Sometime this month a Michel is going to take a balloon ride into the Stratosphere where he will jump at 130,000 feet. He plans to be the first skydiver to break the sound barrier. He is attempting to break 4 different world records.

• Altitude record for freefall
• Altitude record for human balloon flight
• Time record for longest freefall
• Speed record for fastest freefall

I look forward to seeing Michel succeed in this feat. Take a few moments to check out the following websites.

• Article on aero-news.net
• Legrandsaut.org
• The Super Jump Blog

August 25, 2007 - It seems that it is more difficult to safely skydive from this height. Michel and his crew are postponing the jump ’til the summer of 2008. I was looking forward to this jump this month… but the safty of michel is more important than jumping unprepared.  I look forward to the new attempt next year.

Check Out the Yahoo Article.

It is so crazy how we as a race have developed such technology that we are able to see planes circling some of the stars we see in the night sky. 28 new planets. One of those planets is only 30 light years from Earth.

4 more of the planets belong to star systems that contain more than one planet. Who knows. Maybe one of those planets will be able to sustain life and maybe eventually we will be able to contact them (in 30 years).

This is so exciting. Make sure you keep looking up.

Can you imagine a world without keyboards, a world with out the mouse, a world without wires? Well that world is going to be here sooner than you think. Microsoft has a new technology they are dubbing Surface. It basically turns any table or desk into your computer.

Imagine being able to place your phone, ipod or pda on the table and all the information within that item becomes instantly accessable on the table top. You can share with other devices, surf the internet and add all kinds of new information to your device. It is an amazing peice of technology and I cannot wait to see it come to fruition.

It amazes me how many people out there do not backup their files on a regular basis. I don’t know how many times I have heard from friends, family and even the occasional acquaintance about how their computer’s hard drive decided not to work anymore. It just stopped. That was it. No more. Some of these same people carried massive amounts of information on their laptops or home computers and would back it up when they thought about it every few months. Then when their computer died, the work they had done over the past month or two was completely lost.

There are ways to get information off a hard drive after it has gone bad, but they are not cheap. There are businesses out there that specialize in data recovery. They spend hours restoring what data they can from a dead hard drive. There is no guarantee that all the information can be recovered. The reason the hard drive died in the first place is because parts of the drive became unreadable.

Your hard drive will most likely die eventually. It is only a matter of time. The best way to keep from loosing information when this happens is to regularly backup your data. This can be done on CD or DVD from you operating software. I have heard some people who had two hard drives in their computer and backed up all their files from one drive to the other. If you have a network with a server, you could always backup the files to that server.

One of the newest ways that I have found is backing up your files online with a service that specializes in data storage. This is great because the data is not kept in the same place as your computer. So if your house or place of business burns down or floods or blows away in a hurricane, you should still be able to recover that data because it was not onsite where the damage happened.

One such company is idrive.com. Right now they offer FREE 2GB backup storage with no bandwidth limits. You can store your photos, media files or other important documents. This service is best suited for individuals and families. They have a pro version for companies or individuals who keep large numbers of files (like podcasts or videos). Take a moment to check out idrive.com. If you decide not to take advantage of their FREE offer, at least find another way to backup your computer files once a week. You never know when something bad is going to happen to your computer.

This blog entry is sponsored by PayPerPost.com.

It has been all over the news and the center of a lot of heated debate. Should a 60 year old woman be allowed to become pregnant? 

Now I have mixed feelings about this subject.  For one, this is America, the land of the free. You are supposed to be able to do anything you want to do. If you want to go out and get yourself pregnant, and you are actually able to get pregnant, then that is you constitutional right. No one should be able to tell you otherwise (Of course there is the freedom of speech, which allows everyone else to put her down for it if they so choose).

There is also the fact that if God gave her the ability to get pregnant at her age, then maybe she should be able to have those kids.  Maybe He wanted her to have them.  He made it possible for her to have them.  Now there is the point that she went to a clinic in some other country to have herself artificially inseminated. This is not really natural, so some would argue that God did not give her the ability to get pregnant, Man did. Others would argue that God gave man the ability to create ‘the way’, so she is justified.

It is obvious that she was able to get pregnant at her age. One may wonder, though, did she think it through whether or not she ’should’ get pregnant? Did she realize that she is going to be 78 years old when her children graduate college? Did she think about her grown daughter who realizes that she is going to have a more parental role in these childrens’ lives rather than a sister role. I honestly don’t think that she did.

I feel that she got pregnant to fulfill some kind of self need. She was probably feeling lonely or seeing others with babies and wished that she could have that again. Maybe her daughter had not yet brought her grandchildren. Whatever the case may be, she brought two new children into the world who are going to have to rely on the kindness of others when their mother’s health starts to fail. They may even be forced into foster care if their mother becomes unfit to care for them or, God forbid, she dies.

I think she made a poor choice, but there are two new children in the world, and it is the world’s responsibility to welcome them with open arms, despite what their mother has done.