Researchers at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women
’s and McLean hospitals, have successfully removed toxic plaque from the brain cells of mice with Alzheimer’s. If this treatment works in humans, it could aid millions of elderly who suffer from the degenerative memory loss condition.
August 30, 2007
Promising Alzheimer’s Treatment works in Mice
September 11, 2005
A Long Time Comming
Well, well, well. I’m guessing anyone who stumbled across this site probably thought it was dead after not being updated for a year and a half. The truth is, the hosting company that hosts this page had to change their main hosting center because of a problem with their Internet connection, but I wasn’t able to get a stable enough connection to download my site to be able to move it from their old servers to their new servers. Rather than put in the needed time and energy to fix it I just let it sit and then when I tried to retrieve my site in class the other day it worked. So anyway, now the site is up on the new server so it should perform much better and be easier to update.So what has happened in the last year and a half? Well, I’m now in my Senior year at RPI which is incredibly hard to believe. The super secret project for GameCube Café was the E3 DVD which was delayed by a year and then ended up falling pretty much through the floor because Nintendo dropped a big fat goose egg and gave no useful information about the Revolution. Since that was our main marketing point we were kind of sunk from the get go. The DVD came out really nice though.
In other news, I started playing a MMOFPS called PlanetSide in January. I immediatly became a fan. Basically it is a futuristic war sim. You take the role of a soldier in one of three empires battling for control of a planet called Auraxis which had a bunch of advanced technology on it, some of which caused the planets continents to each split to being their own planet. (Wierd yes, but it gave them a reason to expand the game and make different types of climates and such.) Each continent/planet holds up to 133 people from each of the 3 empires and you battle for control of bases on each continent. (You capture bases by either hacking a terminal in the base and holding it for 15 minutes or by hacking that terminal, picking up the LLU (a ball basically) and getting it to another one of your bases.) The reason I love it so much is that it is like a real time strategy game, but every character is a real person. You level up by getting kills and helping capture bases. This gets you BEP (battle experience points) and when you get enough you get a battle rank (BR). You can also get command experience points(CEP) for helping with captures while leading a squad. There are 25 BR levels and 6 CR levels (BR 1-25 and CR 0-5) BR gets you implants for special abilities (3 total), Certification points (1 for each of most battle ranks), and cosmetic changes such as armor color. Command rank grants different special abilities such as placing 4 waypoints on the map for all squad members(CR1), revealing the locations of all friendlies on the continent (CR2), EMPs that take out or disable all mines, turrets, vehicle weapons and implants in the area of the EMP (CR3 – CR5 getting bigger each level), Revealing enemies in an area on the map (CR4 and 5), Orbital Strikes from space (CR4 and 5) and the ability to send messages to all players on your empire on the server (CR5). Each CR also has a cosmetic armor change and access to a command chat channel with others of that CR level within a growing area. (CR2 – base, CR3 – region, CR4 – continent, CR5 – server) I joined up with an outfit (guild/clan) pretty early on called Forgotten Soldiers. They are probably one of the best outfits on the server. I worked my way up through the outfit and I am now an officer with them. I have a BR23/CR5 character and a BR13/CR0 character. I’m also involved with several websites related to PlanetSide. http://www.forgottensoldiers.us/ is the homepage for Forgotten Soldiers. http://www.ncallianceps.com is the website for the New Conglomerate Alliance (NCA) which is an alliance of various tactical outfits. http://www.emeraldnc.com is a community site for all people that play an NC character on the Emerald server. A friend of mine from PS and I started it about 3 weeks ago. Mostly I do coding on all these sites automating different things based on stat tracking and such. All in all, I love the game because it is so tactical and so large scale.In other big news, I have decided to break from my original plan to start a company writing computer graphics and video software. Instead I plan to apply to the FBI as a Special Agent. This decission came about when I realized that the FBI is looking for Computer Science majors and I realized they pay on par with the rest of industry. I hope to work with both computer related investigation and SWAT. I may even eventually try to make it on to the HRT (Hostage Rescue Team [Think FBI version of the SAS.]) I can’t apply until I’m 23 though, so it gives me a year to kill after I graduate. I have begun to workout to prepare physically and I am also learning Arabic, continuing my training on rifle marksmanship and will be applying for a pistol permit in December so that I can work on pistol marksmanship.
Ok, I think that is quite a bit for now, I’m sure there are things I have missed, but I can always bring those up in future updates. Hopefully I’ll be updating this again in less than a year and a half. Until then, later.
March 3, 2004
IT Directing and Cool Secrets
Wow, I have let this site sit for a long time. I had a Flash site up for a while, but then I realized that Google couldn’t read it, so I dropped it in to a subfolder. I haven’t had a chance to update the site at all because I have been really busy with Gamecube Café. Since December I have been the IT Director at GameCube Café. I’m also involved with a super secret project there. Shh, noybody even knows there is a secret project yet, except my readers. Stay tuned to GameCube Café for more details about the project in a couple of months.
August 13, 2003
Summer, Work, Conferences and Connections
Ok, havn’t made any updates for awhile. I’ve been working at RPI over the summer. DC/LA was really cool. Mel Gibson was there and I made big connections to the company that makes MediaShout.(PowerPoint like software for churches.) In fact they offered me a co-op which is really cool because there programmers are mostly RPI graduates and the programming devision is based in the Albany area. Then Soul Fest was really cool too. I was able to get on stage with Jars of Clay, 6 Pence None the Richer and Five Iron Frenzy. I met lots of cool people, heard lots of cool music and had a lot of fun. My family is going to Disney next week which is fun, but it is kind of a let down that it turns out that the Lathrops are going down this week and we will miss them by a few days. It would have been really cool to be able to hang out with Niffer and Aimee down there some or at least to have bumped in to them once or twice. Then it is back to school.
On another note, I found two really cool features of AIM. First, I found one a lot of people know about, you can forward messages to your cellphone when you are off AIM by going to www.aim.com/wireless/. I signed up my cellphone account under ajh16cp. If you need to get ahold of me, you can IM me there if I’m not on. The other is AIM Security. If you get a free E-mail ID Certificate from www.thawte.com, then you can encrypt IMs and digitally sign them. It is really cool and gets the lovely lock icon next to your name. (Once you have the certificate you can use the Security options tab to import the certificate.)
March 28, 2003
My first Domain
I just got my first domain names. I actually got two domain names, but the first was a typo. I’m going to use the first one as a media server and I will be moving my site to www.synthesissoftware.com over the next few days. I will also be able to be reached at aj@ajhenderson.com. If you are interested, my media server is www.sythesismedia.com. The site should be available by Sunday night. As soon as Road Runner or RPI updates there DNS table I will be posting this site to its new location. I will still continue to make updates to this location as well, but the media will be transitioned off this server. (And I will finally actually have some free RCS space. 🙂 )
March 26, 2003
The beginnings of a SysAdmin
Ok, my FreeBSD system is up, but DNS is a pain in the butt. I just posted my Media Studio: Imaging portion of the site. You can link to it here. Enjoy. It was my first work with hard-coded HTML, so don’t expect too much. Right now the photocopy collage’s are just place holders, but everything else is working. Its fairly simple right now, but I will try and make it better as we get in to the utilities I’m more familiar with.
February 20, 2003
Security Nut
Hey all, I just generated a couple of PGP keys. They are under AJ Henderson on PGP’s server or you can download the public keys here. If you don’t have a clue what PGP is, then don’t worry about it.
January 24, 2003
Excel 2003
Excel 2003 went really well. It probably wasn’t the best Excel ever, but it still rocked. You can check out photos from the tech crew at http://brooksroy.com/pictures/Excel2003/ . I worked on tech crew and they actually had my all access pass this year. 🙂 I just finished updating my site with some photos of my friends. They are available here.
September 30, 2002
Paintball Commando, Lost Keys and Car Troubles
Well, last week was interesting. The good news is I played my first two games of paintball ever last (over a week ago) Sunday. Don’t ask me if it hurts to be hit with a paintball, I still don’t know:). I got the game winning hit on the second game and I didn’t even get splatter on my clothes. Now the bad news, I couldn’t find my keys after paintball. Even worse, my laptop was locked to a folding table. So, I had to borrow the table from the camp I was as and bring it home until I got a replacement key on Wednesday. Then the next day at school I accidentally forgot to put up my hangtag for an hour and I wound up with a No Permit ticket for $36. Now more good news, the ticket should have been for “Hangtag not properly displayed,” which is only $11, so I can get the ticket waived completely because they screwed up. Then, this past Sunday we used Scuba gear for the first time in class. It was really cool. Breathing under water for the first time wasn’t as weird for me as most people say it is. I guess maybe I have just a little too much faith in technology. Though as long as it works, what do I care.
September 8, 2002
SCUBA and other cool stuff
Lets see, school has been interesting and fun so far. I’ve signed up for SCUBA certification and bought my gear. I’m REALLY looking forward to SCUBA. I want to learn to SCUBA Dive, skydive, and fly, so learning to SCUBA dive is a big step. I can’t quite figure out what my DSA professor means by “constant” memory on my project, oh well. I guess that is what I’ll have to do after class this week. The laptop is working out great. Rensselaer Christian Association rocks and everybody should at least check out one meeting. It’s sort of funny, I’m getting more sleep on weekdays than I am on weekends. I guess that is a change from high school. I’m working with Video’s for Change over in the incubator chamber as a part-time editor/consultant. I’m also working with UPAC Lights and UPAC Sound as a tech. I’m glad AIM exists, cause it is a really easy way of staying in contact with my friends that are out at college. Oh, and I got one of those wireless optical mice. It’s really nice when I’m working with Maya. Maya, for those of you who don’t know is a piece of computer graphics software. Alias/Wavefront makes a free copy called Personal Learning Edition. It’s available at http://www.aliaswavefront.com/ . It has a really good tutorial if you have never done computer graphics but have been interested. If you want any help with it, just IM me or e-mail me and I can help you out.