Semo.net Weblog » 2007 » September

Other Roads: Puxico’s Tom Hemby — Award-Winning Nashville Session Guitarist

Toni Thompson — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 18:04:04 +0000

Once upon a time in Puxico, Missouri, an eager little 12-year-old accepted a unique challenge from his father. “You know that record you keep playing all the time?” the father asked, referring to a now-forgotten side by the great Chet Atkins. The boy said yes. The father replied that if the boy could learn to play it himself on the father’s guitar, he would buy the boy a brand new instrument of his very own.

A few days later, young Tom Hemby was holding his own sleek new Gibson SG—the slim, solid-body electric affair that would take him to a whole new level of discovery on the instrument that had captured his imagination. Read the rest of this article…

Excel 2007 – Miscalculates Simple Multiplication

Brian Becker — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:33:37 +0000

For those of you who have trusted your spreadsheet program to give accurate results…check out how Microsoft’s Excel 2007 software shows that:

850 x 77.1 == 100,000 (not 65,535)

The entire story can be found at:
http://www.appscout.com/2007/09/excel_cant_multiply.php

Microsoft’s response:
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx

MercyMe Ticket Winners Announced

Brian Becker — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:23:28 +0000

semo.net is happy to announce that the winner of the tickets are as follows:

- Zenita Smith
- Annie Hornbeck

And the grand-prize winner receiving 4 tickets to the concert AND 4 Meet & Greet passes to meet the band is:

- Amanda Samons

Congratulations all and thank you for participating in our contest.

Way of the Entrepreneur: Hobby World

Toni Thompson — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 13:45:52 +0000

Doyle Burke believes in doing his homework. Burke and his wife Tracy are the proprietors of Hobby World, the new Valley Plaza hobby supply center that’s been generating a major buzz throughout the Poplar Bluff area. Slot car and electric train enthusiasts, artists and crafters, model builders and scrapbookers, families and teachers, take note: You no longer need to trek to the ends of the earth—or to Cape Girardeau, for that matter—for the supplies you need to make the most of your work or play.

That’s because Doyle Burke has combined extensive business experience with a knack for research to tailor Hobby World to the needs of local consumers.

Burke returned to Poplar Bluff from Nashville in 1993, having garnered decades of management experience with two major retail chains. After working in various capacities on his return, Burke began seriously rethinking an idea that, as a slot car racing buff, he’d had for years: to set up a hobby shop right here in the Bluff. Read the rest of this article…

Scientist Confirms that Salt Water can “Burn”

Bridgett Barnhill — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 12:51:03 +0000

Salt water can indeed burn when exposed to a certain kind of radio wave, a university chemist has confirmed. Rustum Roy of Pennsylvania State University verified earlier this month that the radio waves break down the water into its constituent components, allowing the resulting freed hydrogen and oxygen to catch fire.

John Kanzius of Sanibel, Florida, first happened upon the phenomenon earlier this year when running experiments with a radio frequency generator he designed to help zap cancer cells.

When he trained the radio waves on a test tube of salt water, it produced an unexpected spark, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Curious, Kanzius and colleagues decided to ignite the water with a match. The water lit and kept burning as long as it remained in the radio frequency field.

Read full story

Courtesy of National Geographic

Warriors’ Voices: A New Column Coming to the semo.net Homepage

Toni Thompson — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:38:33 +0000

If you are anything like me, you go about your business in life not having the slightest notion, from personal experience, what all is involved in ensuring that no armed threat from beyond our borders prevents you from doing just that: going about your business.

Sometimes we may unwittingly fail to see our own inexorable link to the U.S. soldier in the field in a time of war. We may fail to see our connection to that soldier’s effort; to that person’s ability to perform at peak readiness; to that person’s ability to remain clear, with greater ease, on why he or she might have traveled so far from home for such life-threatening hardship, with so little tangible reward.

Read the rest of this article…

Win MercyMe Concert Tickets & Meet The Band backstage!

Brian Becker — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:52:18 +0000

semo.net will be giving away 3 sets of 4 tickets each…that’s 12 tickets and the grand prize winner will also get Meet and Greet passes to meet MercyMe! The concert is on September 28th…and now you have the chance to go for free!!!!

To enter, all you have to do is email MercyMeTickets@semo.net and you will be entered to win.

Warning: Only enter one time per email address! Multiple entries will cause you to be disqualified.

How will you pick the winners?
– Each of the three winners (who will receive four free tickets) will be randomly selected from the emails that arrive. Then the grand prize (4 Meet And Greet Passes for MercyMe) will be randomly selected from the three winners.

When will I know if I won?
– We will draw on Monday, September 24th

When is the concert?
- Concert is on the September 28th at the Black River Coliseum in Poplar Bluff. Read about the concert!

Do I have to be a semo.net, SheltonBBS or IMS customer to win?
- Nope, anyone can enter and anyone can win! But we’d love to have you sign up for our service. Call us at 877.686.9114!

semo.net employees and families are not eligible to win.

Amazon Mechanical Turk: Artificial Artificial Intelligence

Bridgett Barnhill — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:25:00 +0000

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications.

While computing technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.

Mechanical Turk aims to make accessing human intelligence simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Businesses or developers needing tasks done (called Human Intelligence Tasks or “HITs”) can use the robust Mechanical Turk APIs to access thousands of high quality, low cost, global, on-demand workers — and then programmatically integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems. Mechanical Turk enables developers and businesses to achieve their goals more quickly and at a lower cost than was previously possible.

From a users point of view, Mechanical Turk allows individuals to make money and help with volunteer work such as search and rescue. You can make money from doing research, writing blog entries, taking surveys or even answering simple questions.

Signup is free and easy, so check out Mechanical Turk today!

MercyMe and Friends at the Black River Coliseum

Toni Thompson — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:33:37 +0000

There’s a powerful Texas wind sweeping the land, and it’s leaving a trail of pure, unadulterated joy in its wake. Next stop: Poplar Bluff, Missouri!

Now’s the time to grab your tickets to a star-studded night of contemporary Christian musical praise here in the Bluff. On Friday, September 28 from 7:30 pm, the Dove Award-winning, Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum powerhouse MercyMe will be rocking the Black River Coliseum, along with special guests Shane & Shane and Monk & Neagle.

Come experience MercyMe right where you live—hear the band whose rock-and-pop-infused sound is searing through boundaries, spreading a message of hope beyond the traditional frontiers of Christian radio.

Read the rest of this article…

Overnight Outage Update

Brian Becker — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 09:41:10 +0000

At 1:50am on Friday (Sept 14), a DS3 at our main office failed causing many of our customers to lose connection to the Internet. semo.net engineer, Adam Barnhill, worked with AT&T to diagnose and correct the problem. The circuit was restored at 4:00am by resetting a card at AT&T. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused.