Ever noticed how you never see pictures of scratched up military vehicles? Further, you never see pictures of military personnel out with Turtle Wax to protect the shiny finish of their vehicles. I started wondering what the military paints their vehicles with and was actually able to find out.
Hentzen Coatings is the supplier of paint for military HUMMVEEs. The particular coating product used on military vehicles is called Zenthane, a urethane-based flat coating and is CARC (Chemical Agent Resistant Coating). According to literature on the Hentzen site, Zenthane is normally the top coat layer of paint, applied over a couple of epoxy-based primer layers. Not surprisingly, Zenthane can be applied via traditional spraying methods, but can also be directly applied via brush for touch-up; my guess, though it doesn't state it anywhere on the site, is that you could probably touch up a pretty significant-sized area with a spray paint can of Zenthane.
Digging a little more, I found a reference on this site that claims Imron paint and AwlGrip paint are nearly the same as Zenthane, especially for those of us that don't need the CARC. If you use Imron, you have to do this apparently:
If you hace trouble locating Zenthane, then
just have a body shop supplier mix up some Black Imron or Awlgrip and
add the flattening agent.
Have you gotten to the point where you ask: "So what, Ross?" Here's the point: this hard-use paint is available, but not used on civilian vehicles because it would probably disrupt the entire body shop industry.
Ever wanted to go touch up a nick in your paint with a brush? Pretty hard to do now, but pretty easy to do with these products. Do you need a shiny finish? I sure don't care about it -- flat's perfectly fine with me.
Hat tip to jonwedd for the picture
In the footsteps of Google Mobile, GrandCentral now has a lightweight, mobile-specific version located at 
As much as I've tried to use Blackberry alternatives over the past few years, I am now a Blackberry Pearl user on Cingular. Previously I've defended not using a Blackberry because it makes it look like you're talking into a pocket calculator (I still think that, by the way, about the non-Pearl form factor Blackberrys) and because a lot of my mobile e-mail interaction in the past has been simply cleaning out my inbox. However, I now find myself needing to be able to send responses that extend beyond the abilities of T9 text input.
Increasingly the biggest challenge for home consumers will be managing their data storage. As broadband speeds continue to accelerate to allow rapid downloads of larger files, as we start to store multiple gigabyte video files, as we continue to store increasingly large photos at higher and higher resolutions, and as simple software takes more and more space, the need to store massive amounts of data and to do so in a redundant manner will become increasingly necessary. Currently most home consumers use external drives to store files and more sophisticated consumers use multitudes of external drives as software RAIDs; some consumers use hardware RAID devices as they become more and more popular and cheaper.
I was fortunate enough to receive a galley edition of The Dip, Seth Godin's newest book. As the book is a pre-production version, there may be some changes to the final language, etc., but I'm going to try not to really quote anything and just give you my $0.02.
CNN reports that a federal judge has ruled that Vonage can continue to infringe on Verizon's patents for all existing customers, but cannot add new customers and must post at $68mil bond. The CNN article does point out that although Vonage feels that this is not an equitable solution, this really is a "middle-road" solution that allows Vonage to continue to service existing customers rather than completing shutting down the Vonage service and allows Verizon to not worry about additional patent infringements while knowing quantifiably the amount Vonage is infringing.
If you're like me and have an older (read "pre-2005") iBook or Powerbook and you miss the ability to enable the feature set that allows you to use 2 fingers on the trackpad to do various things, you'll definitely want to check out iScroll2.
