I contacted him a number of years ago about his R-12 replacement for my old 1975 Ferrari, rather than converting it. It worked perfectly - better than Freon-12, even. Which is the only reason the EPA refused to allow it to be widely used. His web site (ghgcool, IIRC, I'm sure long gone by now) taught me that you can also mix butane and isopropane as a superior drop-in substitute for R-12, but he didn't pursue that approach because he knew that the EPA would kill it on safety grounds - even though it was only slightly more flammable than R-12 with the required compressor oil mixed into it.
George was a really interesting guy, a true hacker's hacker, and I truly enjoyed talking with him.
I bought the "high end" e-Machines box on a killer sale at BestBuy because I needed a modern computer and didn't have the time it takes to get all the drivers and settings really working as they should.
They branded it as the "eMonster", and although not stellar, it was solid, reasonably quick, and got the job done. It was my daily driver for many years. I don't remember why now, but I called them with some kind of support/upgrade question several years later, and they were shocked when I told them my OS was XP. "The EMonster can't even can't even run XP!", said the incredulous person on the other end of the phone. Only then did I remember that I'd reflashed the BIOS a couple of years before.
My kids heard this on the speakerphone, and christened it the "eMonsterstein". I haven't fired it up in a long time, but it's one of three old PCs that I just moved whole out to the garage (most were cannibalized or just died). I suppose it'll boot up and run just as well as it did when I finally gave it its long overdue retirement. I may have to give it a try - I still have a monitor with a VGA plug somewhere...
If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)
Likewise - I tried the demo recently, and it's really impressive. I wanted to try it because the new CAD package I'm using (Sharpr3D) runs on it, and it seemed like a good idea to try that. (Unfortunately, despite being one of the most impressive and serious 3D apps for VisionPro, it's not one that the Apple store (at least here in Austin) was able to demo.)
But the demo also really convinced me that there is no damn way I'm going to want that ridiculously heavy and bulky hardware on my head for more than a few minutes. It's impressive, but pretty expensive, and completely impractical. It makes a great demo, but it's a miserably uncooked product - very well though out in some ways, but missing big targets like weight and comfort by a mile. Maybe in a few more years...
FYI, We just had world-class cellist Steuart Pincombe here in Austin last month performing the last three Bach cello concertos along with three matched brews from the excellent local Lazarus brewery as part of his occcasional "Bach and Beer" performances.
He's a flat amazing cellist, and watching him perform that last concerto you really realize how hard he's working to get it done - it's a workout. Anyway, it was a really good evening. (FWIW, this was part of the Arts On Alexander program this year, which is one of Austin's lesser known gems of amazing live classical music performaces.
We'll see how this holds up. I currently have nearly 3283 tabs in my primary Firefox window. (The other six windows only have 35-125 tabs at the moment. I sort of use the windows as tab groups.)
To its credit, Firefox is the only browser that does not either slow to a crawl or just fall over dead with that many tabs.
I still need a good tool to merge bookmarks from a bunch of older Firefox profiles, though. Does anyone know of a good tool to do that?
George was a really interesting guy, a true hacker's hacker, and I truly enjoyed talking with him.