Author: cosmo

Alex has a programming class in school, and they’re using a program called Chipmunk BASIC. He asked me today if I could install it on his computer, so I poked around the internet and found a version that runs on Linux. To test it, I installed it here on my desktop and gave it a go.

Sweet, I actually remember how to program in BASIC!

That takes me back to the Good Old Days of 1980 or so, when I wrote my first program (for a second-grade enriched studies class). It presented ten multiple-choice questions about Saturn’s moon Mimas, allowing the user to answer them and then scoring the answers.

Hello world!

Whee, I just spent 45 minutes being routed through Washington Mutual and Chase phone systems hoping to reset my stupid online banking security questions. After all of that nothing had changed– no one could help me, and everyone told me to call someone else, and the last gal gave me the first number I’d called, so I realized it was just a big cruel joke. I’m never going to get my security questions reset, and they’ll take my money and probably cancel all my credit cards as well.

I was griping to Laralee about it, and said, “No one really likes banks. They’re like…” To which she replied “porta-potties”.

Yes, that’s exactly it. Banks are like porta-potties: no one likes them, but everyone uses them because they have to. Argh.

Went to the Rockies game with Brian and Rob. Beautiful evening, great game, fun times.

(And the Rockies smashed the Mets.)

Friday night we had our annual S’mores Night in the backyard. Basically we borrow a portable fire pit from some neighbors, and invite the whole block (27 houses, around a hundred people). Not surprisingly, the same group of maybe thirty people show up every year.

There was a twist this year: our newest neighbors (right next door) have their own fire pit, a trampoline, and three little kids. Since there’s no fence between our yards, it made the party even more fun because we had two trampolines, about fifteen screaming kids bouncing and chasing each other, and the two fire pits with roaring flames. The adults sat around talking and enjoying the beautiful evening and occasionally telling kids to stop throwing things into the fire, and that five marshmallows at a time was maybe too many. Oh, and when it was fully dark and the neighbors brought out the strobe light and shone it on the trampoline, the kids really started having fun. It was hilarious to watch.

The party lasted around three hours– finally around ten o’clock we decided it was time to wind down the hyperactive kids. As it turned out, our kids had invited several of their friends to sleep over for the night, so we all moved inside and ended up with five surprise guests that night. Everything worked out, though, and I think we can consider it another rousing success.

Now we have some leftover s’mores material: a bag of marshmallows, a dozen Hershey bars, and a few boxes of graham crackers. So in the evenings I’ve been making my high-tech s’mores in the microwave:

A carefully-prepared cracker, with the microwave set to 1:40 at power 4, and voila, I have an awesome mess of warm white and brown sugary glop oozing out from between the crackers. Whee!

Seen on a LinkedIn profile:

Buzzword Bingo strikes again.

Holy nanotech, Batman.

Researchers at IBM spent 20 hours using an atomic force microscope to image a molecule. This puppy has a “needle” that’s only a few atoms wide, and moves half a nanometer above the surface of its subject. For 20 hours. That is an amazing piece of technology.

The molecule:

Pentacene, or C22H14. It doesn’t look all that remarkable until you compare it to a ball-and-stick model of the same molecule, similar to what you might build in high school chemistry class:

In other words, these guys actually took a “photograph” of a single molecule at the atomic scale. And you can actually see the individual atoms and bonds.

Science is so cool.

Someone had the idea that a dual-screen laptop would be sweet. And indeed, the marketing bling looks kind of cool (minus the Windows logo, heh):

Keep in mind these are dual 15.4″ displays with a full-size keyboard. I think we’re really starting to stretch the idea of a “laptop” here…

Facepainting is such a girl thing.

Peace, yo.

Kyra is very excited about middle school. She loves her French class, loves playing volleyball, and loves the idea of playing the flute. Today I met her at school to go flute-shopping. Half a dozen local music stores had set up in the common room, hawking their wares. You could rent any instrument for your kid in band, pick up the song books, and so forth. It was really quite nice to be able to comparison-shop by simply walking around the room and talking with the various salespeople.

In the end we decided to rent a Gemeinhardt 2SP, which is supposedly a pretty good one. It’s a thousand-dollar instrument (wow!) but we can rent it for twenty bucks a month so that was an easy decision. Thankfully she didn’t choose the saxophone or some of the brass instruments, which rent for around sixty or eighty a month.

Kyra practically skipped home with it, and upon arriving promptly put it together and started working on it. Since she doesn’t really know how to play (she’s only had a couple days of band class) it was a little funny to watch. But I’m sure she’ll get the hang of it soon, and then we can look forward to nice music wafting from her room.

Alex went fishing with his Boy Scout troop today (there are three boys in the troop, including him). When I went to pick him up, he thrust his hands in my face and said happily, “Hey Dad, smell my hands! Fish guts!” Mmm.

As we walked home with his friend Connor, I was entertained by tales of how they whacked their fish on rocks to crack their skulls, how the blood spurted around, how the leaders showed them how to slice the fish from jaw to tail and yank out all the guts, and so forth. Yummy!

As someone who has never in his life caught a fish, I don’t really get into the whole fishing scene, but it was fun to hear Alex get so excited about it.