Year: 2009

09/10/2009

The Hubble Telescope had another repair session, and the shots it’s returning from the depths of space are as stunning as ever. Behold NGC 6302:

Beautiful stuff. Nature can be so breathtaking.

09/08/2009

From a Slashdot discussion about why America has lost “the edge” in innovation and technology:

Hobbies and passions, such as developing aluminum electrolysis in a backyard in Oberlin, Ohio, or airplanes in a field in Dayton, Ohio by bicycle repair men, are a thing of the past. We don’t have backyards anymore, and the DHS descends on you if you try to do anything in it, such as aluminum or flying. Everything requires a permit. Permit to attempt to fly. Permit to electrolyze aluminum. And the police are holding a straitjacket at the appeals session in court waiting for the verdict from the jury of twelve deliberating the testimony of psychologist witnesses pushing drug company agenda about mental illnesses.

09/08/2009

Wow, according to Microsoft’s Windows 7 literature, Linux sure sucks.

I can’t believe I’ve been using this dang Linux thingamabob for ten years now when it doesn’t let me share digital media in my house, connect to my two digital cameras, let me put music on my iPod, print anything, or even connect to the internet (WAN).

Oh, wait. It does.

09/07/2009

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.

Chipmunk BASIC v3.6.4(b8)
>10 for i = 0 to 10
>20 print i
>30 next
>run
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

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!

09/04/2009

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.

08/30/2009

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!