Month: August 2010

Vonage does a pretty good job transcribing our voicemail messages and sending them via email. It never gets Laralee’s name quite right (lately it’s been showing up as “Dr. Marley”) but overall it’s impressive.

Today we had an automated message from the school, and after the English version they always have a Spanish translation. Vonage tried its best but failed in a hilarious way.

!Impresionante!

On Friday evening we biked over to the Longmont Main Street Festival because it sounded fun. It was a beautiful summer evening, and four blocks of Main Street was filled with booths, shows, performers, and thousands of people.

There was a photographer offering to take pictures. She had some goofy items in a costume box, so I grabbed a sombrero. Unfortunately it didn’t fit, so I handed it to Zack and grabbed a nice red feather boa instead. The picture was… umm…

Just as we were finishing, Jack Sparrow sauntered up. And I mean “sauntered”… this guy had an amazing costume, and even walked like the famous Disney pirate. He posed for a few pictures as well (he had nothing to do with the photography studio). He even had a spyglass!

Tonight when I was poking around their web site to see my pictures, I saw Captain Jack’s as well:

Although I’m not about to pay the $15 for a digital proof of my picture, I wonder if ol’ Jack is going to get some of his.

When I was 18 I bought my very first computer: an Apple IIgs, which was the top-of-the-line Apple model at the time (1990). It set me back a little over $2,000 but was fabulous during my first year of college. It had amazing graphics and sound (hence the “gs” in the name) and was way ahead of the competition– notably IBM clones running Microsoft’s MS-DOS. The Macintosh, which had been first released a few years earlier, didn’t have the processing power or color screen of the IIgs. So all in all it was a great piece of hardware.

I was waxing nostalgic a bit this evening, so I surfed over to eBay to see if people still sell those twenty-year-old computers. To my surprise and delight, there’s apparently a thriving market for the IIgs! Not only can I buy a full system– for $150 or so– but people sell games and software on ancient 3.5″ floppy disks as well. I’m almost tempted to buy one, just to remember those heady days of the start of the PC revolution. Almost.

Stepping even further back in time, I remember the old Apple IIe we had at home. I suspect mom and dad bought that puppy around 1984 or so, when computers at home were rare (we were the only family who had one for a long time). Ahh, the crazy cool games we played back then: Apple Panic and Night Mission Pinball and Black Magic.

I even taught myself how to program on the Apple IIe. First I learned BASIC, then stepped into assembly (yes, I figured out how to program 6502 Assembly on my own), and managed to write all kinds of software ranging from text-based adventure games (Zork was king then) to low-level disk drive routines that increased the data density of the 5.25″ disks we used back then.

Wow, I’m a geek.

Funny, though, how twenty-five years later I’m still programming, and in fact making a decent living at it. You never know what silly childhood hobbies will endure into adulthood…

Today I finally had a chance to throw our copier out the window.

It’s a great copier, but it broke about two and a half years ago and despite my best efforts, it was simply irreparable. So we bought a new copier for Laralee’s office, and the broken one has literally been sitting on the floor beside it for all that time. I kept meaning to chuck it out our second-story bedroom window onto the driveway, but the time never seemed right.

With the impending hardwood floor upgrade to our entire downstairs, we’re in the process of moving everything out of the office (including the mammoth six-hundred-pound desk La uses). It just doesn’t make sense to move a broken copier and then move it back in when the hardwood is installed. So the time had come.

Everyone gathered on the driveway while I maneuvered the copier into the open window. Alex took pictures on repeat mode while I tossed it, but unfortunately they ended up completely blurred out because he forgot to focus. The copier actually didn’t sustain much damage on the first toss, so we went for a second throw with Laralee taking the pictures. Unfortunately you can’t see the magnificent end-over-end spin I put on the copier, although it hits with a nice solid bounce.

Toner blew up everywhere and plastic parts managed to scatter across the entire driveway. Awesome.

Today I received an email from some sales guy in Poland who must’ve looked on the Zing web site to get our contact information so he could write to us about a potential business relationship.

His company does 3D modeling. Although I think 3D modeling is pretty cool, and did some fun stuff many moons ago with realtime space simulation software, I have a hard time picturing how it’s going to apply to the web development work we do at Zing.

Nonetheless, I went to his company’s web site– more out of a morbid sense of curiosity than anything else– and was treated to an project portfolio that included an amazing 3D hamster!

Now that’s something that every web site could use!

Or, umm, not.

It’s been almost a year since I updated my photos online. They’ve been sitting on my hard drive here at home but it takes some time to upload them, label everything, and so forth. With nothing really stupendous to do tonight, I decided to sit down and spend a few hours updating everything.

So now the photos are up-to-date; click the camera icon on left to see them. Hopefully it won’t be a year before I do it again…

This morning as I look at my email inbox I see that some enterprising spammer has decided to capitalize on interest in celebrities. I have a bunch of messages about various people who have died. Each message has a few lines about a plane crash, and an attachment you’re supposed to open to read more which, of course, contains a virus.

Oh, and of course the all-important “You need matching size for those hooters”.

I hate spammers.

Today at ultimate we had pretty balanced teams. Seven-on-seven with two subs each, and a good lineup on both sides. My team lost 5-7 in a hard fight. Since we had some time yet (we play for a little over an hour) we decided on a second game to five points.

Greg (on my team) rallied us and said we should play the second game hard and shut them out 5-0.

So we did.

Since that game went so quickly, we all decided there was time for a third game, this time to three. I invoked Greg’s inspiring plan and said we should win it with another shutout, 3-0.

And lo, we did.

That was a lot of fun. We played hard, and the other team came really close to scoring a few times but we managed to slap it down or force a bad throw or whatever. And we got lucky on a few deep passes and diving catches. All in all another great day on the ultimate field.

Every night for the past week or so, a big spider has descended from somewhere above our front porch to spin a web right near the porch light. We’ve named her Miss Prudy, and it’s fascinating to watch her at work.

During the day the web gets destroyed, because it’s right where the front screen door swings open. Or the wind or rain take it down. Regardless, every night a little after dusk she creeps out of her lair and spins it again. The work goes surprisingly fast– the web is complete and ready, and then she sits right in the middle waiting for someone to fly into it. The location is brilliant: since it’s near the porch light, and we always get moths and little bugs buzzing around the light, it seems inevitable that some of them get trapped on the web.

Although Laralee and the kids all agree they wouldn’t want Miss Prudy crawling on them (she’s a pretty big spider, and fairly nasty-looking), we get a kick out of watching her work and wait for dinner…

Here’s some sweet uptime on a server I manage:

That’s four years, three months without ever rebooting. And counting. Rock on, Linux!