09/18/2009

Kyra’s pet gerbil Pumpkin died tonight.

She was a great little pet, and had been with us for almost two years (since Christmas ’07). Even I’m a little sad, and I didn’t really want to get her at all in the first place. But she kind of grew on me.

09/18/2009

Alex gets a gold star for doing a good deed today.

He found a nice Verizon Storm phone on the way home from school today, so we poked around in the contact book a bit and found a person labeled “Babe” with a picture of a pretty woman in a bridal gown. Assuming it was his wife, I dialed the number. She picked up immediately and said in a chipper voice, “Hey honey, I’m on the way home now. How was your day?”

I chuckled a bit and said I wasn’t her husband. She got a little nervous all of a sudden and asked who the heck I was. I explained the situation and then she laughed and said how relieved she was that we found the phone.

As it turns out, they live in our subdivision a block away, so Alex and I went over to their house and left the phone outside the front door.

It feels good to do something nice for a total stranger.

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.