| Wednesday, November 26, 2008 |
  in which I go out on a date | 
Posted - 11/26/2008 10:50:45 AM | First off, today's my birthday. I'm 42 today. If you wanna make a Hitchhiker's Guide reference, feel free to do so in the comments. Today will be the only day that it will be allowed. I've already covered the comedic possibilities of the number 42 (i.e. virtually nil) quite some time ago. Still, if you feel you have a new wrinkle to offer the whole "42 = funny" genre, post away.
Next, Shelly and I went on a date. At least that's what she called it. We went to the George Hrab (one of my geek mancrushes, google for him) show at University of Texas at Arlington last Friday. The crowd was quite small, perhaps 30 people. I think it's an unfortunate choice of time and place. While the UTA Geosciences building had a quite nice little lecture hall with stage that worked well for a small show, choosing the Friday night before an entire week off after all the university kids headed home for vacation probably wasn't the best choice.
Still, the show was a lot of fun and George did great with the venue. I'd been to shows with underwhelming crowds before, like a show with The Guess Who that fetched about 50 people at Arkansas' Magic Springs Family Fun Park where I worked for a couple of summers in the 80's -- boy those guys made it clear that they were there to punch the clock and get the heck outta town.
Also the Geosciences building had a very nice fossil display in the hall. A couple hundred million years ago, Texas was at the bottom of an ocean, so most of the fossils you find around here are marine. Sharks teeth and ammonite fossils are plentiful here, and they had some nice examples.
Shelly brought her knitting with her (as Shelly brings her knitting EVERYWHERE), and she finished up a pair of socks (go here for a bit about her new sock fetish). After the show was over, she presented a pair of socks to George in appreciation. Strangely, George said that he had never received socks before.
The next day, the Bad Astronomer (Shelly's geek mancrush, google for him too) mentioned on Twitter that he's gained an entirely new appreciation for thermal socks now that he's moved to a cold place (Colorado Springs I think). I mentioned to him that Shelly would likely make him a pair of homemade socks, and BA took her up on it but only provided that his socks are better than George's.
The upshot is that my genius wife has inadvertently invented a whole new level of geekery - the craft-groupie. The craft-groupie is a person who follows around entertainers and gives them fine handcrafted items of apparel. Mind you, these entertainers must be the kind who would appreciate such items, so it's a bit of a narrow groupie-hood -- I can't imagine Axl Rose getting excited over a nice pair of hand-knit woolen socks.
speaking of which, I wish I had 15 years and 50 musicians on hand so I could produce 15 really overproduced songs that all sound the same. Chinese Democracy is the musical equivalent of Daikatana. But I digress. So Shelly's now a craft-groupie -- sort of a G-rated version of Cynthia Plaster Caster.
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| Thursday, November 20, 2008 |
| Attn George Hrab | |
Posted - 11/20/2008 1:43:37 PM | Sorry if this appears to be in code, regular listeners. I'm posting to George Hrab here for two reasons. . .
1. I didn't see his email address right off on his site.
2. He apparently has a google alert set up for his name.
Heard the mention of good D/FW BBQ. Thought I'd post my faves. . .
1. Feedstore BBQ in Southlake (www.feedstorebbq.com). My personal favorite, as I prefer the dry-rub ribs to the sauced ones. It's in an actual converted feedstore. Dunno where you're staying, but that wouldn't be so convenient if you're in Arlington. It's about 15 minutes from the airport, though.
2. Spring Creek BBQ (loads of locations). Good all around. Good ambience (and by that I mean paper plates and picnic tables).
3. Angelo's BBQ (www.angelosbbq.com). Way over in West Fort Worth, so probably not a good possibility. Outstanding sandwiches. Draft beer is served in frozen mugs so you get little bits of beer-ice floating on top -- yeah I know, not an issue for you, but damn it was a nice lunch when I worked for Tandy in downtown Fort Worth.
Anyway, those are my picks. Dunno if the NTCOF minions already have plans to take you places. If not, contact me at john@thecodezone.com and I'll take care of the driving and the tab.
Hoping to go to the show in Arlington on Friday. We have some houseguests on Friday night, and we'd have to find a sitter, so I'm still not sure.
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| Monday, November 17, 2008 |
| Holiday advice | |
Posted - 11/17/2008 2:55:54 PM | Awright, I've had a request to post a deal and some black-friday info, so here goes. . .
First off, the deal. Free office-supply bits for a limited time. Print out the coupon here and take it over to your local Staples store. They have a new line of products under the label "M". It's reasonably priced stuff that looks fairly nice. Check out the line at www.mbystaples.com. At our local store, the M stuff was mostly collected together on an end-cap.
And a lot of it is under the price of the $5 coupon. For example, our local Staples had some nice little hardcover journals for $4.99 or three-packs of cardboard-cover journals for the same price. Mind you, a lot of these coupons don't work unless you're over the threshold, so grab one of the little 99-cent M-branded tear-off notepads just to make sure.
Also, if you don't have one of those discount cards for Staples or Office Depot, get one and flash it every time you buy from 'em. If you do, you'll find yourself getting a gift certificate from 'em from time to time. Staples is like Toys-R-Us for grownups, and getting a gift certificate from 'em is better than Christmas.
And speaking of which. . .
Next up is Black Friday, which is the friday immediately following Thanksgiving (11/28 this year). This is the "official" start of the Xmas season and retailers usually have some nice loss-leader deals for you. One of the best BF sites is www.blackfriday.info. It collects together all of the sale items (both officially released by stores or leaked) so you can see if there's anything you have to have. Most stores are more than happy to have their BF ads posted, but a couple (okay, just Wal Mart) are notorious for sending out lawyergrams to anyone who leaks.
As for BF strategies this year, I really don't have much advice to give. This year there aren't any shocking new videogame consoles or high-definition technologies that everyone must have NOW. That, coupled with the down economy, should make for a fairly sedate affair. While there'll be some people who'll queue up at 3AM just out of habit, there should be plenty of deals that can be easily had.
Actually my two favorite BF haunts are Radio Shack and Sears. Radio Shacks are small and plentiful, so there usually aren't many people there, and it's fairly easy to get a couple of gadgets (like these adorable things that are gonna be buy-one-get-one on BF). Sears is great because they have such an absurd amount of stuff on sale that it's almost impossible not to find a deal on something. Sears is especially good if you have a dad who's a tool fetishist, as they always release a couple of frightfully useful Craftsman gizmos that make good gifts.
Also, Sears' stuff tends towards the practical, so the fanatical shoppers will be strangling each other over Nintendo Wii's elsewhere while you're grabbing a great deal on an air compressor :)
Finally, Sears is really enormous and has checkouts scattered about everywhere so it's not difficult to move around.
I avoid Best Buy because their deals tend to be absurdly good loss-leaders sold in very limited quantities (like this year's dual-core 64-bit Toshiba laptop for $380) which generate a lot of publicity but are nigh-impossible to get.
So my advice is year is the following. . .
- Dig through the deals on that website I posted. Mark a few "that'd be nice to have" or "that'd be a nice gift for [insert name here]"
- Unless there's something you must get or else you'll die, get up at a reasonable time.
- Check out as many stores as you can. If you go somewhere and it's mobbed, pass it by.
Also I'm gonna post a final piece of advice that's not easy to do but will guarantee to remove at least half of your holiday stress. It was actually an idea put forth by a religious group (Dobson's I think, those godless people waging a war on Christmas and capitalism), but I'm not averse to grabbing an idea when I can.
And it is the following. . .
Christmas is for kids
(insert Hanukkah, Festivus, Humanlight, Kwanzaa, etc for your holiday of choice)
What that basically means is that if you're over 18, you should not expect to receive gifts. And if you're giving gifts, restrict them to those under 18. We presented this to our families a couple of years ago, and it went over brilliantly (my brother was especially relieved that we would no longer need to go through the annual ritual of trading gift-cards with each other). If you're over 18 years old, you shouldn't expect anything but a card from me, and I'll expect no more from you.
Because let's face it. If you're an adult and you have a full-time job and you really need something, you're just gonna go out and buy it. I honestly can't think of a single thing right now that I'm hoping a member of my family will buy me for the holidays. Couple that with the sense of angst you get when you receive a truly wrong gift (like the giant box of espresso pods my mother-in-law bought that didn't fit my espresso machine), and a gift-free holiday really does eliminate much of the stress.
I get some gifts for my kid and my nephews (both very easy audiences), and I expect my family to do the same.
If you think this is a good idea but your family will freak, then do it. I guarantee they think the same way you do about it. If you're over 30 and you're still giving and receiving gifts from other 30+ year old members of your family, then you're doing it out of routine and everyone probably wants it to stop but doesn't know how to broach the subject.
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| Monday, November 10, 2008 |
| Critter happenings | |
Posted - 11/10/2008 11:40:51 AM | Since I had some Saturday errands to run, I decided to take the kiddo with me. And if you have a six year-old, you know that you can't just bundle up the kid and do your errands. You have to make it something SPECIAL.
Thankfully, that's easy to do. I took the kiddo with me to Starbucks and got myself a coffee and got her one of their little 75-cent triangular pastry thingies, which is enough to turn "riding in the car" into a "Super Special Daddy And Me Outing!"
Our Starbucks is right next to a T-Mobile store which had a bigass poster of the Google Phone in the window. And the conversation went like this. . .
Critter: [sounding very much like Veruca Salt] Oooh daddy. I need a Google Phone. I really need one of those.
Me: Why on earth do you need a Google Phone?
Critter: WELL. . .if I had a Google Phone I could call up all of my friends and I could talk to 'em every day and I could talk to them for a long time!
Me (under my breath): Well I think you just made a good case for me to not get you a friggin' Google Phone.
On another kiddo-related note, I just tried out Microsoft Small Basic. And, like a lot of Microsoft offerings, it has some compelling features coupled with some deal-breakers.
On the plus side, the syntax of the language is great for kids. It's a sort of cut-down Visual Basic (with no line numbers, danged fascists) coupled with some simple objects for I/O (text or graphics window), and some simple data structures. It also has a turtle graphics object, which is a great thing for kids, because the cute little turtle drawing lines makes things obvious for kids. For example, here's a program that draws a fractal tree with the turtle.
angle = 30
delta = 10
distance = 60
Turtle.Speed = 9
DrawTree()
Sub DrawTree
If (distance > 0) Then
Turtle.Move(distance)
Turtle.Turn(angle)
Stack.PushValue("distance", distance)
distance = distance - delta
DrawTree()
Turtle.Turn(-angle * 2)
DrawTree()
Turtle.Turn(angle)
distance = Stack.PopValue("distance")
Turtle.Move(-distance)
EndIf
EndSub
Some of the examples are more sophisticated (like a program that displays Flickr images), but most of the programs are simple enough to explain to a kid. There's also a little paddle-game that could be expanded to a breakout-game.
And if you're a kid who didn't write a breakout game in BASIC, then you just haven't lived :)
Unfortunately, the program has some drawbacks. First off, despite the program being quite small (a 3.5-meg download that installs to about 5 meg including the manual), the program's startup time is abysmally glacially slow -- around ten seconds on my quad-core box. When dealing with "hummingbird on crack" attention spans of most kids, that kind of startup time is a deal-killer.
Also the help needs some more help. It has a cute little command-helper that expands to a couple of sentences of help-text in the little side-window, but that's not enough. Even if the side-window had a "more help on this" button that'd open up a browse-able and search-able help window with an example of the command in action, it'd help.
Finally, the program runs multi-instance and multi-document (aka MDI). My choice would be to run multi-instance and give each instance a single expanded document, as that'd be a bit easier for kids to deal with. Overlapping windows aren't as obvious as you think, especially if you're a kid. Being able to open several documents at once is important for Visual Studio, but not for something like this.
The included PDF file (I thought Microsoft was all about XPS, go figure) looks like it's intended to be printed and followed as a step-by-step guide for kids. That's a nice start, but the online help needs to be more helpful.
In conclusion, it looks like a good start for parents who are nostalgic to teach their kids some bits of how programs work. I hope it doesn't get abandoned in its current state.
On a good note, the program doesn't appear to be finished. Given that it's on their "development labs" site and a couple of the toolbar buttons seem to be permanently grayed (syntax check and build), I'm hoping that it'll have its big bugs fixed. If it does, I'll install it on Maggie's lappy so we can both figure how to say "20 GOTO 10" in a structured way :)
| |
| Tuesday, November 4, 2008 |
| EEE Week two | |
Posted - 11/4/2008 9:14:50 AM | Okay, we've had the EEE PC for a week, and the critter's still really happy with it.
Turns out that it's not possible to combine the 4-gig C: and 8-gig D: drives into a single drive, as they're two different Flash drives inside the unit. But thankfully there's a pile of information on the internet as to how to prune the extraneous chunks out of EEE XP that you take for granted (file indexing, virtual memory, etc), and I now have a decent amount of elbow room on C:
One problem I had was that the touchpad was a bit too sensitive and I found myself accidentally clicking and double-clicking when I touched it. And the touchpad was just identifying itself as a generic PS2 mouse, so there weren't any adjustments available for it in the control panel beyond what you could get from a regular mouse (assigning buttons, double-click speed).
Easy fix, though. It's apparently an Elantech touchpad, and a quick google search will avail you of a replacement driver that fixes the sensitivity issues, allows you to shut off tapping on the pad, and even enables multi-touch. I played around with multi-touch for a while. It's cute but the touchpad is so danged small that it's difficult to use.
I also discovered a "squished" 1024x768 mode that you control with a hotkey. It sets the screen to 1024x768, but with nonrectangular pixels. The upshot is that the one thing that absolutely refused to fit on the screen, Webkinz.com, now works fine. Now Maggie's favorite avatar, "Pinky Pony", looks like she needs a diet :)
I also slapped a couple of movies on the D: drive, installed GOM player (like Media Player only better), and discovered that it plays movies very nicely. Tiny speakers are still a problem, though. I offered to put some headphones on 'em, but Maggie prefers to watch movies in our bedroom alone with the lights off.
This also means I can sell the Zune. The only thing I was using the Zune for was for Maggie-videos on car trips. The EEE doesn't have as much storage as the Zune, but it makes up for it with a bigger screen and much wider format support.
After that Microsoft rebate thingy (see about two entries ago) and ebaying the Zune, I think I'll end up ahead on this deal.
According to ASUS, they wanna get the price of the Linux ones down to $200 next year, which is cool.
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