Harv's blog

26 May 2012 @ 09:36 pm

This, boys and girls, is what we called a "VHS tape". Way back in the 20th century, I used such tapes to make low-definition analog recordings of television shows, mostly Frasier (you know, these guys). Then I mailed those tapes by snail to my parents, who were living and working in Egypt, so they could have a little western entertainment in their lives. Today... we're finally disposing of these tapes — boxes and boxes of Frasier episodes — with the realization that we no longer have a way to play them (and that every episode of Frasier is available on Netflix anyway, not that we care anymore though).

I hope you boys and girls are old enough to get the reference.

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25 May 2012 @ 11:05 am

Leap Motion

OMG touch screens are so last year! ; P

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program. -- Douglas Adams, 1978 (HHGttG)

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21 May 2012 @ 12:12 am

total eclipse, of the sun

This morning my folks and I went to the mall and I walked stairs for the very first time since my surgery in January. (Yay, I'm strong enough to go home to NY now!)
first_stairs_after_surgery.mp4 (21.9 MB)

Then we walked over to The Cheesecake Factory for Sunday brunch. Yum.

This afternoon, we played Scrabble. Mom had all the good letters. ; P

This evening, as the sun was setting, there were hundreds of little solar eclipses all over the side of our house, created as the sunlight passed through the palms and hedge. My folks and I watched the progression of the moon for about half an hour as we bobbed in the pool.
eclipse_may_20_2012.mp4 (18.2 MB)

Note to future self: this was a pretty darn good day.

(VIE, EEK, EVE, EKE... none of which did me a heck of a lot of good)

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18 May 2012 @ 04:59 pm

upgrade meh

Today IBM sent me e-mail offering a new laptop, to replace the ThinkPad W500 I was given back in Sept 2009. (Wow, coming up on 3 years already!) I'm not especially excited by the offer, as the updated specs just don't thrill me: 1920x1080 resolution (down from my W500's "golden ratio" 1920x1200), no solid state drive, and it'll come preloaded with Windows 7, eek!! I'll miss XP.

I can do something about the lack of a SSD...

step 1: Kingston 120GB SATA III SSD upgrade kit

step 2: Enabling TRIM support in Windows 7 (pay no attention to the Dell theme)

Meanwhile... solar eclipse coming on May 20, 6:35 p.m. Mesa, AZ time!

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17 May 2012 @ 05:54 pm

Portals is awesome, usually

PULL_ROWS is type natural (meaning non-negative integer), but, that aside, there's just no way that 2-to-the-power-of-anything could give us zero, right?!?!

BTW, bitmap fonts FTW!

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16 May 2012 @ 08:27 pm

listen here Apple...

A lot of people in this world use the OpenOffice.org office suite, myself included (primarily for work). I was hoping Apple's "most beautiful word processor you've ever seen on a mobile device" iOS app Pages would be able to open an .odt file. It can't. So I exported a test page into Microsoft Word format (.doc), checked it out with Microsoft Word (it looked identical to the original), moved it to my DropBox, opened it in Pages on the iPad, added two words "blobby blippity", e-mailed it back to myself (since Pages won't talk to DropBox), and opened it again on my PC. But in addition to the two new words (in red), the process erroneously introduced 5 formatting changes (can you spot them?). Grrrrr.

Actually, no, I'm not surprised. It was pure optimism on my part. And perhaps honestly I'm surprised the process went as well (well, relatively) as it did. Anyway, perhaps one should stick with plain text.

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15 May 2012 @ 11:40 am

listen here UI programmers...

Like, forever, I've been saying that dialog boxes should be universally designed such that they can't be dismissed with a keystroke faster than it's humanly possible to see what they say. Why don't the programmers think, "I just stole focus a millisecond ago, so clearly that [insert keystroke of your choice here] couldn't be a response from a human intended for me." Right??

I just was typing along and a couple of my keystrokes got stolen by something that popped up and then as quickly disappeared again, oy!!!!

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13 May 2012 @ 03:53 pm

'munks FTW

http://www.itn.co.uk/home/45225/Johnny+Depp+lands+in+Japan

(thanks to

higgs_raccoon for the link)

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12 May 2012 @ 11:36 pm

Meh.

One can't really have a conversation on Twitter.

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10 May 2012 @ 11:24 pm

Hotmail resolution

It's nice when one can get closure... I mean, when the story about the PC Pro editor's Hotmail account getting hacked came out, I wondered how could this happen?? Well, now we know...

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/pc-pro-editor-s-hotmail-experiment-disaster/028255

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/microsoft-fixes-0-day-hotmail-flaw/028272

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