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Tuesday, August 31, 2004

6 digits

Stardate 57083.1 (08-31-2004)

Whoo-hoo, I finally reached a goal. As of close of business yesterday, the value of my 401K passed 6 digits to the left of the decimal. I've been watching it inch up, fall back a bit, and inch up again for the last month and a half. As to why this was a goal, one: it's a nice round number that is big. Two, a seventh grade U.S. history teacher kept emphasizing one hundred thousand as a magic number, beyond which things started to happen. I remember being annoyed because he seemed to talk more about his finances than history. I was and still am interested in history. I got into a few disagreements with him over things he taught wrong. But that was a while ago (1978), and that amount was worth more. But it still feels good.

End of Entry

Monday, August 30, 2004

100th Entry

Stardate 57083.0 (08-30-2004)

Hello, and welcome to the 100th log entry. It’s amazing, really. I’ve always thought it would be neat to keep a journal of some kind. Several attempts at a written one failed after a couple of entries. When I was looking over the Seventh Fleet website, I followed the links to Carl Stark and Mike Gibby, who both do online logs, or blogs. I have since learned that there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of blogs. I’m not sure why I find this better than a written one. Anyway, about a year and a half of this, and I am still going strong.

Instead of going to bed last night like I should have, I stayed up with April and watched “The 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever” on VH1. There were some I have never heard of (mainly rap, which doesn’t interest me). There were several I enjoy, and I don’t see why they would be bad (Huey Lewis and the News – ‘The Heart of Rock and Roll’, Wang Chungs “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”). Others I could see, such as Ricky Martin’s ‘She Bangs”. It’s a matter of opinion. Some were on there because of lyrics, yet I remember other songs with little or no lyrics that didn’t make the list. 

Strange, I never made the connection until just recently the Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee of “The Lord of the Rings") was the son of John Astin (Gomez in TV’s “The Addams Family”). My favorite role of his was as Harry Stone’s mental inmate father on “Night Court”. He would always have the line “Of course, there was that setback with (fill in the blank)”, knit his eyebrows for a few seconds, and then get a big smile and say “But I’m feeling much better now!”

Thomas went to the Extended Daycare Program (EDP) for the first time today. Pre-kindergarten is only half a day, so on the days both April and I work, the kids stay at school in EDP. Patrick and Rachel are only there for about an hour, but Thomas is about four hours. He was not happy about it. The story I got today is that they had the kids do some coloring, and a little girl sitting next to him kept asking him questions. He didn’t respond to any of them until she asked if he talked at all. He looked at her and said simply, “no”, and went back to coloring. It’s amusing to see your personality traits show up in your kids.

An article about the Ticonderoga's and Kelly's Adopt-A-Highway volunteer effort appeared in the SL Tribune today. Unfortunately, they cut out Carl's comments and didn't mention his name. I was not happy with it starting out "From white supremacists and Star Trek fanatics". Not exactly two groups who would have a lot in common beyond cleaning a stretch of highway. The club does get a lot of response from the sign on the highway. I pass by both that one and the USS Kelly sign on the way to work in the morning.

End of Entry

Sunday, August 29, 2004

Lots to do, nothing done

Stardate 57082.9 (08-29-2004)

Ok, another one of those days where I start out to do a number of things, and get held up by one of them. I wanted to change the oil in the Altima, and then cut the vertical step pieces for the deck so I can screw them in. I got the oil drained easily enough, but I had problems with the filter. I hate car designers who put the user serviceable parts in hard to get at places. It's halfway up the engine block on the side closest to the passenger compartment. The car is too low for me to crawl underneath unless I jack it up, which is extremely dangerous. So I am left with threading a wrench between hoses and pipes to get to it. This leaves me with about a quarter inch space to twist. It would not come off. I finally just said 'forget it', and replaced the oil. Starting the car up, I let it run and checked underneath. Oil was spurting out from where I had cracked the filter. The rest of the day was spent trying to figure out how I was going to get it off, since I now had no choice. April had to go into work to try an fix the analyzer. A courier there suggested driving a screwdriver through the filter, and twisting with that. It took another hour to get the screwdriver in due to the limited space, but it worked. By then it was 7 PM. The rest of the tasks I had planned were shot.

I did get instant messaging going, and had a small chat with Carl and Dave Wright. I could have done it before, but it requires getting a 'dot NET passport'. I had to get one of those for my MSDN membership, so I decided what the heck. I checked out the online gaming for Age of Empires. About seven thousand online this morning. I watched a History channel show on the Battle of Chelons, so I've started playing it again. The last couple of nights I have been up until 2 AM with games. If I think I have the time, I might try an online session.

Thomas came down with a slight fever last night, at 100.3. This morning he was fine, but it flared up again this afternoon. I guess he must be fighting a virus. April came back from Arizona with a head cold. We thought it might be that. I'd hate to have to keep him home from school, considering the good start he has going.

End of Entry

Friday, August 27, 2004

First Days of School

Stardate 57082.7 (08-27-2004)

The first three days of school have passed. Thomas, as expected, cried as he went in the first day. The next couple of days, however, he went in with a smile on his face. The teacher, NaLani Gannon, told me he did very well. I'd have to call her a miracle worker. I still wonder what happened at the day care center that made him so terrified of it. The was the one day that they made him go outside after the weather had turned cold. Or it could be a combination of events. I think he went into pre-kindergarten with the idea it would be the same. In any case, he seems far more comfortable now. Patrick leapt out of the car the first day, yelled 'Bye, dad", and was gone. He did express the desire to go to the public school down the street so he could go with the neighborhood boys. I told him he still gets to play with them after school, and he if he did go to the public school, he would not see his other friends. Rachel enjoys school, and is glad to be back with her friends. One of them, Melissa, is in a different class from her for the first time since pre-K.

It seems a little strange to have all the kids in school. I had a couple of free hours Thursday, and sat at the Starbucks on Riverdale Road reading a book. I could get used to it pretty quickly. April is out of town looking at a new chemistry analyzer for her work. The apparently put her in a really nice hotel, or more of a resort.

Even as they push XP SP2 to the update servers, people are already finding flaws. I have not seen the notice from the auto update program yet. I might just go and download it manually.

Lots of new terms to learn. POJOs, JMS, JMX, Struts, ILOG, EJB, Xdoclet, ANT, to name a few. I know technically what they all are, but understanding is a bit different. Java enthusiasts point to this plethora of tools as a proof that the language is better than the rest. Me, it seems a little complex. .NET is simpler, but I have heard predictions that it will go the same route.

It's been raining nearly every evening this week.  It's nice, because I turned off the automatic sprinklers the whole week, and the lawn is still green and growing fast. On the other hand, it has been cooler that normal for the end of August.

Well, there was a great deal more I was going to write down, including something about Tonya Wright and not talking, but I am tired. I was out wrestling with the kids this evening, which I have not done in a while. It's fun to do, but I am paying the price in shoulder cramps. I broke down last week and had my doctor prescribe some muscle relaxants. The one tonight is starting to kick in.

End of Entry

Friday, August 20, 2004

Van Light

Stardate 57082.0 (08-20-2004)

An eloquent post on science fiction and technology. People at work have complained I use a lot of big words, but I don't think I am in her category. I agree with what she says, though. If growing up means giving up imagining a world where humans are not killing one another over different religious and ideological views, where space is open to all, where the rest of the world population descends on natural disaster, famine, and trouble spots with all the aid they can muster, then I will remain a child at heart. I will, however, draw the line at going to a convention in a cheerleading outfit (much to everyone's relief).

Thomas, watching one of the endless ads for hair restoration products, told me I needed one. Then again, according to my kids, I need a Bowflex and a dozen other products advertised to make you look and feel better. I have noticed over the past couple of years that if I stay in the sun for a long period of time, the top of my head gets sunburned.  At least they are watching out for me. I have over the years gone from being compared to Li Shang of Disney's "Mulan" to Homer Simpson when I have my shirt off.

Visited with my Dad Wednesday. He is doing ok, but the problems with his legs is getting worse. Numerous trips to doctors have not revealed what is wrong, much less a treatment. I think it is some sort of neuromuscular dysfunction. He told me he thinks my grandmother had the same thing, so it might be something congenital. He still gets out, so that is something.

I've been searching for a replacement for the parking/turn signal lens on the van. The county says it needs to be replaced before I can renew my registration, because I can't have something with jagged edges. Ordering the part kept getting the wrong thing. I called around yesterday, and a guy at Butterfield Ford was frank, they have never replaced one, so they don't carry it in stock. He did a search, and told me there was one in the valley at Larry Miller Auto Parts Warehouse. I called them, and went to get it. The same wrong part showed up, but the guy at the counter turned his screen around for me to see, pulled up a diagram of the van, and asked me to show him what I wanted. He clicked on it, got the part number, looked in inventory, and was back in a couple of minutes with what I needed. I was impressed. One of the auto part store employees told me earlier in the week he wished they had pictures for the parts. Maybe I should go back and mention this to him. This is where computers are really useful, making information quick and easy to have. April did point out after the part number was on the back of the part I had taken off the van.

End of Entry

Monday, August 16, 2004

Understanding Slowly

Stardate 57081.6 (08-16-2004)

Understanding is coming slowly but surely on the new team. Part of the problem is getting used to the new IDE. Eclipse looks like a great tool, but it takes some getting used to. I did get the crash resolved. The guy added code to free up memory for a class member, but it was already being freed in another part of the program. That piece of code is not obvious, but I am struggling with how to make it better.

This morning I found a article about Windows XP Service Pack 2, and how it will impact some programs. Right at the top of the list is Starfleet Command III. Reading further on, the main problem is that the firewall software shuts down all TCP ports. You can open up the ones you need for the multi-user online games. Another interesting argument is here. Taking away raw sockets really doesn't deter hackers. It may frustrate the script kiddies for a while, until new scripts are available to work around it.

Also this morning, I went in to check on the kids before going to work. Thomas had grabbed a Lego Darth Vader and had it lying beside him with the head on the pillow. It was all I could do to not laugh out loud at how cute that was.

No new word on the deck railing. I went down to the place last week to order, but they were already closed. I did get the van mostly repaired. The front parking light is still broken. I walked down to the new Checker Auto on Gordon, but they would not be able to get the part until the first week in September. I can't figure out why it takes so long to get stuff in. Well, not true. It takes so long because they have to fill a semi trailer. C&H Auto said they would have it tomorrow.

April is going to be mad at me again. She scrambles to trade shifts because she does not have any paid time off (PTO)  I took three days off last week. When I checked my accumulated PTO then, it was 80 hours. I put the time off in the timesheet today, and the PTO is now 98 hours. So instead of using 24 hours of PTO, I've essentially used 4. I will never be able to use it all by the end of the year. I wish I could sell it or something. Yeah, I can imagine the groans of sympathy at my plight.

No dream team at the Olympics. The men's basketball team lost to Puerto Rico. The ironic part is one of their players is on the Utah Jazz.

Fixed a small problem with the logs RSS feed. The server kept wrapping the feed in HTML. Changing the extent from RSS to XML got rid of that.

End of Entry

Sunday, August 15, 2004

Weeding

Stardate 57081.5 (08-15-2004)

Halfway done with the weeding. I've let it go a little too long. The sticker plants are making new stickers, and some have been dropped. I was hoping to get rid of them completely. False hope, I know. Weeding is like Romans fighting barbarians. You keep winning, but they keep coming back. At least I can't see a Teutoburger Wald scenario happening. The emperor Augustus was said to roam his palace in Rome (pun intended) late at night shouting "Publius Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!"

Which reminds me of something else I was mulling over a few weeks ago. I read an alternate history book called "Lion's Blood" by Steve Barnes. In it, the Muslim blacks control the southeastern US, the Vikings the northeast, the Indian nations the west, and the Aztecs the southwest. In the manner of such books it does not give a detailed history of events. What it does tell about is that Socrates did not drink hemlock, but escapes to Egypt. Alexander lives a long life and becomes the new Pharaoh. Hannibal defeats and sacks Rome. This is what gave me pause. Hannibal was a general in the second war between Rome and Carthage. Who won the first? There's no answer, and this bothers me.

April is working a couple of graveyard shifts this week because the tech that normally works is stuck in Orlando. His flight out Friday was cancelled by hurricane Charly. The airport took a beating, and they were still cleaning debris Saturday.

Rachel went to a birthday sleepover with her friends from school on Thursday. She brought home some cupcakes. Saturday the boys noticed them, and asked her if they could have them. She said yes, and I heard Thomas say the Rachel was the best person in the world. I found that funny since most of the time he is angry at her for being around.

We are supposed to be transitioning the kids into going to bed earlier to prepare for school. I dropped that idea because it seems to be a lot of hassle for little gain. Besides, in talking with one of the moms in the neighborhood, when school starts, the kids won't be playing much with each other due to school and all the other activities they are involved in. So I've been letting them stay up until ten. I'll probably regret it come the 25th.

End of Entry

Saturday, August 14, 2004

Hits

Stardate 57081.4 (08-14-2004)

Whoa, there were a load of hits on the site this last week. I'd love to say it was because I had put something interesting up here, but no. Eric Gunnerson posted an entry on what to get his wife for her birthday. In it, he comments that one time he got her a trebuchet. That elicited so many comments he put up another post soon after to explain, titled "It's only a model." He ended it with the remark that he pitied the people who did not understand the reference. I added a comment with a link to the True Programmer's Test. And therefore, all the hits. In retrospect, I should have included a link to the index page.

The weekend did not start out as planned. I was going up to Bear Lake for the Seventh Fleet Olympics. I had taken a few extra days off, which started the problem. There was a big crash at work the day of the release, and I was called to help. One developer told me it created a seven gigabyte core dump. That's hard to believe since the file system allocation is only two gigabytes. I am still working on why this Saturday around noon. I laughed when he told me it was no more than twenty seconds before the sys admin was calling him wondering what was going on. The sys admin is a smart guy, and I know he has a few monitor programs running. We used to play cat and mouse years ago. I'd set up an FTP server on my machine, and see how long it took him to notice, or program a listener on a port, and fire a message to quit the port scanner to him when it triggered. The developer also told me the kestral was back, feeding on a mouse.

Speaking of fun, I am tempted to try this at work. I don't know if it will work over an MS network, but it might be funny.

On the other hand, I have quite a bit to do around here. Weed, clean the garage, weed, fix the van, weed, download the pictures from the camera (which is full), and weed. I did get an RSS feed going for the logs. The tag is on the Welcome page. It's a little more effort, because now I need to title the entries, and add a short description. Only the last few entries are on the feed because of this. I might add another channel for the Enterprise reviews. The Feed2JS is fun, but the problem is there is way to much content to add. NPR, the New York Time, Washington Post, and many, many others have feeds. CNN is the exception.

Sci-Fi Wire's feed is not valid, hence the messed up dates. The date format does not conform to RFC-822 specifications because it ends in an AU. I looked at this and could not figure out what it was. The web based validator can't either. It's not a big deal, since I don't usually look at the dates anyway. I should inform them of this.

Patrick's pumpkin is getting nice and big. It should be fun come Halloween to carve it up. Rachel's is coming along, but it is growing halfway up the fence. I need to take it down before it falls under it's own weight.

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Kestral

Stardate 57081.0 (08-10-2004)

Yesterday a kestral landed on the ledge outside the window. Not only is my company watching me like a hawk, they are using hawks to watch me. Yeah, yeah, technically it's a falcon. It stayed there for about twenty minutes, about two feet away from me. Beautiful bird, I hope it comes back.

I added a Sci-Fi Wire RSS feed to the news page. It works great, except for the fact that all the dates are Dec 31, 1969. I guess they are borrowing from the Simpsons, and they don't want the 60's to end? I thought it was because it's a version 2.0 feed, but I checked some of the others, and the C# feed is also 2.0. The feed data itself does have the correct dates.  Hmmm...

End of Entry

Sunday, August 08, 2004

Feature

Stardate 57080.8 (08-08-2004)

One of the blogs I visit had an interesting feature. The ones he linked to would show the last time it was updated. I wondered how I could do this, and it occurred to me that most of the blogs I read have an RSS feed. I am not happy with the feed readers for the simple fact that they are tied to a computer. If I read the article on on computer, it shows up as new on another. Another reason that has nothing to do with readers or RSS is that they are not allowed where I work. Not sure why, since someone showed that they took less bandwidth then reading HTML into IE 6. Searching the net turned up Feed2JS. Give it the address of the feed you want, and it generates JavaScript code to copy and paste to a web page. It also offers the PHP code if you want to host the stuff yourself. I added the JS code to the bottom of my blogs page. I fiddled with CSS to make it look the way I want, and I am pleased. It almost makes me want to go to the trouble of offering an RSS feed for my personal logs.

Patrick and Thomas, and friend, decided to take a bunch of bowls, dog dish, and anything they could find that would hold water, and made a mud puddle of my back patio. I let it dry a little, and then they swept it for the better part of an hour in the hot sun. (I did allow breaks with juice. I am not completely cruel. Don't go call DCFS.) I think I got the point across about how hard that is to clean, and not doing it again. (And this is not the first time this has happened.)

Home Depot refunded the money for the deck railing. Now on to someone else to get the deck DONE!

End of Entry

Saturday, August 07, 2004

Pissed off at Home Depot

Stardate 57080.7 (08-07-2004)

Pissed off, I am. Calling Home Depot yesterday, the deck railing was still not in. It has officially been a month. The guy there promised to call the supplier. We called back about fifteen minutes later, and the guy was finally honest with us. Unless we substantially increased our order, or someone else orders the same thing, it was not worth the time for the supplier to ship it. Therefore, unless we are extremely lucky, we will not get what we paid for. Whereas I can understand the reasoning, I am ticked off they just didn't tell me this to begin with. Another vinyl supplier can supposedly get what we want, and they will cut it to size. Add that to the fact the deck expert in Riverdale refused to talk to me after he found out I had already built the thing, and I am seriously thinking of sending a snail mail complaint. Sadly, I don't believe there is anything worth filing a complaint with the BBB here.

Utah has it's share of blogs, according to the Deseret News. They gave a link to the same site I picked up a few more blogs from. I did read a little of a Canadian who attends BYU, just for the novelty of it. I can't believe some people do not understand this person is an international student. On the other hand, that would be a great attitude for the world, being accepted for who you are, not where you are from.

I took the old mattress frame and toddler mattress to the dump on Friday. It was not hard to draw parallels to the recent case of Lori and Mark Hacking. That case has become bizarre. I feel sorry for both families.

At work, the occasional message is sent around about something that was found and turned in at the front desk. The message comes from security, and one of the employees there words it somewhat strangely. For example, this week it was "Found one each ring men's locker room. Describe security desk." Looking back at the list of words and occurrences, the high counts are on words like "the", "a", "and", etc. The lost and found message points out why.

Microsoft has released a beta version of Visual Studio Express 2005 for free. You do need to go through a bunch of steps (including getting a .NET passport) to get it. And after three hours, it's still installing. The progress bar does move, so it does not seem to be stuck. It did install the .NET framework version 2.0, so I can play with generics in C# and SQL Server 2005.

We signed Patrick up for karate on Friday at a place in Layton. His first group class was Saturday morning. He said he had fun, but he did not sound very enthusiastic about it. He said the guy had them do a lot of push ups, sit ups, and stretching. I told him physical conditioning is important for his health, and to do most activities. He did like the wrestling they did. Watching the last part of the class, I did notice if a student started acting up or talking too much the guy had them do ten push ups. At the end, if your room was not clean (and he looked at a parent for confirmation), or you did not practice, you did more push ups.

This link on Miss Cranky's about Boudicca was interesting. I had heard the name, but if you had asked me about it before I read the link, I would not have been able to say exactly who she was, or even where she was from. The only thing I knew about it is that she was someone who gave the Romans trouble. I might go to the library (better yet, the library web site) and see if I can find any books to corroborate the information here, and maybe some diagrams of the battle to recreate in AOE. Wish me luck, because I usually don't find anything. But chariots against the Roman legion? It's worth a shot. ("What did the Romans ever do for us?" Reg - Leader of the PFJ. "The aqueduct?" - PFJ Member).

End of Entry

Friday, August 06, 2004

Noob

Stardate 57080.6 (08-06-2004)

Here's a look at Sun's newest attempt at at the desktop market,  Project Looking Glass. You will need RealPlayer or QuickTime to see the demo. There's a lot of cute tricks, but I don't see anything useful about them. The constant bashing of Microsoft without mentioning the name is just plain annoying. The one trick I like that was not shown here and is not available in Windows but is in X, is the ability to roll up the contents to the title bar. It's nice to get the window out of the way for a minute. You can get it in Windows with WindowBlinds.

The new team has weekly staff meetings. Normally I'd consider this bad, but they try to make them worthwhile. This week was a short overview of Hibernate. It's a framework for mapping relational databases to objects. I found it fascinating and way too short. A few years ago I went looking for a system such as this. A system like this would make some things quite a bit easier. I imagine there are gotchas as well, but it will be fun to learn.

I've been tasked to learn JRules from ILOG. The first challenge with it was to get the thing installed. They have an automatic registration feature built into the install, but the corporate firewall blocks it. The alternate solution was to have it write a registration file as a XML document, and email it to an automated server. At this point I found out through some testing that attachments with an XML extension are blocked by the antiviral software. That fact elicited a few choice comments from the local development community. My personal comment is that we can all step back about twenty years and use UUENCODE and UUDECODE. I did find a way around it. I understand the concepts of the software, but I need to get at the nuts and bolts to get a good handle on it.

So much of the week was spent outside the 'he who knows much that is hidden' role to plain noob (definition 1a, although I could do 2  ). It's refreshing, challenging, and nice to get a chance to see different methods and technologies.

We convinced Patrick to do a camp on life around a river at the Ogden River Parkway. To do this, everyone must get up by 7:30 am. I consider it good conditioning for when school starts. The kids do not have to get up as early as last year since we are not carpooling anymore. With Thomas, there are too many kids to fit in an average car. Anyway, although he hated getting up for it, he did enjoy the camp. I didn't get much out of him about what they did, since it ends at noon and I don't get home until 7. That's one of the things that suck about ten hour days. By then the camp was a long time ago from his perspective.

April went to the school this week to help out assembling some stuff they are selling. That turned out to be a good thing, because she found out that while Thomas was registered and all the paperwork was done, he was not in a class. Some sort of snafu, and not hard to fix. It would have been a big surprise if we had not found out until the picnic a few days before school starts.

The kids went to The Little Treehouse on Thursday with some friends. The have an Oval Office mockup. We had considered sending Rachel and myself to Washington, D.C. this fall. April researched some hotels and came to the fast realization that this is a Presidential election year, and the city is very busy. We decided to hold off until spring.

Still no word on the deck railing. Home Depot says that it's supposed to be here any time now.

Mike Gibby's video blog page is down, so I will assume he is in the process of moving. Carl Stark has already moved. There have been a few changes for people this year.  April has a talent for pointing out all the good things that resulted from a change in our lives. I think this is one reason she likes change, and one of the many qualities I like in her.

End of Entry

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Misc

Stardate 57080.3 (08-03-2004)

For anyone who is on the edge of your seat about the banana cream pie, it turned out splendidly. The saying is that the third time is the charm, but the second worked out in this case. It does help that the second attempt was without three kids arguing over who gets to put what in. The step that was missed the first time was to add the egg yoke mixture to the main mix, and allow the entire thing to cook for a few more minutes. The first attempt I added the egg yolk mixture without any further cooking. The dog didn’t seem to mind.

The dog is getting better at locking his jaws to avoid the pills. I can’t say I blame him. He gets two pills three times a day, and another twice a day. Eight pills and cream for the ears is not fun. 

Patrick won the argument over stacking the bunk beds. Sunday we moved his bed to the top. He was a little scared come bedtime, but he made it. He has been sleeping much better since getting the new mattress. Once of the pros about putting his bed on top is that Smokey is to old to jump that far, and Frisky has moved into his new home, so no cat hair to bother him. I had a bunk bed as a child, and I do remember waking up at night for a while to the ‘bump, scratch, scratch’, as our cat, Maxine, would jump from the floor four feet up to the top.

Patrick also helped put the beds together. He did a lot of twisting on the hex (aka Allen, although I have never found out who Allen is or was) wrench to drive the screws into the wood. I kind of wished the designer had used Phillip head screws, which would have allowed me to use the cordless drill. It’s hard to get a lot of torque on a 1 ½ inch metal sliver. Maybe they need to study Archimedes a little more.

Rachel started art camp this week. She is a little bored, and because she has been to so many camps this summer, we gave her the option of skipping it. 

One of the sitters who watches the kids was telling Rachel about World War II. I guess he has a book about it. She relayed a lot of the details to me after. When it started, when it ended, and when the US got involved. She told me over and over that some of the ships sunk at Pearl Harbor are still there, although she could not remember the name (USS Arizona).

Someone at Paramount must be listening. An article on Sci-Fi Wire says Manny Coto wants to take Star Trek back to it's roots, and show some of the aliens in the Original Series. Ok, maybe a few others had the same idea, and it even may have been Manny's original idea in his head. Either way, it sounds good.

The warp drive article got me thinking, which is a bad sign. Sometimes we get a little stuck on certain ideas. One of those is that the impulse drive in Star Trek is a simple action/reaction system. The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual by Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda seems to follow in this rut, until you read the text about creating a field effect and allowing the slippage of the continuum past the spacecraft. Kind of vague, but on purpose. I always like the explanation found in Diane Carey's Final Frontier, where impulse is I. M. Pulse, which is short for Internally Metered Pulse drive. Lasers compress a fuel pellet smaller and smaller. The energy is collapsed in on itself, and 'escapes' as space distortions. The ship rides the distortions like a surfer on a wave. It sounds pretty good.

Yuck, I didn’t do to well on this phishing test. I have had a few of these show up in the inbox.  I tend to assume if some email is asking to verify account information, it’s a fraud. 

A code review was done on one of my C# projects. It came back very good. The main complaint was that I used the C++ Underscore_between_words on variable names. The preferred style is camelCase (first letter lowercase, and each word after capitalized) or PascalCase (each word capitalized). One little embarrassment was that I used a foreach to search an ArrayList like this:

ArrayList aList = new ArrayList();

int new_id = 4;
boolean found = false;

foreach (int id in aList)
{
        if (id == new_id)
            found = true;
}

if (!found)
        aList.Insert(new_id);

It works, but I could have done:

int id = aList.IndexOf(new_id);

if (id < 0)
        aList.Insert(new_id);

The IndexOf method is probably faster, and definitely less IL code. What bothers me is that I knew the method was there, I just didn't think to use it. I fell back into an older way of doing things. I also don’t use K&R bracing style out of old habit. 

Christopher Anthony has been interesting to read when he was bashing Windows. The inevitable fight ensued, and it became known he was basing all of his opinions on second hand knowledge. He has since installed XP, and does like it. I found his comments interesting, especially myth 5, on the support you get with Windows vs. Linux.

Sunday, August 01, 2004

T'Pol

Stardate 57080.1 (08-01-2004)

Aha, the actress who plays T'Pol on Enterprise was not happy with the direction of the character either. I don't like a constant wimpy, weepy portrayal of a character such as this. Especially when she is Vulcan, who it has been emphasized over and over keep emotions under tight control. Star Trek has had quite a few strong female characters. One scene that sticks out in my mind is from the episode 'Conspiracy'. An admiral is under alien control, and beating up Worf. He does manage to summon security, and Riker comes, and gets beat up. Dr. Crusher walks in, the admiral charges, and she calmly shoots him with a phaser. I remember commenting after seeing it for the first time, 'Why didn't anyone else think of that?'

The study of alternate propulsion is not dead. Warp drive may be possible according to a BBC article. NASA does have an advanced propulsion lab, but I don't think they are thinking this far ahead.

Friday evening I took the dog to the animal ER in Sunset. His ears are a mess again. We found out after the first time this is a common thing in Labs. After a cleaning, and prescriptions for pills and a cream, he is doing better. He is wise to hiding the pills in peanut butter, or else he is tired of eating it three times a day.

Most of that day was spent hanging around the computer and phone, waiting for Home Depot to call back on the status of my deck railing. I placed the order a month ago. I know it's small from their perspective, but I'd still like to get the deck completed before the next snow.

So I spent some time wandering the `net and doing some programming. I read between 300-400 words per minute, according to this site. That's probably pretty accurate, but I wonder if I am faster with printed pages. I know studies have shown screen printing is not as clear as paper, and Microsoft and other companies are trying to make it better. A few at work wonder why I prefer black text on a gray background. One reason is that it reduces the red fringing I see because of the thick glasses. I see much better with contact lenses. I should pick up a new pair, but I have just been lazy. My insurance should pay for a new pair, which would be nice, since with my prescription the contacts are expensive, and have to be specially ordered.

I did a first pass at a C++ program to count words. There are a few things to work out with it, although I thought I got the punctuation removed. If you are bored, this is the output. 'I' is the winner at 1,689 occurrences, followed by 'and' for 87 log entries. There are quite few that only show up once, which I hope means I am not repeating myself. I will tell when I get to one hundred.

I also watched some of the host of 'The Amazing Race' diaries that appear on the site. He seem a little miffed that one team took the hockey shots instead of the single shot of vodka from the blade of a sabre. The team didn't do that on religious principles. He went on about how it was not the cheap stuff, but the 'top of the shelf' kind. I thought that the challenge was easy. I would guess the game gets harder as you drink more, but they only had to do one shot.

I added a few new blogs from Utah found here. Miss Cranky was there as well. I could register my site there. Of course, there are millions of bloggers out there. Ted Koppel of Nightline noted at the recent Democratic Convention that thirty years ago, there were only three networks covering it. Now there are hundreds of channels, and hundreds of individuals making their opinions public through blogging. Thomas Jefferson would be pleased.

Saturday Rachel came home from a week at Camp Cloud Rim. This year she was ready to go, whereas last year she cried that she did not want to leave. She hasn't talked much about what she did there. She is still singing the songs, and says "Hullo, poppet" from 'Pirates of the Caribbean' all the time. We also went out and purchased a bunk bed set for the boys. The idea was to put them side by side, but Patrick is pressing to do the bunk arrangement. I am not sure if he fully realizes that he will miss out on some of the bedtime ritual he likes (reading, having myself or April sit on the end of the bed).

Sunday, this morning in fact, I tried making the banana cream pie again. It is not done setting up in the fridge, but it already looks better than the first attempt.

End of Entry