Starting today, if you head over to Fox Sports NHL, you'll see selected posts from my blog included in their feature content. The first piece they've grabbed covers unassisted goal scoring...
Whoohooo!!!
Man, the holidays just seem to fly by so quickly, it seems like it's been ages since I've kept up with things here. Really quickly, then (as I've got some CD-based training to get through in the last couple hours here at work):
1. Weight loss has hit a (predictable) plateau around 188, mostly due to a 4-day excursion to my in-laws, where the good cookin' just keeps on coming. I'm back in the saddle now, though, but will have to work hard to get to my goal of 175 by early March.
2. The media tie-in for my blog is signed, sealed, and delivered, now I just have to wait for them to post my first piece sometime in the next couple days. It's been quite a rush, really - I started dedicating more effort to the blog about 3 months ago, and I'm already about to be featured on a big-time site.
3. Bethanie's getting divorced? I missed that one, until browsing through the JE's just now. My oldest brother divorced earlier this year with 2 kids in the middle, and while it was as amicable as any divorce can be (he lives in a new place just blocks away and everyone gets along), you can tell it's going to be a work in progress for quite a while. Best of luck to all parties there...
4. The Xmas haul was less than in previous years, which is perfectly OK, as we're climbing out of a debt hole and have better things to spend money on, but my wife got me a nice jacket, and I pooled monetary gifts to get an LCD monitor for the home PC and pay part of my dues for the upcoming hockey season, which starts in two weeks.
Also pertaining to Christmas, we had our "Worst Online Shopping Experience Ever" this year, with Lillian Vernon. First, they got our credit card number wrong, but since their system doesn't run the credit check right away (strange), we didn't find out until an email arrived hours later saying "call customer service". We got on the phone, corrected the mistake, and a few hours later, got another email. We called again, corrected the mistake AGAIN (someone mistyped our expiration date), and were told everything would be OK. After a couple days, however, my wife checked the order status online, and shortly thereafter, got another email saying "call customer service". She calls, and finds out that someone had cancelled our order, but their system didn't have any notes or tracking information to suggest who or why (this at a time when she was at a spa, and I was at work, so it wasn't us). By this point, we're just a couple days from the holiday, so she gets a manager on the phone, who apologizes profusely, and offers to "manually override" the order and give us expedited shipping for free, in order to get our gifts on time. The packages are being sent to her parents' house in Indiana, since that's where we went for the weekend.
So we get to Indiana, and the goods aren't there yet. Saturday morning comes and goes, still no delivery. We call them yet again, and this time, the manager says the packages are currently in West Virginia. Evidently, the previous manager we spoke to gave us the "expedited shipping discount", but didn't actually flag the order for expedited shipping, so instead it went regular USPS, and was due to arrive on the 30th!
Fortunately, the kids still had a great holiday without those particular gifts, so we're refusing delivery and will get a full refund of our money. I imagine Lillian Vernon must have had terrible problems this season (perhaps a new ordering system?), as it seems we hit so many different bumps along the way, that I doubt ours was an isolated case.
Over at the blog, I've posted our holiday card for this year. Head on over and check out the Little Forecheckers.
Make sure your drink matches your tie. (Right down to the lemon wedge going with the handkerchief!)
OK,
Oh, and Treo's are right out - there's only so much money to spend, after all.
The last couple weeks have been very busy, and as far as weight loss goes, I've hit a bit of a plateau - still making progress, but it's definitely slowed down. Mostly it's because we've been so busy that we've not gotten to the Y quite as often as we should (although I went before work this morning, and we'll go tomorrow). Hopefully I'll get back on track and drop a couple more pounds before the next session of our hockey season picks up January 8th.
As far as hockey goes, our team finished dead last, and I'm hoping for some major roster turnover. Basically, I'd keep a core from our current group, our captain, our goalie, two forwards who actually hustle, and one of our two female players. Hint: one of the two is in that picture, and she's the one to keep.
On the blog front, I'm still waiting for the media company to send over their content sharing agreement. Supposedly it's still working its way through their legal department...
Progress So Far
9/8/06: 209
9/15/06: 204.5
9/22/06: 206
9/29/06: 201
10/6/06: 197
10/13/06: 195
10/20/06: 194
10/27/06: 193
11/3/06: 193
11/10/06: 191
11/17/06: 192
11/22/06: 189
12/1/06: 188
12/15/06: 187
If there wasn't a Christmas shopping season, hundreds of games would have been allowed to develop further instead of getting dumped on the market prematurely. So many glaring flaws would have been fixed and the games would have been so much better.
A while ago I asked for opinions about building a Linux laptop for my son. This is a follow up to that, some notes for my future reference.
After looking around, I decided to go with the Edubuntu, an education related distribution of Ubuntu. Ubuntu had just released their 6.10 "Edgy Eft" release. Ubunutu has a great reputation for usability as a desktop OS. The Edubuntu release has lots of the games and tools that I would like for my son pre-installed.
I downloaded and burned the Edubuntu install CD, and used it to perform an initial install on the laptop I had chosen for this project - an IBM ThinkPad 600E. Thinkpads are so durable, they make great computers for kids. The install went fairly smooth. My PCMCIA ethernet card was identified properly, the video configured itself reasonably, and the system was very functional. The software included Tux Paint, Potato Guy, and a host of other games and activities that should appeal to a youngster. My one complaint was that the sound did not configure itself properly.
Apparently configuring the sound on the Thinkpad 600E is well known as a tricky operation. I tried a bunch of remedies. I disabled fastboot in the bios. (The bios is entered by pressing F1 during the boot process.) I added the kernel parameters pnpbios=off and acpi=off to the grub configuration. Nothing seemed to work.
After futzing around for a while, I decided to start from scratch. I rebuilt the machine with fastboot disabled and the pnpbios=off and acpi=off parameters during the install process, hoping that this would allow the install to discover the sound settings. It still didn't work.
After further poking around, I discovered that IBM provides a config utility called PS2 which can be used to, among other things, view and alter the configuration of the sound card. The utility only runs under DOS. The hibernate function of the Thinkpad 600E also requires a FAT16 partition to host the hibernate file. I decided to build a small DOS utility partition to host the hibernate file and the PS2 utility.
My CD burner software - CDBurnerXP Pro 3 - contains a utility to make a bootable cd. The boot process actually loads a minimal DR-DOS environment and maps it as "A:", and the contents of the CD are available as "D:". Not being certain that the IBM PS2 facility would run under DR-DOS, I found a Win98 boot diskette image and made its contents available on the CD as well as the IBM utilities.
Once I booted with the CD, I used the Win98 fdisk utility to create a 500 MB bootable DOS partition at the start of the drive. Then I formated it and transfered the Win98 system files, the PS2 utility, and some other drivers needed to mount the CD rom, etc. I attempted to reboot, but couldn't because the MBR still had grub on it.
I rebooted with the CD, then used the DR-DOS fdisk to overwrite the MBR. I rebooted without the CD and everything came up fine. I attempted to make a hibernate file with the PS2 utility, but that failed. The Win98 tools had built for me a FAT12 partition. I needed a FAT16.
I rebooted with the DR-DOS disk, partitioned and formated with the DR-DOS FDISK and FORMAT utilities, then loaded the Win98 system files and copied everything else over there. I removed the CD, rebooted, and was able to use the PS2 utility to create the hibernate file and check the parameters for the audio subsystem.
Now, I rebooted with the Edubuntu install disk and reinstalled on the remaining 5.5 GB. The grub config did locate the DOS partiton and correctly made an entyr for it. Sound still did not work. A little searching led me to this page. That successfully fixed my sound issues.
The default kernel was an i386 build, backward compatible to lots of older processors. The other "flavor" available to me was the i686 flavor, which can be used with Pentium II or better. I used the Synaptic Package Manager to de-select the linux-386 package and select the linux-686 package.
Finally, some of the web sites my son might want to visit use flash. I found these directions, which worked pretty much perfectly.
Finally, I created a user account for my son, and moved some links to things he might want onto his desktop.
Still to do, I want to reduce the number of services running. No need to run bluetooth, for instance.
One last thing. Like lots of older laptops, the battery was shot. I was able to trade the battery for a replacement at http://www.batteryrefill.com/. They take aged battery packs and replace the LiIon cells. The control circuitry is usually fine, even though the cells have failed due to age. The refurbished battery for a Thinkpad 600 series is $35 with a trade in of a non-working battery.
When saving files, I never got in the habit of using the History button. Now I want to, and I have hundreds or thousands of links such as "My Documents (35)". I don't want to delete them one by one. I searched for "History" and "Recent" and haven't found them yet. Googling is a PITA since I don't know what to search for that won't bring up stuff for Internet Explorer. Help?
I'm just a lemming, aren't I?
1. What is your occupation?
Director of ERP Systems at a wholesale distribution company.
2. What color are you socks right now?
Black, like my shoes and belt.
3. What are you listening to right now?
The clack, clack, clack of my keyboard and the constant whirring of the HVAC...
4. What was the last thing that you ate?
Burger, fries and a lemonade at Sonic with the wife and kids...
5. Can you drive a stick shift?
Absolutely - it's been 3 years, and I miss it so!
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
Orange. It's always been my favorite color.
7. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
My wife, reminding me of something I need to do this afternoon.
8. Do you like the person who sent this to you?
Yup!
9. How old are you today?
36... 37 in March. My brother turns 42 today (gotta call him, doh!).
10. Favorite drinks?
Pepsi, beer, lemonade, whiskey sours, orange juice, white-chocolate mochas...
11. What is your favorite sport to watch?
On TV - football, because it has been so optimized for that experience. Live, hockey.
12. Have you ever dyed your hair?
No.
13. Pets?
Ozzy the Dog, a corgy-mix. I think my wife preemptively named him Ozzy before any of our kids came along....
14. Favorite food?
Coney Islands, as found nearly everywhere throughout the Detroit area. Damn, it sucks that I live in Tennessee...
15. What was the last movie you watched?
Crash.
16. Favorite holiday?
Christmas. With the kids being 4, 4, and 3, they're in the sweet spot for that kind of stuff.
17. What do you do to vent anger?
Save it for my hockey games. There, if I screw up, I can just break a $20 stick in a kathartic spasm of rage.
18. What were your favorite toys as a kid?
My Atari 400.
19. What is your favorite: fall or spring?
Fall - it's all about the leaves, the chill in the air, and knowing that winter (my favorite) is right around the corner.
20. Hugs or kisses?
Hugs.
21. Cherry or blueberry?
Cherry...
22. Do you want your friends to send this back?
Just keep it pinging around
23. Who is the most likely to respond?
Good Q, there have been dozens already so it's hard to say.
24. Who is least likely to respond?
Osama Bin Ladin - he never seems to reply to my messages.
25. Living arrangements?
Rented house with the wife and 3 kids. Hopefully we'll buy it in a year or so.
26. When was the last time you cried?
Dunno - perhaps on my wedding day.
27. What is on the floor of your closet?
Lots of laundry to do.
28. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you're sending this to?
N/A, JE on
29. What did you do last night?
Put up lights outside, decorated the house, put the tree up, etc.
Progress is still being made on the weight front, despite the Thanksgiving weekend. I didn't record my food intake for about 4 days, but managed not just to avoid trouble, but enjoy some awesome food in the meantime. Green bean casserole, mashed potatoes & gravy, chicken & noodles, French Silk pie... my mother-in-law even had a tin of chocolate-peanut clusters waiting for me.
Normally I track everything I eat over at Sparkpeople.com (which makes it quite easy), but I kept things under control and still managed to keep the downward momentum rolling.
On the hockey front, our team got smacked again Tuesday, with another game coming up tonight. While we've got a nice bunch of folks, there is simply no organization. We haven't kept a consistent line or pairing together for more than a period, so there is often confusion as to who's playing where, and what they should be doing. Pretty sad, really, as we could probably do OK if we just got our act together. I'll try to push for that when the new season gets started in January...
And on the blog front, the big media company's legal eagles are forwarding over a Content Partnership Agreement, so once that's taken care of they'll start hosting some of my work. As soon as that happens, I'll sound the trumpets!
Progress So Far
9/8/06: 209
9/15/06: 204.5
9/22/06: 206
9/29/06: 201
10/6/06: 197
10/13/06: 195
10/20/06: 194
10/27/06: 193
11/3/06: 193
11/10/06: 191
11/17/06: 192
11/22/06: 189
12/1/06: 188
So Joe has been pounding away on OpenOffice Writer lately. He mostly likes to take things from around the house and copy the words in. Today, however, he made up a new game.
OOo Writer has a "paragraph background" feature that allows one to set the background color for that paragraph. Today, he made several blank lines and started setting the color for each. Starting from the top, he made a band of light blue, a band of bright yellow, about 5 more bands of light blue, then a band of green.
Then he called me over and said, "Look. I made the world. Here is the grass, the sky, and the Sun." I was shocked. It was very 20th century abstract art. Very cool.
I tend to find most bumper stickers hopelessly trite, but this one caught my attention while driving back to Tennessee from Indiana yesterday:
Frodo Failed.
Bush Has The Ring.
So in the first group there are insensitive people who stain the carpets as they eat and drink in violation of the rules. In the second group there are the sensitive people who are more concerned with how the carpeting looks than how it functions. Functionally carpeting feels softer and absorbs more noise from the loud ride.
Well if the stains are so bothersome, I propose BART keep the carpeting, but change the color to dark mud. This will hide the stains. If the seats are also reupholstered in forest green, the cars will have a natural color scheme so appropriate for the environmentally friendly Bay Area.
I don't mean come up with a better search engine. I mean one of their features like orkut or flickr? So now you can presume the idea I have isn't in those departments. But I have an idea for what I think is the missing killer feature in an existing app.
It actually turns out the company that comes closest to my idea isn't yahoo or google, which makes me think those two are either working on it already, or seriously missing out. It's a missing piece that would unify, compliment, and or augment two or more of their existing apps.
So I think my site would kick ass and the competition would be sluggish to respond or wouldn't want to completely duplicate my idea as it would force them to change their simplified approach. Except then I figure if I had any real success they would modify their sites to get users back. I wouldn't at all mind being bought by them though.
That's my million dollar idea with loads of risk. I have another I'd like to think is worth five or six figures a year, but from my research no one is doing it yet, at least not in English. I'm leaning towards working on the second site.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
