Some of my vegetarian friends say they won’t eat anything with a face, thus allowing them to opt out of fish, but still snack on oysters and clams. Well, I will eat things with a face, but not if the face is still smiling at me. Maybe I’m crazy, but doesn’t this look like a… Read More »
For the last month or so I’ve been playing around with Arduino (“open-source electronics prototyping platform “) and Processing (“open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions”). Both are very, very cool. The Arduino programming environment is based on Processing, so learning both isn’t much extra effort.… Read More »
In September when we were in Bled, Slovenia, I spotted this ramp at the main intersection in town. While I’m, of course, happy to see that the main shopping area is accessible to people in wheelchairs, I was equally happy that bicycle racers are also welcome and accommodated for. Hopefully everyone queues up single file,… Read More »
After using the built-in self upgrade feature of Eclipse to go from 3.4 to 3.4.1, I was no longer able to launch Eclipse. Instead of the happy Ganymede splash screen, I got a poorly formatted dialog saying “The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library.” I discovered that the problem was… Read More »
This afternoon I volunteered at the Alameda County Community Food Bank with some Voxify co-workers as part of a work sponsored event. We processed 2500 pounds of food and were able to completely sort and shelve 1500 pounds of that total. It was a great experience and I highly recommend helping out, especially this time… Read More »
Just got malware spam in a Skype chat claiming that “Security Center has detected malware on your computer” with the affected software listed being all the recent Windows flavors. It assures me that my “system IS affected, download the patch from the address below …” That would be, of course, my OS X system. Best… Read More »
We had another huge potluck lunch at work today. I made pastalaya with chicken, andouille sausage and pork shoulder. A Russian at work brought a few bottles of Kvas, a fermented, mildly alcoholic beverage. It tasted like a pleasant blend of Guinness beer and a carbonated cola drink. Maybe that doesn’t sound all that tasty,… Read More »
Over the past few years some universities and colleges have provided incoming freshman with free (well, bunded into tuition and fees) laptops, and even more recently, iPhones. The Times reports that now some schools are making bicycles available for free or inexpensive rental. The University of New England spent $50,000 on bikes, helmets and locks.… Read More »
The $700 billion bailout plan was amazingly extended beyond wealthy bank CEOs to include bike commuting schlubs like myself via the Bicycle Commuter Tax Provision. However, I may be out of the money because I don’t regularly use my bicycle “for a substantial portion of the travel between the employee’s residence and place of employment.”… Read More »
I got an outbound notification call from United this morning about a change to an upcoming flight. When United introduced Easy Update years ago, I was a big fan. I even sent email to United customer service to find out which vendor implemented it for them. Today’s call was more like Excruciating Update, though. The… Read More »