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Just Because I can: Gmail

I was working on my webpage a little bit yesterday. One of the things I did, besides the main part of updating the recipes section, was set up an atom feed of my update log. That’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

And since I could, I decided to sign up for a “beta” Gmail account just because I can, even though I haven’t a clue whether I’m actually going to do anything with it. Well, if I think of anything useful to do with it, I have it.

I came across this at work reading some documentation….

Q: I need to program ISD chips with prerecorded audio files in exact
address locations. How can I do this?
A: ISD/WINBOND no longer makes programmers for our products.

Taken out of context that just is amusing… Awww, shucks, you don’t make
engineers anymore!?!?…You know, once the government cracked down on our
Cloning/DNA research department it just wasn’t economically feasible to
breed programmers… 😉

Fridays are Quiet

I like Fridays, because on Fridays its really quiet at the office. I hadn’t been noticing just how quiet it was until the HR manager walked by with someone on an interview and as they were walking by mentioning the quietness and joking “you’d think it was the off Friday”. Well, its not quite *that* quiet, because if it were, there’d be no sounds of keyboards and clicking mice.

I’m not sure why its so much quieter around here on Fridays, particularly after Noon. I remember back when I was interviewing, it was a Friday afternoon, and yes, it was this quiet when I took my tour of this part of the building–ghostly quiet, like you might think you’re one of the quiet floors of the library, and someone’s gonna glare at you if you talk above a whisper. But the thing is, its not like that the rest of the week.

I’m not really sure what makes Friday so different. It really isn’t like half the office goes home early for the day or anything…

Thoughts from “Start Where You Are”

Paul’s Shipwreck at Sea

“Forgive me if I sound uncaring, but it took a shipwreck to jolt Paul’s perspective back into focus. The disaster at sea, followed by the forced change of pace on Malta was precisely what he needed to begin the process of recuperation and repair.” -Charles Swindoll (Start Where You Are)

Roots & Wind

“the roots grow deep when the winds are strong. Working through is always–always–more painful than walking out. But in the end, ah, what confident honesty, what calm assurance, what character depth result!” -Charles Swindoll (Start Where You Are)

Visual Slick Edit Rocks

Visual SlickEdit is becoming more and more my favorite code-editing ide. customizer’s heaven. yeah, for being a $300 editor it better be a good editor right? 😉

to put this in perspective, yesterday i was talking to Don, and he was saying i should put a phrase in all my comments about unfinished parts that i can search for to find them later–he uses “TestCode -” for his comment lable. So I was saying, Ohh yeah, i usually use “TODO:” just force of habit from having used visual studio long enough, and it has that cool little feature that every comment that starts with TODO: goes into this little todolist window that has clicky links to the lines with your todos. Its too bad SlickEdit doesn’t have that feature.

So then today, unrelatedly, I’m sitting ther trying to write a macro to slash-slashify comment out/uncomment massive hunks of code and having a hard time with a bizarre error on the uncomment macro i wrote, so i went to the website for slickedit to see if they had any tips or example macros or anything. And boy did they, in their macros section, they had exactly what i wanted already done and working, as well, as you guessed it, a macro to do a visC++ style todo list window–which i proceeded to modify ‘cuz i wanted it to take up less screen space with the window it popped up, but it works like a charm! yay, the one thing i missed from visual studio i now have. plus i also have cool macros like one to align columns of text so that your typdef structs look all pretty with all the assigned values lining up in an obsessively spaced perfectly order. and i put comment out on my right click menu. and i also got this cool macro to copy the selection to the end of a scratchpad type window to keep typedefs and message structures handy, quickly. oooh, this all is soo… *useful*. Ohhh, looking forward in that nerdy way to playing around with that more.

Also rearranged the toolbars and customized the menus a bit. added a toolbar button for my new todo list macro, and i think i want to redo some of the bmp’s for a few of the ugly toolbar buttons to pretty-ify it, just cuz i can and itd be more aesthetically pleasing 🙂

so yeah, i’m a nerd, ‘cuz finding this cool stuff for my editor totally made my day =)

Nerdy Solution

I was thinking “I need a remote” for my desktop/winamp as a song I didn’t want to hear jumped up on the playlist. And I was thinking about how my friend H. said on Sunday how he uses his wireless keyboard as an “expensive remote for playing music controls. “I should get one of those,” I thought, suddenly realizing I could do the same thing using my laptop and VNC!

It worked like a charm. Yay, I can play Winamp coming out the nice speakers attached to my desktop rather than the ones built in my laptop…AND still control it from across the room using my laptop. Yay.

HTML vs Word Processing

There’s one thing I like better about Word than HTML, you have a much greater control over the aesthetic presentation to completely visually reflect what you’re trying to convey. Spacing and indentation are much easier, as well as adding headings, shading, color, pictures, etc. Raw HTML doesn’t give you that satisfaction, as you imagine the “<i>” tags magically turning into italicized text in the finished product, though a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver can help a bit with that.

Sometimes I find the medium of a computer screen too flexible, the canvas is more like a scroll than sheets of paper. Quite frankly, webpages that try and break articles into “pages” arbitrarily by making you click links to get to the next “page” of it? I find that really cumbersome; it’s not something you can flip through easy like a printed book with separate pages. The internet has a different set of rules than printed mediums.

I like the visual aesthetic control you have working with the printed page. I like to add bits of page layout, columns, outlined boxes of text in a different color to make things stand out, or to clarify that something is an aside from my subject matter, sometimes I even add pictures in the margins and as I feel fit–its not just about the words coming off my pen, it has to look visually appealing as well.

Hard Drive Naming Scheme

So it turns out when I named my hard drives using a constellation theme, I inadvertently did something even cooler–I named them all from the same constellation family without realizing it. My hard drives Carina (meaning the keel), Delphinus (meaning dolphin), and Equuelus (meaning little horse) are all a part of the Heavenly Waters Family.

At first I was thinking, well, I could continue my alphabetical theme, but the only constellation starting with F that I could find was Fornax and that wasn’t a cool enough name. Ohh, and besides which, Equuelus is no longer drive E: it is now drive F: instead. So the new hard drive would be G: or above. Maybe I’ll call it drive J: cuz its gonna have my stuff on it. Haven’t decided. But there is no constellation starting with J anyway–so…

I’m thinking its kinda cool though the “heavenly waters” constellation theme…so I think I’m gonna stick with that…now the hard part…deciding what to name the new hard drive that is going to give it nothing but good luck and good fortune.

Amusing bug of the day…

In oberon, java, and sparc assembly:

CONST_TRUE: .asciz "FALSE"
CONST_FALSE: .asciz "TRUE"

Play spot the error…

the difference between 35 errors and zero errors. Stupid copy-paste typos…

pointloc[0]=(float)i./(float)(NUMPTS-1.);
pointloc[1]=(float)j./(float)(NUMPTS-1.);
pointloc[2]=(float)k./(float)(NUMPTS-1.);

pointloc[0]=(float)i/(float)(NUMPTS-1.);
pointloc[1]=(float)j/(float)(NUMPTS-1.);
pointloc[2]=(float)k/(float)(NUMPTS-1.);