May 8, 2009 - Sleep Study

Last night I participated in a sleep study.  I hadn't been sleeping very well for the past couple years, and my wife complains that I snore.  She also says that I sometimes gasp for breath, and that she thought I had sleep apnea. Well, doctors haven't been a big priority for me, but since I have spare time (being unemployed and all), I decided that I should take care of it while it didn't conflict with a job. It was surprisingly easy.  I showed up at 9:30pm at the medical center and went to bed in some rooms that were set up like a motel.  I was supposed to get to sleep at 10:30pm (my normal bedtime), but I don't think I actually got to sleep until after midnight.  Fortunately, I anticipated this and brought my laptop and some TV shows that I hadn't gotten around to watching, yet. The nurse wired me up with a couple dozen electrodes and plugged me into a computer.  Then I went to sleep.  Actually, I was a bit uncomfortable and when the nurse "got me up" I was already awake... and I didn't feel like I'd slept at all.  It was one of the worst night's rest I've had recently. However, in spite of my perception that I didn't sleep, the nurse assured me that I had.  I was afraid that I had wasted the entire sleep study by not sleeping.  When I thought about it, I realized that I hadn't quite counted to a thousand (I count, slowly, when I want to get to sleep... it's boring enough to knock me out), and that would only have taken an hour, whereas I had been lying down for 6. The different electrodes left sticky glue or some kind of gritty paste on various parts of my head, face, and body.  They washed out easily enough.  One electrode left a red mark under my left eye.

May 6, 2009 - Test Video

May 4, 2009 - Server Network Adapter

May 3, 2009 - Power Supply

Now... the problems started after a storm a few months ago, and I figured that the motherboard was fried.  I'm not sure why I got that idea -- I guess because the computer started sometimes and not other times.  It never crashed after it got started.  Also, it did "power on" but had weird behaviors.  In my experience, a bad power supply is the cause of "sudden problems" in a stable system 6 times out of 10.  Another 3 times out of 10, it's a dying hard drive.  1 time out of 10, it's a dying CPU.  I don't think I've ever actually had a motherboard go bad (although I've gotten bad motherboards out-of-the-box).

In any case, I noticed that the fewer things I had connected (i.e. USB devices), the more likely the machine was to boot up.  Although USB devices don't draw much power, they do draw some power, and the power drain was the only thing that I could think of whereby a USB device might affect boot-up.  So I switched out the power supply, and bingo:  The system came right up.

Next time I have computer problems, I think I'll just play the odds and assume that it's a bad power supply, regardless of the symptoms.

May 1, 2009 - Angie's Netbook

While we were there, though, we looked around at the tiny laptops.  These are generally called "netbooks" and have an 8 - 10 inch screen.  They're not much bigger or heavier than a paperback book.  Angie got a 10" version with 160GB hard drive, 1GB memory and 1.8Ghz Atom CPU.  It's powerful enough to run Windows XP with ease, and we got the version with a "big battery" for 7 hours of battery life.  It's a really cool little computer.  It wasn't expensive, either, at $349.

April 30, 2009 - New Stuff

We've replaced most of the floors in the house.  A lot of the house had old and dirty carpeting -- carpets that have been there well over 10 years.  The kitchen had ugly terra cotta flooring that had been painted an uneven mixture of yellow, pink, and white.  Most of the house is now wood laminate.  The living room is tile, two of the bathrooms are peel-n-stick linoleum, one is tile, and the girl's bedroom is peel-n-stick linoleum, but is scheduled to be replaced with wood laminate.  The total cost of all that will be around $10k, counting some tips that we gave the hard-working guys, the tile living room (which was done a year ago) and tiling the two bathrooms, which we have yet to do.

We also had the trees cut back and trimmed, which was expensive, but not too bad.

We got a 42" LCD TV today, which was actually free -- the spoils of an "extended warrantee plan" on an off-brand TV I bought three years ago.  It died, and no replacement parts were available since the maker (Kreisen) went out of business.  The original TV was a 32", but Microcenter's replacement plan provided me with a dollar amount comparable to the original cost... and LCD TVs are cheaper, now.  This was actually a good deal all-the-way-around.  The Kreisen TV was already one of the cheapest 32" LCD TVs at the time, and I bought the last one -- the display model -- for an even better discount.  I enjoyed that TV for about two years before it gave out, and now (for $20), it has been replaced with a 42" LCD TV that has HDMI and VGA inputs, 1080p resolution and the latest digital tuners.

On Monday, we got a new Refrigerator.  It's bigger than the old one, has the water & ice dispensor on the front, and is generally a nicer fridge than the old one.

April 26, 2009 - Flash Maze Game

April 23, 2009 - Video Blog Conversion

The "ultimate blog tool" would have to assume that you would write a big boring blob of text (with formatting), but provide an easy way for you to create an audioblog (podcast), a photoblog (like a daily/weekly cartoon for cartoonists), a video blog (like youtube), blogs with notes, blog with links, blogs with photo galleries, and blogs with products -- since my blog tool was going to be incorporated in my mall/store software.

The problem with the ultimate blog is that video-on-the-web has more-or-less standardized on flash video (*.flv) format. audio-on-the-web has more-or-less standardized on mp3 at 64khz. It's easy to upload a file, and I've written a few image-manipulation systems to create thumbnails and galleries and normalized photos. However, decompressing, recompressing, and transcoding video and audio was a bit outside of my experience and every time I looked into it, the task seemed pretty daunting.

However, I finally put my nose to the grindstone and found a good way of doing it.  It involves scheduled batch jobs on the server side that convert video, move it, and update a database when it's ready.

April 21, 2009 - Flash Rotator

One of the things I've been wanting to do with flash was to create a generic "rotator" that I could integrate into a store. My friend Terry at Helen's Heart has a website with pictures of shoes. They're gorgeous, and I kept thinking "wouldn't it be cool if a web user could grab that shoe and look at it from different angles?!"

Such a thing is possible -- even easy -- in Flash. However, with all of the shoes the Helen's Heart stocks, it would be a daunting task to build a flash file for each and every single product.

So, follow the link to see (and test, and download) my Flash Rotator.  It uses a parameter to set the directory, which reads an XML file and JPEGs -- no need for Adobe Flash Professional, no need for programming, and it should be easy for even neophytes to use.  Of course, seasoned web developers will easily imagine data-enabled uses for this.  Off the top of my mind, interactive product pages and interactive real-estate walk-throughs seem most obvious.

April 2, 2009 - Cookie Bandits

March 30, 2009 -

Newspapers have failed in so many ways for so long that it's silly to blame the internet.  Their death toll was ringing before the internet rolled around.

The newspaper was once a decent way to get movie showtimes.  I remember being a teenager and buying newspapers to find out what's playing and where.  But theaters got bigger and bigger.  I don't need a newspaper to find out when and where a movie is playing when the AMC grand has 30 screens: they are showing every single current movie and have a call-in number.  And I have a cellphone wherever I go.  Television and radio play ads for the films.

The newspaper was once a decent way to get TV showtimes.  But they never tracked cable channels, and TV Guide utterly crushed them decades ago.  Tivo makes the issue irrelevent today.

Ticketmaster consolidated theater and event information for the purpose of selling tickets.  They did a far better job than the newspaper in collecting this information.

The institutional newspaper priced itself out of the classified ad market ages ago -- I tried to run an ad, once.  $40 for two lines of text?

I never did read the sports section.  Most sports enthusiasts seem to enjoy sports radio, available most of the day.

The newspaper used to have comics.  And they still have the same ones from the 1970's (and earlier).  You can buy comic books inexpensively that will provide many times the comedy, story, or art in a specific form of your choosing.  Newspaper comics are significantly smaller today than they were in the past and many comics are repeats.  For instace, Foxtrot, Calvin & Hobbes, and Peanuts (known for certain, off the top of my head).

The newspaper's social section was primarily replaced by celebrity gossip & entertainment magazines, talk radio, tv talk shows, and others.

Current Events are more spectacularly provided by evening news shows, and more conveniently by radio.  Cable news channels addressed the "I want it when" issue.  I'd almost argue that the internet is ignoring print -- competing with televised news.  Newspapers suffer collateral damage by being three publishing technologies behind the time (print > radio > tv > internet).

Newspaper features have been cherry picked by so many publishers and broadcasters and to such a degree that actual newspapers don't do ANYTHING as well as their competitors.  And the information never was organized well.