18 posts tagged “cheap thrills”
I got the tow kit installed this weekend. The car doesn't need to be towed right now. Why the kit?
In 2006 I broke down on I-465 during rush hour. You don't ever want to do that and have to think. The traffic is heavy and fast. It's extremely loud. It's hard to think straight, and you mostly just want to get the heck out of there.
I want to be prepared for the next time I break down. I want to be able to walk into my garage, grab the tow bar, drive the new Beetle back, and rescue my old Beetle. I want to know exactly what needs to happen and how to get by '73 Bug back to my garage in peace.
Related to that, I don't like having to bum rides out to Greenfield to drop off the Bug with Dick or pick it back up when he's done. If the car's not running, then I have to find somebody with a truck and hitch.
So that's all fair, but there's a third reason too: I wanted to see my New Beetle tow my Beetle. It's a statement. I tooled around the neighborhood to see how the New Beetle would handle with the load. I got a look from every single person I passed, because face it, when have you ever seen such a sight?
Courtesy of Troy, today's Internet brings me the perfect combination: LISP and air-cooled VWs.
For over fifteen years I've created static web sites with vi and a web browser. I would edit the page, reload it, rinse, repeat, and FTP the page to the server when done. The cycle got a little more painful when I got righteous about web standards. I had to FTP the page, validate it, make corrections, rinse, and repeat. It was slower and less fun, but I had just a few sites to maintain: one for me, one for my brother's business, and one for my dad's business.
Well, Megan has been poking at iWeb, and I suspect she will be wanting to write HTML directly before too long. iWeb is already "not fun," because I went the WebDAV route for file copying, and WebDAV is clumsy and slow both on OS X and Windows. Megan hates the file copying. As for writing HTML, it's the first formal language she'll see, and it's hard to learn good markup without on-the-fly validation.
So this weekend I broke down and admitted I needed a tool for editing HTML and getting it uploaded. I looked at both Coda and CSSEdit.
Coda meets all my needs. You can configure a site with how it gets uploaded and where it's mirrored on your local machine. It then tracks changes and make pushing updates to your server a one-button operation. The on-the-fly error checking and intellisense is great. The preview is great. The CSS editor works well and gives you an idea of what options are available for customizing look. I got it confused when I tried to upload with no network connection, but otherwise it behaved well for the several hours I used it this weekend.
The best part is that I used to not have fun working on my family's web sites, and with Coda, it became fun again.
CSSEdit looks like a great tool for learning CSS. What jumped out is how easy it is to go to a web site, inspect how it's put together, and modify the CSS for the site. It's a great complement to Coda once you've learned some CSS basics.
It takes thirteen hours to drive to drive from Indianapolis, Indiana to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I spent some of that time catching up on old This American Life radio shows. One of them, Time to Save the World, had a short recording of a lecture Starlee Kine gave on The Rundown.
I found a summary of the Rundown online. Read it, and if you can, it's worth listening to the show to hear Starlee give an example of how it's used.
But you don't need Starlee if you know me personally. That's because to my surprise, The Rundown is how I like to have conversations all the time. Almost. In the online writeup, the author suggests that the conversation should take some odd turns. That might be fun in a bar, but I didn't get that vibe from Starlee. Starlee's point is that you should probe and ask questions that make the conversation meaty. Don't be shy!
Of course, being bold can lead your foot to your mouth, and that happens to me a few times a year. Still, it's a small price to pay, and you'll win in the long run.
Mac Rumors claims that there are going to be new iMacs announced in June. I've been holding off on a new computer for exactly this news, and if it's true, it means I'm putting off a purchase until fall so that Apple can rev the hardware at least once to address bugs.
In the meantime I'm continuing to stockpile excuses for why I need a new Mac. The latest excuse is that my poor eMac is really bad at torrenting for two reasons.
- Torrenting requires leaving the computer on a lot. The eMac is loud, and it generates a lot of heat.
- Serious torrenting takes lots of disk. My eMac has a 40gb drive, and I've already spilled my iTunes library to an external drive. The torrent stuff is on the external drive too, but its I/O is too slow to play video, and I have to copy files as I want to view them to the internal disk.
- Azureus seems to be the best client, but it's a cpu and memory hog. Running 20 torrents has the footprint at 120Mb real memory and over 400Mb virtual memory. CPU load is spiked. There is substantial drag on my system when Azureus is handling this load, but sorry, 20 torrents isn't a lot.
Yeah, maybe I should use a client other than Azureus. While researching for this post, it looks like there have been some updates to other clients since I last looked. Neverthless, the heat, noise, and disk issues aren't going away.
I'm sure the peanut gallery is going to ask what hentai I'm downloading. Sorry to disappoint. Currently I'm torrenting Debian 4 CD-ROM images and the SICP lectures. I like playing with the cool kids.
Update: I tried the stable and beta Bittorrent clients. I tried Tomato. They're no better than Azureus. I'm open to suggestions for other clients.
Update: Chris is right; the shutdown bug in Azureus still isn't fixed.
Via Oscar.
The Canyon Inn is full right now. My daughters and I have two rooms, and two guests each have another room. One guest is Illya, a condensed matter physicist from Louisiana State.
My dad and I were talking to him over breakfast, and he was telling us about a recent trip to Big Bend National Park. Big Bend covers territory along the Rio Grande River marking the border between Texas and Mexico. Illya was walking along the river with his wife when they came into a clearing with trinkets spread over the rocks. Huh?
It turns out that trade is becoming more restricted on the border. Drug traffic is up, and law enforcement is clamping down. A few years ago, Mexicans would regularly walk across the river, do business on the U.S. side of the border, and return home at the end of the day. They can't do this anymore without risking capture and deportation. Sure, getting deported is no big deal...but the nearest deportation point is 100 miles away. Very inconvenient when you're left with no transportation after processing and release.
So in this clearing on the river, wares were laid out on rocks. Two men sat on the other side of the river about fifty feet from Illya and his wife. They shouted across the river to each other to ask questions and negotiate. When the deal was settled, Illya and his wife collected their purchases, put the right amount of money in the can labeled "donations to help the poor children of our village," and waved goodbye.
Free Enterprise will always find a way under the radar.
Yesterday I stumbled into Crazy Apple Rumors via Wil Shipley's blog. It's hysterical if you're an Apple fan! A few choice posts include:
And they have a lot more stuff in the archives. Scan their Categories list...I see hours of cheap thrills in the queue already.
I took the bait and fiddled with XNA Game Studio Express during my week off from work. The tutorials are well done and make it easy to get off the ground. The framework itself looks pretty basic and is poorly documented. The content pipeline is especially opaque. It probably isn't bad if you're familiar with the vocabulary of modern graphics engines, but I know very little and therefore had to experiment to get anything done. For example, writing a program to move a point on the X/Y plane was impossible without looking at examples. You have to create and configure a vertex buffer as well as rip over it applying effects to render the point in 3-space. Looking at the final code, it's trivial if you understand the model, but the learning curve is steep. I suspect you could base a college Computer Graphics course on XNA, though, and get through a lot of material with little fuss.
Megan and I had some fun. Early one morning I attached an XBox 360 controller to the laptop and worked through the flying spacehip tutorial. After ten minutes of refactoring, I could have any number of spaceships flying on screen, coordinated by the controller. Megan wandered into the room, and we spent about half an hour messing with constants and playing with the code. Her seeing code, making changes to it with me, and rerunning the demo was the first time I got to share programming with her. That was a pretty nice moment as a parent.
I still want to mix programming languages. I thought about a simple interface on top of a combat system and naturally got more interested in the design of the combat system. I thought about starting with the AD&D rule set and what it would take to code that. Would I want to do that in C#? Heck, no. Would I want to do it in Scheme with good macro support for expressing the rules and an engine for running them? Oh, yes.
