morrowlife

Here’s LRN2 on the way to one of our geocaches at Chabot. Part of my famous Camping series.

Happy birthday to me! It’s been a nice day on all fronts.

We actually celebrated my birthday yesterday. LRN5 was there for the afternoon, which was extra nice. I received some nice gifts and a great dinner.

Spoke with my Mom last night and my Dad, brother, and sister today. It’s always possible that more loved ones will call tonight or tomorrow. What a great day.

Just one small negative note today – LRN4 discovered a flat tire on the Suburban this morning. Sadly, it was the result of yet more vandalism. Welcome to California. Costco cheerfully replaced the tire at no cost, as part of their no-cost tire warranty. I like Costco and plan to give them a lot more tire business.

LRN1 had his wisdom teeth removed on Saturday morning. It was a tough weekend for him. He’s still in pain, but is recovering well. The swelling, which was never very bad, is already receding. One more missionary checklist item completed. Probably the most painful one.

LRN1 and I stayed home on Sunday. We watched a bunch of TV shows on Hulu. Sat unhappily through a bunch of (unattributed) Microsoft commercials for their stupid Bing search engine. No mention of Microsoft or what Bing is, of course. Just announcements of today’s “Bing-athon.” Looks stupid. The harder Microsoft tries to be cool, the more uncool they are. Sigh. I read somewhere they have a $100 million advertising budget for Bing. Maybe if they would put that kind of money into their product, they wouldn’t have to try to fool people into using it. Double sigh.

I got yet more good news today – all the YW camp counselor callings are filled! Woo hoo! It’s been a struggle. Now I’m looking forward to getting to camp. Should be a pleasant week.

LRN2’s been working on an article for spinfo.info. He reviewed the very cool game called flOw. It’s a strangely compelling game. Highly recommended. See the article for a description. You can play online or download it for free.

I need to shoot him a copy of sumotori. Also worth playing.

I’m also working with LRN1 on making gardenvillesoftware.com a destination for Arduino enthusiasts. He’s working on documenting the MARV on an ongoing basis. And I’m adding a few links to interesting Arduino projects.

I’m still struggling with gville’s focus. Here’s something my Loyal Readers could help me with. Or something with which my Loyal Readers could help me, to avoid ending the sentence with a preposition.

Anyway, what’s your opinion? There are several decisions to be made:

1) Should we abandon the gville domain for something easier to remember, more descriptive, or hipper?

2) Should we eliminate anything not related to Arduinos or talk about anything in tech that interests us?

3) Should we get a new website design and/or logo? If so, what?

4) Should we eliminate the currently-unused Forums feature or try to get it used?

5) What else should we change?

I’d really love to hear some opinions.

Today’s important glowing animal update: they have glowing babies! Still waiting for the snake version.

Time for other things. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Great Art featuring . . . Great Art. Talk about confusing. Some of the painters seemed to have a bit of Artistic Temperament, an affliction that fortunately doesn’t affect me. My talent is pure. Part of my famous Camping series.

Fine day at work, although the commute was less than perfect. Moved pretty well until I got the where two lanes were closed for an accident. Got there eventually, though.

It was really crowded getting to the temple. Took a little more than an hour to make a 45-minute drive, which really isn’t too bad, all things considered. The temple session was very nice and I’m glad I went. Saw a few people from the ward, plus a woman who introduced herself as somebody I called to serve at Young Women Camp. I’ve spoken with a whole bunch of people and don’t have any idea who they are in person. I have a lot of names to learn this summer.

LRN1 is having his wisdom teeth pulled tomorrow. We’re hoping for the best but expecting him to feel pretty bad for a few days. Good luck and a speedy recovery, LRN1!

What with temple night and all that, it’s late. Weekend plans pretty much center around helping LRN1 out. There’s also the lawn to be trimmed, the filters to be cleaned, and a car to be washed. Plus a navigation system to be written. Ought to be both action-packed and relaxing.

No food violence, no toilet news. The world is at peace.

Next blog: my birthday! See you Monday.

Here’s another bit of Great Art courtesy of LRN3. That’s a pretty full houseboat. This is how they spend their holiday weekends in Arizona. I guess it’s too hot to do anything else.

Extreme Short Shrift tonight. I had a dental appointment this morning that went later than the last train out of town, so I had to drive. Therefore, no blogging on the train. Then I spent the evening making Young Women Camp phone calls. So I’m out of time.

Tomorrow’s temple day for me after work. Looking forward to it.

Otherwise, it was a beautiful day, marred only slightly by a very painful jaw from the dental work.

No search engine news today, but there is food violence news: At least they’re taking their differences to court. Stupid, I grant you, but they didn’t actually throw the crunchberries.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN3 at work this past Memorial Day. Looks pretty tough. I can’t understand why he likes that job. Photo courtesy of LRN3 hisownself.

Another great day. Busy as a bee at work, and way more than plenty to do at home. I’m still struggling to make good use of my time on the train. I have some new tools, but it still comes down to productivity and having the right tools at the right time. I’ve been disappointed to learn that much of the trip is outside of AT&T’s pathetic data coverage, so there’s that to be worked around. Email works okay, since it gets queued up until the signal comes back. Web access – not so good. There just are no towers covering a whole lot of train tracks.

On the other hand, I could be more productive, even without web access. In one positive development, I’m spending a little less time watching unproductive videos on my iPod. Only productive ones. Mostly.

Anyway. MARV is at a bit of a standstill today, accelerometer-wise. LRN1 has some queries out to the accelerometer’s maker, having gone to the forums without much luck. If we haven’t broken the logjam by the weekend, we’ll hold a peer review and try to get to the bottom of things. We need to figure it out and get the project moving forward again.

More search engine stuff today: Topsy. It’s fascinating; the search is done via Tweets – Twitter posts. I tried a few queries out, and it looks to me like it might actually do something better than Google: news. Google’s information is days old, at the very least. Since Topsy uses Tweets, its information is presumably fresher. Check it out. You don’t need a Twitter account to play.

And then there’s this: A call to action. I find the idea of an open-source search engine fascinating. Would the openness of the search algorithm tend to encourage or discourage gaming? It sure seems like the latter, but read the article and see why Cory Doctorow thinks otherwise.

Today’s food violence update: When ranch dressing is outlawed, only outlaws will have ranch dressing.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s some true Great Art. Taken during last weekend’s campout at Chabot park and part of my famous Camping series.

Just another day in paradise. Couldn’t have been nicer.

Our visit with our friends the Taylors last night was delightful. They brought us shortcake with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and fresh whipped cream. Delicious! What wonderful friends we have.

Good day at work too. I’ve been experimenting with a little website for some of the group’s data, including a wiki for frequently-updated test procedures and such things. Don’t know yet whether there will be much interest in it, but I’m interested, anyway.

LRN4 pointed out correctly that we used the dutch oven on our recent campout, not the crockpot. That’s what I meant, of course. Must be getting old. It worked great, too. We’re actually getting fairly good at dutch oven cooking, if I do say so myself. Which I do. We tend to prefer main courses over desserts, unlike many of our camping friends. Dutch oven desserts are almost uniformly wretched. On this subject there can be no dispute.

I’ve been checking out some new search engines recently. First, there’s bing.com – Microsoft’s new entry. Sigh. What can I say about Bing? Basically, it’s useless. Not that it doesn’t function. It just doesn’t do anything better than Google. That’s all I ask – just do something better than Google. The search results aren’t quite as good as Google’s, based on my short, unscientific test. Other observers report that it apparently favors search results that feature Microsoft products and employees. Bing doesn’t look better than Google – it has Microsoft’s signature busy look with colorful backgrounds and various non-memorable graphic elements. Bing tries to specialize in video search results, with a supposedly nifty feature that starts videos in the search results window playing when you hover your mouse over them. I find this feature disconcerting. Play starts very quickly – too quickly, in fact. Just passing the mouse pointer over a video starts it playing immediately, with the result that you tend to get several videos playing at once, or starting and stopping, or doing something annoying.

I haven’t gotten any further with Bing. If I can find something I like there, I’ll let my Loyal Readers know. Maybe it’ll get better with time, although Microsoft’s track record in this area isn’t too strong either.

Speaking of getting better with time, I continue to be tremendously impressed with the lds.org website. They started out with just a few features and have grown like crazy, constantly adding cool new features. No fanfare, not much publicity. Just great new features. I was looking at the Music section last night. They have MP3s of practically every song in the hymn book, with and without vocals. They have sheet music with auto-playing “accompaniment” that allows you to determine the speed of playback. The Provident Living section started out with basically a few old talks from various church leaders. Now it contains an incredible depth of information on emergency preparedness, home production and storage, financial management, and who knows what else. There’s practical information on a huge number of topics.

Then there’s the genealogical information. Oh my goodness. They have everything you can imagine. And the church magazines, with searchable text from essentially every issue of every magazine ever published by the church. And information for interested non-members. And stake/ward websites with extensive calendars and searchable membership rosters (that stuff is for registered church members only). And MP3s and videos (including recent general conferences in beautiful HD video). And on and on. Bravo, church. I’ve never seen a better example of embracing technology everywhere it can do good.

Anyway. I also looked at wolframalpha.com. It’s not exactly a search site. It’s more of a solution finder. I really don’t know how to describe it any better than that. I haven’t gotten very good at giving it queries it can work with – I supposed it’s an acquired skill. But the sample queries they detail on their search page are pretty cool. I plan to get some use out of it in the future. The Wolfram people are behind the excellent Mathematica software, so there’s probably a good chance they’ll improve with time.

Speaking of the bumblers over at Microsoft, I discovered last night that they have surreptitiously installed a Firefox add-on on PCs that allows websites to install applications onto your machine without your knowledge. This is done for your convenience and in response to intense consumer demand, of course. Oh, and you can’t uninstall it. Well, there’s been enough outcry that if you look really hard, you can find a well-hidden Microsoft patch you can install by hand that will allow you to uninstall the stupid add-on. I did it on my machines, of course. How typical of the bumblers at Microsoft to install add-ons to Firefox without your knowledge or permission. If they thought so many people would really want it, maybe they would have told us they were installing it, hmm?

Anyway. We do have some food violence news: Stay away from prosecutors. At least the Florida ones.

Lots of things left on tonight’s schedule. See you tomorrow.