morrowlife

Here’s an entirely appropriate sign. Picture taken, coincidentally, at a place called Michael’s restaurant.

Well. LRN1 went to the dentist’s office today and it turns out he has a secondary infection. Not a loose suture. I’m assuming the secondary infection was caused by a stray piece of suture in his throat. That’s the only reasonable explanation.

The weekend’s here! We’re working on LRN2’s Eagle project Friday and Saturday mornings. He’s been working on signs, making phone calls, and getting food ready. Getting excited about it. We’re clearing trails in the local state park.

Other weekend plans include . . . ummm . . . not much. The pool and pond filters are pretty clean. The cars are pretty clean, for the most part. I do still need to trim the lawn, so I’ll get that done. And I have a lot of work to do on the MARV. The accelerometer still doesn’t work right. I’ve been looking at the software, but am turning my attention to the hardware now. I drew a quick schematic of the current arrangement and need to verify it’s the way we want it to be. Maybe I’ll take a few voltage readings at critical points. LRN1 says we can get some free logic analyzer software for the Arduino that will help us too. We’re going to get this thing figured out this weekend, by golly.

Also need to make more progress on my talk coming up in another week. I’m speaking in two wards – sitting in for a friend on the second one. One talk, two wards. Easy.

Do my Loyal Readers think this counts as food violence? Fork attack. I think we can all agree it’s at least food-related, anyway.

See you tomorrow.

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.

Here’s a freestyle ski jumper practicing. In the summer. In a pool. Odd.

Before I forget, I need to make the following Special Morrowlife Announcement: No blogging tomorrow or Friday. We’re going camping and don’t expect to have internet access. I realize this is a major disappointment to many of my Loyal Readers, but just think of how much you’ll appreciate it when The Blog returns on Monday. And how energized I’ll be from my vacation time off.

As mentioned before (I think) we’re going to be camping at Anthony Chabot Regional Park – the same place we stayed over the Thanksgiving holiday. We enjoyed it then and are looking forward to a summertime stay.

In other news, progress is being made on the MARV front. LRN1 got the two Arduinos talking to each other and is close to getting the accelerometer hooked up and sending data. We’ve decided to do a lot more documentation on the Gardenville website – updates on a nearly-daily basis, with more detailed posts as appropriate. Our first tech spinoff of the program is the LCD board. LRN1 is getting the prototype finished today, hopefully, and we’re designing a circuit board and will have a few made up. We’re trying to decide whether to try to sell kits, completed boards (may cost too much to produce), or just bare boards with parts lists. Need to do a little research to see what’s already available. I’m thinking the easiest way is to release the schematic, PCB layout files, and software as open-source and offer to sell bare boards to people who want them. That keeps the price low to undercut whatever prebuilt competition is out there. I think it may also maximize our profits, although kits might end up making more money. Either way, I see this as a great way to monetize open-source design. If we sold kits, we could also pre-load the software onto the chip. Could also just sell pre-programmed chips, for that matter.

Anyway, check out the Gardenville website for project status on an ongoing basis.

LRN2 is also working on his writing for the HRVA and, in an important new development, Spinfo. We’re going to get the latter site going with reviews and news on free and open-source games. Still need to do a little web research and see who else is doing the same thing so we can find a way to differentiate ourselves. Also need to figure out where we ultimately want to take those sites and how to monetize them, if possible.

Loyal Reader ideas are welcome. I guess if there’s no direct money to be made, we can at least hope to contribute to the community in a meaningful way and get our work in front of a few eyes.

Otherwise, the situation is stable and everybody’s happy and healthy. Looking forward to hearing from LRN3 on his new job.

Weekend camping plans include geocaching, hiking, and some business strategy meetings. Also some good meals, campfires, and lots of relaxation.

I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with some unfortunate criminal toilet news: stay out of the elevator.

See you on Monday, with lots of news.