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Thankfully it was an exciting game this year because I found the commercials to be fairly lackluster this year. The best commercial was Pepsi's iTunes' commercial with all the RIAA prosecuted teens. Too bad, I don't like their product and will open drink it if Coke's not available.
Just heard about a new Eclipse plugins site. Eclipse Plugin Central promises to be a comprehensive list of plugins along with forums, news and reviews. This appears to be a slightly nicer version of Eclipse Plugins. What is needed is more editorializing on these sites. Since anyone can create and list version 0.0.1 of a halfbaked plugin idea, there can be a lot chaff at these sites. Another thing is that people work on plugins for awhile and then leave them dormant. This leads to lots of plugins overlapping in scope. I'd like to see more reviews of categories of plugins with all the positives and negatives listed.
On a positive note, the Eclipse Plugin Central site does off a RSS feed of news and updated plugins. Prehaps the arrival of competing sites for plugin info will create an arms race for new editorial content and features. It should be good for us developers.
My old school ReplayTV was completely confused this morning. For some reason it thought it was in the year 2010 (and of course that means that there was no shows in the channel guide). I forced a network connection and after 15 minutes of slow modem downloads, everything is running correctly. Although, a tiny portion of me wants it to be broke so I can get a new more advanced one with room-to-room sharing, I don't have the time right now to deal with such a calamity.
Jeni Tenitennison has numerous XSLT and schema info on her site.
Mike Rodriguez has posting a short review of day 1 of O'Reilly's Emerging Tech Conference. Of interesting is that Disney is using blogs and Wikis in support of the production 24x7 television operations. Ross Mayfield shares more notes on Disney's tech usage.
Cute Slashdot article on how local German government IT staffs got their offices to try Linux: Have women supervisors give the demos showing how easy it so that none of the men would vocally complain. Can't be shown up by a woman I suppose.
That reminds me that I meant to blog about an experiment that I am running at home. I'm teaching my wife how to use a Linux based OS to do the majority if not all of her computing. Some background on her: She is a fairly novice computer user who doesn't really know a whole lot about MS's OSes except for the basics. Her application usage basicly comes down to web browsing for art education information for her students, using web based e-mail and some extremely light word processing.
I set her up with a Linux box running Fedora Core 1. I have been quite pleased so far. There were some initial struggles to figure out how to launch the browser and Open Office word processor, but so far the applications feel familiar enough to her that she is able to get her work done.
Here are some downsides that I have noted. She is bit tripped up with the username and password to log into the machine. This has caused some stumbling since she has never had to worry about something like this before. I see similiar reactions to inhouse corporate apps where you have to remember logins and passwords that are siloed. Double-click vs. Single Click: Because the button bar at the bottom of the screen looks and feels very much like big icons on the desktop, Ang tends to double click on those items. Lastly, Open Office has thrown up the warning that saving the document in a non-native format (i.e. MS Word xxx) could result in loss of some formating. Unfortunately, the wording in the dialog is bit ominous and it scared her that she is about to do something bad.
Hurdles we haven't crossed yet: So far everything she wants to browse on the web renders in Mozilla. We have yet to come across something that doesn't work right (and I doubt my explanation of standards and market forces is going to have a good impression on her).
All in all pretty good. I'd like to introduce some more software to her like Gimp since she is an art teacher. It could be an interesting addition to the art curriculum.
John had some useful comments on my post about teaching my wife how to use Linux. Thanks John.
Josh made me aware of a patch to Gallery, the popular photo management software that I use for my photos. It was an easy install, just unzip the patch into the directory and its all ready to go. Thanks Josh.
There are certain shows that I like to watch but without a digital video recorder, it would be impossible. On such show is American Idol. Right now the format is a 1 hour show to intro 8 semifinalist and have them sing and then a followup show for 30 minutes to announce the top 2 people that advance to the next round. With my remote by my side, I can cruise through the first show in about 20 minutes and I can get through the 2nd in about 10 minutes. The 2nd show is so full awful pauses and endless promotion of next weeks show and big long build ups that you know will have to wait until 'after the break'. I don't see how people could sit through this in real time.
For years visionaries have been saying that we consumers would get to multiple angles of the "action" shown to us at once and we could pick and choose what we want to see. That has never come to be but it is certainly true that we are becoming our own "network programming execs" picking and choosing which parts of shows to watch in what order and when we watch them. I refuse to be passive about what "they" want me to see. I want to control my experience.
Its been several weeks but better late than never. Here are the pics from the party at Jeff's. Thanks Jeff.
I'm pleased to report that the instructions for changing Mozilla Firebird's icon also work in Firefox.
Angela and I took a quick trip to Chicago this past weekend. We had a great time and it was good to get away.
We stayed at the W City Center (nice web site design: it detects my lack of Flash and uses a version of the site that doesn't use it). It was my first time in the W chain and I liked the experience. The W bills itself as being hip, cool and contemporary. They definitely cater to a younger crowd with House and Trance playing in the lobby, the employee's basic black uniforms and the dark color scheme in the place. It can be a little over the top: they refer to the elevators as "the lifts", the lobby is "the living room", the 2nd floor overlooking the lobby, isn't the 2nd floor or Mezzanine, its "the plateau". All in all though, its a great hotel. good concierges too (they arranged tickets for us while we were out and called us on my mobile when they finally got through to the box office).
Although I've been to Chicago many times (esp. when younger since I have family there), this was the first time I was the lead navigator. I found the cities' navigation aids to be subpar. Street signs were often very small and placed in unobstrusive places. They also were of inconsistant size and color scheme (often with non-constrasty colors). They are also stingy with the signs. Often, there was only one little sign per intersection so it could be hard to read while driving or walking (its often way on the other side of a 6 lane street). This was experienced in the loop and on Michigan Avenue, the biggest tourist areas. I imagine it is worse in the less visited areas. Also word to the wise, if you are going to use the El lines as landmarks, be sure to note that the red line and blue line are actually subways in the loop and the River North area of Chicago. This threw me a curveball at first and got us a bit confused. Similar navigation problems exist in the El. Quite a few of the stations didn't appear to have any maps in them or any good navigation hints. They use the system that shows direction by listing the name of the last station on the route. That's fine if you know the system, but awful for visitors. Showing a list of all the stations reached in that particular direction would have helped greatly or even directions (North/South would help (to be fair, the station at Wrigley Field listed North/South and to the Loop/Downtown on the routes). Local maps of the area around the station would have been nice (Paris' Metro does this well).
Stuff we did
The art institute never fails to disappoint. Angela was quite thrilled since is an art teacher. The musuem has a very nice collection of impressionistic and post-impressionistic works. From the placards I read it sounds like a Chicago native who was a contemporary of the artists saw great value in the work and bought a lot of it up (before obviously dontating it to the musuem). Quite amazing to have such an eye to see the value of upcoming (for the time) artists.
Michigan avenue was also overwelming. It was cold and windy and still there was thousands of people about. I couldn't imagine the place when the weather is nice. Ang and I went into the Marshall Fields at Water Tower Place. All eight floors of it with the great big thing of escalators in the middle of the place (made me feel 10 again and with my mother at the big department store in Wheeling). We found the Couture section in Bloomingdales. Good lord the stuff is expensive. I didn't see a dress for under $1700 or a shirt for less than $250. Thank goodness Ang doesn't have expensive tastes. :-). We also had some truffles and gourmet hot chocolate at Vosges Haut Chocolat. I had the Axtec Elixir which features ancho and chipotle chiles. What a nice add...certainly packs a nice little punch. Alton Brown does some similar in his Hot Cocoa recipe. However, by far, the coolest shop we went into was the Lego store. What amazing things they are able to create with a lot of time, a lot of skill (and a unlimited supply of blocks). The Legozilla and a huge, creepy yellow and black spider were most impressive.
Food
For Valetine's Day we ate at the Grill Room (the great conceiges got us a table with only a few hours to spare). The place was nice and the food was pretty good. Nothing leaped out at me to say it was a special place. It probably relies heavily on its location across from a busy theater. For dinner the next day, we had traditional deep dish pizza from Gino's East. It was fabulous, tasty with yummy sausage and not greasy at all despite the hefty crust. Arrive early because a huge line forms and be aware it takes awhile for your order to go through (45 minutes) but the staff is upfront about the wait and they hit the mark exactly.
One negative
The only thing I was disappointed about was Improv Olympics. They are improv theather based near Wrigley Field that was started by one of the old school Second City guys. First off Frommer's Chicago 2004 had us going the wrong way to find the theater (it was off by more than two blocks). We got there as the show was starting (thankfully we had reserved tickets) and therefore got the worse seats in the place (seating starts half hour before the show). Apparently IO offers many different types of shows. What we saw was called The Herald. The site desctibes this as "explor[ing] a single audience suggestion by using group improvisation, monologues and scenes to weave together characters and stories, creating instant theater via 'the group mind' and comedic discipline." Basicly this means taking one audience suggesting and incorporating it into a series of interweaving prewritten sketches that build on each other. By my count there is about 30 herald teams so this is really hit or miss depending on what teams you get to see (we saw three different teams). I didn't think a lot of the material was all that funny and the one, lone audience suggestion wasn't really incorporated much at all into the sketches. There were three bits that were pure improv (one taking the original audience idea and doing a group monlogue (before their prewritten stuff started)), asking an audience member to recount her day then reenacting it with the whole cast and a game where they took turns "freezing" the action, replacing the current actors and taking the scene in a whole new direction. All of this was heavy improv, was damn funny and the actors worked well with each other. My suggestion would be to see if there are resources out there that review the various Herald teams so you can find good ones or go to a different type of show (that's what I will be doing next time).
Oh of course, there are more photos are available.
For a little under a month now, I've made a conscience decision to change my habits so that I can loose some weight. I've been wanting to do this for some time now but the real kicker was when I found out that I was 70 - 80 pounds over my "ideal" weight. So I decided to attack this scientificly and sensibly. I don't want to rely on some radical diet change that I know I never will be able to keep up for an extended period of time. So here is what I am doing:
Recording the exercises has really made it more like a habit and it sets an expectation in my mind that I need to fill out another line in the spreadsheet. Also, as a means to induce peer pressure I wanted everyone to be able to see an automaticly generated chart of my progreess. It was a good excuse to practice my python skills. Here is a graph of my current weight over the past month (check back as this updates each day):
To produce this chart, I am using my seperate support blog to enter my daily weight into a new entry. I have a movable type index template that writes out this data as a csv file. Then i wrote this python program to produce the chart. I am using the ChartDirector to produce the chart. Its not open source but it works well and the documentation is incredible. Very clear and filled with tons of examples. I wanted to use the open PyChart but it doesn't seem to work on a headless server.
Next on my list of exercising support software is to learn more about Tkinter so that I can create a custom gui for entering my weight measurement easier. I've explored the MT XML-RPC API already and written a small class to abstract it. It was quite easy. Now its just a matter of finding the the time to read the tkinter docs.
Last night at dinner a tangential conversation got us on the topic of GMT vs. UTC. None of us knew the exact difference between the two except for that UTC was newer and more exact. So, I looked it up. Here is a good, brief description from the State University of New York Institute of Technology's Science &Amp; Tecnology Society (man that is a mouthful). Basicly it comes down to GMT being based on the rotation of the earth around its axis and the sun (which isn't completely regular) and UTC being based on a Cesium atomic clock (which is far more accurate and regular). UTC is regularly modified with "leap seconds" so that it matches up to GMT to be the standard for date/time stamps. Also, UTC is the authoriative measurement for calculations involving duration.
Update: Corrected, which unit gets leap seconds added. Thanks Daniel for pointing out my mistake.
This page contains all entries posted to Ravings of an Intermittent Fool in February 2004. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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