Category Archives: Lite

Saturday Express

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What a wonderful day it has been so far! I woke up, had my customary oatmeal breakfast and then after some puttering around the house I got into my bike outfit (not anything specifically bike-outfitty, just some UnderArmour gear that helps) and hit the road. The entire plan was to take care of the light-mass errands all by bike. That meant hitting KL Cat Hospital for Griffin’s special food and then Pets Supplies Plus for Owein’s special food. I also wanted a handlebar case for my iPhone so I didn’t have to carry it around in my pocket all the time; I’m always afraid that my pocket will empty my phone out onto the ground and make me a very sad geek. I was able to find what I was after not at Dicks, which I half expected I should, instead they opened without all their product being placed properly. Dicks also irked me, I had to secure my bike to a local tree. It’s not something that’s an outrage, but if you are selling sporting goods, wouldn’t a simple hum-drum bike rack out in front be a nice touch? Alas, I didn’t find what I was after. I did find a lot of UnderArmour, of course, but I have no money for such frivolities and I honestly don’t need any more clothes. Between my Doc Martin Chukkas, which I can boldly say are my favorite pair of shoes that I’ve ever owned, and the recent acquisition of all my bow ties I don’t think I’ll need any more additions to my wardrobe for a long while.

On my journey I used several apps on my iPhone which worked very well together. The central fitness app I use is MyFitnessPal. This app works really well with my FitBit, but there isn’t any integration with MapMyRide yet, so when you want to cross-log your efforts in apps you need to have three bits of information, the time you started, the duration and the number of calories that you burned. Irritatingly enough, the MapMyRide app will only give out duration and calories but not start time. I searched high and low throughout the App Store looking for a time logging app and found one good enough in TimeKeeper. I can start it, tap the title, then tap Biking and it’ll take a timestamp for me without me having to muck about with Siri. She doesn’t understand the phrase “Siri, mark the time.” So, irritating. Once I get all the data going I use MapMyRide to trace my biking performance, MyFitnessPal to track my calorie availability and manage what I can eat, and then last but not least, Google Maps. Google Maps has a biking mode and turn by turn directions which work really well when I’m on the road.

Biking around can be dull but I have another app on my iPhone that I use called Downcast that downloads and streams Podcasts over my phone so I can listen to original programming while I work out, going from one place to another. I’m currently listening to only three podcasts, “A Way With Words”, “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”, and “RadioLab”. I have to say that I enjoy all of them immensely and the player is good enough to stream one episode back to back with the next so I don’t really have to fiddle with my phone much at all.

The only thing I would change is that I would bring battery backup for my phone next time. I was glad that Culvers had power plugs by the dining tables and I was able to get a wee charge from them while I had lunch, but that’s not something I should plan on – I need to prepare some sort of backup power deal when I go out biking.

So now, after lunch, which I splurged on (allowed myself french fries, which are my guilty pleasure) I’m at home, recovering from the 32 mile bike adventure. After this, I think I’ll head out and get the rest of the supplies, which entails a trip to Meijers. I may stop at Chocolatea for something not quite unlike Green Tea. 🙂

The Fionavar Tapestry – Guy Gavriel Kay

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I am all done reading the trilogy of books in this series that Scott so fondly loves. The books were written well, I’d put them somewhere between three and four stars out of five. The parts that I didn’t much care for were the pacing problems in the text, where the action comes in fits and starts, spasmodically. The background of Arthurian legend that the book rests upon is okay but the love triangle between Guinevere, Arthur, and Lancelot is rather annoying at first, but once established it evens out acceptably well.

The only other thing that I can really put my finger on, as to why I didn’t fall over myself about these books is the lack of setup for much of the book. Places with names that I don’t recognize or can’t put cognates to to keep in my head, the difference between Cader Sedat and Khath Meigol. Who and what the Paraiko are and why they are important, what skylore is and how magic is supposed to function in this fictive universe and the occasional god-drifts as godlings appear from pure deus ex machina to push the story along. You are just plunked down in the middle of Kay’s fictional creation without a map, a guide, or any way to connect common known things to what he’s trying to describe in his writings.

I was expected to feel something for the character of Cavall, but I just couldn’t emotionally connect with much of the characters in the book including Cavall. The only character I could really connect with was Dave Martinyuk’s father, in that I despised him.

The climax scene felt more accidental than momentous with game-changing details being uncovered in the narrative moments before and after the climax of the story comes and goes. While in the third volume of this series you note clearly that the author is running out of pages and hasn’t resolved the “big bad” yet, and I was worried that the resolution was going to be flimsy and cheap. That you can’t really do proper service to overcoming such a impressive villain in just a few pages. Kay takes the cake on this one, he deflates and disposes of the villain on one single page. Awesome cosmic villainy crumpled up and thrown into the trash basket, three-points!

I suppose if I was younger and still smitten with Arthurian legend this book would have read far differently. I cut the book a significant amount of slack because the general reviews are positively glowing and so I rate it higher than I feel I would if I wasn’t biased by the other reviews only because a shot-and-miss shouldn’t be a death knell for an authors work. It didn’t work for me, but three and a half stars because it might work for you. Without the other reviews I would have given it two stars and thrown the books with great force.

As I commented while reading, mocking Guinevere in these books “Oh Arthur! I love you! It’s so good that Lancelot isn’t here because then you’d be so much trash to kick to the curb. We are so lucky that I can settle with your minimal acceptability. — Oh! Look! It’s, uh, Lancelot. Hi there. {pose and moan}” LOL.

Invention

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I may or may not have just invented something new! I’ve been pondering for a while how to feed all my apple trees. Specifically this came about when I looked at my Weather Underground app and noticed a rather beautiful but dry week ahead for us here in southwest Michigan. The problem is, how do I water the trees where I don’t overdo it, where I don’t spend a while outside being a buffet for mosquitoes, and where I can water my trees on days that won’t have any rain without having to fuss any.

As I was walking home from taking the bus today it struck me as I was looking at all the lawns and gardens that I pass on my way home from the bus stop on East Main Street. Why not repurpose gallon-sized water bottles? I buy pure water for my cats drinking and food-additive water when I go to the market anyways and after I scrounged around the house I found three exhausted one-gallon jugs of purified water. Usually I just crumple them up and throw them in the single stream recycling bin where they go to be recycled, but as I was walking it struck me, why not poke very tiny holes in the water jugs and then I could put them out by the trees base and let the jugs drip-water my trees. It works wonderfully well! I keep the plastic from the recycling stream and I can fill them up in the morning with exactly one gallon of clean water and then cap them. One teeny hole at the top lets in air while there are two teeny little holes at the bottom that slowly let the water drip into the tree’s base. I don’t have to screw around holding the hose, wondering how much water I’m delivering and exposing myself to those nasty little bloodsuckers, at least not any more than I have to in order to water my trees. The only trick was figuring out what to make the holes with. The perfect tool is a thumbtack but I don’t have any at home, no application for them, so I tried the next best thing – flair-button pins! We’ve got a decorative glass bowl full of flair buttons. I grabbed a worthless one that nobody would care about and pulled it’s pin out, turning it into a kind of funny looking thumbtack. It did the job perfectly. Poked a next-to-invisible hole at the top, then two or three in the base and that’s that, all done! I went outside, filled the jugs with water and walked them over to the trees. Over the span of maybe half an hour the jugs will lose all their water. I know I have delivered one gallon of very slow drip-drip-drip water to my trees, not flooding them and not having to worry about how much or exposure. In the mornings when it won’t rain I can go outside and with the hose fill up each jug lickety split. Cap them and walk away.

It’s free, easy, and I think at least a fair bit clever. I think this could also work really well for our garden once we get it going. No more having to worry about how much water, how frequently, or any of that. And no more buying stupid “watering hoses” that disintegrate or don’t work properly when you get them home. This way it’s free, active recycling, and for four apple trees, that’s four gallons of water. Bam. I could even sneak some fertilizer in there and shake the devil out of them and dissolve the fertilizer or food and walk away.

If you find this useful, please comment here, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google+ as I link-dump on all those other services as well.

Money makes the world go ’round

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While reading “The Great Gatsby” one of the characters makes reference to money spent. The book is set in the jazz age of flappers and the well-heeled, say 1927 or so. Before the crash that sent many of these rich men and women tumbling from buildings. So the reference was how much a character ate after being hungry and expressed in dollars. 1927 dollars. Different than 2013 dollars. So I found a site: http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm which you can calculate the power of the dollar from one time region to another. This points out the unique trap an author can get themselves in when they pin facts down in their fictional narrative.

Mr. Technical Support Guy

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While sitting enjoying some nice tea, in this case Chocolate Chai Pu-erh tea at our local tea shop I had my iPad and my Bluetooth keyboard set up and I’ve been wandering through my Drafts-stored blog-prompts looking at things to write about. While writing about my Nook HD a pair of ladies approached me and asked me about the setup they saw me using. What it all was and how much was it and how did it work. So I gave them an impromptu sales pitch for Apple technology, the iPad, the Smartcover, and the Bluetooth Keyboard. They asked why I was using a physical keyboard and I confessed that I type a little too fast for the processor in the iPad to keep up. When I try to write The, the t and h are usually missed because my taps are too fast and I end up with E. Almost always. So I use a physical keyboard because that can keep up with my typing speed. They were impressed and wandered off to their table to enjoy their chocolate treats.

I was marveling at being an Apple Store employee without of course being one, yay for Apple evangelism (!) and I got back to work writing. Then another lady came up to me with her Kindle Fire in her hands and she asked me for help. Something about sitting here with a tablet and keyboard marks me as “Mr. Technical Support” and her problem was as she described to me “My Kindle says I have too many windows open. I went to Best Buy and the Geek Squad guy was no help, I was wondering if you knew how to fix this problem?” and I smiled at her and looked at her Kindle Fire. It’s worth noting that I’ve never really ever touched a Kindle Fire before, I don’t know what it’s system is like (I assume it’s a variant of the Android OS, maybe) and I invited her to sit down next to me while I looked at her Kindle Fire device. I suggested the best path would be to open up a browser on my iPad and bring up Google and search Google for “kindle fire too many windows open” and see if there was anyone else who had this problem and how they fixed it. As it turns out, there is no clear way (from what I could see) to actually close apps in a Kindle Fire. Now, it’s important to note that I’ve never actually touched a Kindle Fire and I’m not actually a part of Amazon’s Technical Support team, and all I really have is cleverness and Google. I found the solution for her and showed her how to hard reset her Kindle Fire. It’s like it is for any tablet device, hold down the power button and keep holding it until the device is forced off and then press the power button again to turn it on. Once her Kindle Fire came back on I asked her to try to bring the error on again and she opened an eBook on her Kindle Fire and said “It should show the error now… wait, it’s working! You’re my hero!”

And now she knows how to fix her own problem with her Kindle Fire.

Apparently I am “Mr. Technical Support Guy” after all. I should wear a shirt and have a Square reader and take credit cards for my services. $10 for Answers. LOL.

Iron Man 3

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Last night Scott and I went to see Iron Man 3. The movie was a nice summer movie that came out too early. It should have been released in June or July. Generally the best part of the movie was the time spent in the dialogue between Tony Stark and the kid was the best section of that movie.

The movie was okay, it wasn’t as good as the first two movies and it squandered the Mandarin character. Sir Ben Kingsley was pretty much wasted in the role of the Mandarin, and casting the Mandarin as a shill ruins the central tale behind Iron Man. Tony’s primary battles are alcoholism, his relationship with his father, Pepper Potts, and on a grand scale the battle between Technology and Magic. The Mandarin is supposed to be in command of supernatural powers provided to him by the Rings of Makulan. Tony is the expression of humanity wielding Technology and the central story is this battle between the supernatural and the technological. This movie also trots out Extremis. The comic books and the Iron Man Anime forged a canon that Extremis was a tool for Tony to use to bridge the gap between the organic and inorganic so that Tony could be on-par with his technology as much as the Mandarin is on-par with his magic.

The movie pretty much squashed Extremis as a sideline curiosity, elevated AIM to primary villain status and squandered the Mandarin. In the comics AIM was always the bumbling army of grunting henchmen, they weren’t clever or particularly villainous, they were principally retarded thieves. But the movie pretty much just shat all over all of it.

Marvel’s excuse that they trot out to calm the criticisms down is that the movies exist in a parallel universe called the ‘cinematic universe’ so these issues don’t matter. That feint gives them an out to write whatever they want, essentially giving a pass to all this character mangling.

I would not see this movie again, once is enough, and due to a rather prolonged free fall scene I would definitely not see this movie in IMAX. The content is okay, but not worth 3D or DBOX prices. I would give it 7/10 stars. It is qualitatively worse than the previous movies.

One Slipped Key

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Death By ChocolateWhile working I wrote a little bit of SQL, trash really because it was just a one-shot query, real short too, and I wanted to show off the SQL code for making the iModules degree info pretty. Instead of clicking open, I clicked the save button. I found the file I thought I was opening and double-clicked. The computer asked me “Are you sure you want me to save using this file, overwriting the old file?” and I absent-mindedly clicked Yes.

The little useless fragment of SQL code replaced my huge SQL script. Boom. All gone. So sorry.

So then I was thinking about how I could recover the file, that it was on my laptop at home and so if I could turn off the Wifi at home and start my laptop I could copy the file before the Dropbox sync app replaced what I needed with my mistake.

But then I thought there should be something in Dropbox that helps address my stupidity. Turns out there is. Right click on your oops file, click on “View Previous Versions” and it opens a website and shows you all the previous times you saved your file on the service. Oh look, there’s all my hard work, right there. Click. Whew!

So, how much do I love Dropbox? Even more.

 

photo by: JD Hancock

C2E2: DC Panel

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The Q&A is less about DC rah-rah and more about DC not having a show-floor presence, a don’t-wanna-be-dead Damian Wayne, and fans expressing irritation on DC’s musical chair design for writers and artists in their titles. Mostly it’s back-pedaling and affable excuse mumbling. It’s not pretty.

At least they’ll be coming out with a story about trillionaire teenagers, because flogging that trope has a oodles of miles left in it. L.O.L. 😉

PAD March 14th 2013 – 180

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Tell us about a time you did a 180 — changed your views on something, reversed a decision, or acted in a way you ordinarily don’t.

That sort of altering of viewpoint, after a long time considering if something like that had actually happened to me and coming up blank initially makes me think that I’ve never done that sort of thing. My beliefs are quite entrenched, I’m quite certain of my positions and my opinions. Anyone who knows me knows that of what I speak passionately about I am determined in and if I am not, I rarely speak of it. It’s better to listen if you aren’t sure than to speak out of a position of personal doubt. There just isn’t any passion in doubt. If you aren’t sure about what you think then how can you put any energy behind it? Passionate thinking goes hand in hand with what I consider to be critical thinking. Can it truly be said to be critical if you can’t be passionate about it? I suppose I am too much my Mothers son, I think I learned my views on passionate discourse from her as a role-model for not bandying around the bush. If you feel something, then be out with it, don’t let it just fester in the dark.

Often times at work I get the phrase “Oh Andy, tell us how you really feel!” thrown at me. I knock those lobbed bastards right out of the park with a home-run whack with my bat. Damn right I’m going to tell you how I really feel! Anything else would be dissembling, tantamount to a lie and do a disservice to whomever I’m speaking with as well as to my very own self. As such, I am functionally retarded when it comes to flirting, subtext, and innuendo. I accept a life of blunt honesty over the dubious sea of gray foam that is subtext, subtlety, and innuendo. Don’t try to play hinting games with me, walk up and say what you think and how you feel. Be honest, be direct, be blunt. Time is precious, don’t be a foolish putz.

So there.

Bandinage in Robin Hood’s Barn

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HexedWow, what a long strange trip that was! I’ve got a lot of my amateur photography and I’ve been kicking around the notion of placing it all on my host and sharing it through my blog somehow. I started this sad trip with Pixelpost, then looked around for other LAMP scripts that could work after Pixelpost belly-flopped and died on impact. The issue I had with Pixelpost was trying to mass-import 218 pictures of my two cats. The software just couldn’t cope. So after a while trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole I just gave up altogether.

Then it struck me that I could use my WordPress blog maybe. I had a dim memory about something about Galleries. I can store as much as I like on my host and there’s no bandwidth issues so why not? So I did some reading in the Codex and well, there you go! Create a new Page, add Media, create a new Gallery and it’s EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. Then I happened to notice JetPack and looked in there and it has Carousel feature which improves the standard Gallery control for WordPress. WOW! It was everything I wanted and it ate all 218 files without blinking and making new pages is a snap! Adding and removing pictures from the Galleries is just as easy.

So all that way and all that time blown out trying to get a weak system to behave itself and the answer was just under the covers in WordPress all along! I am exceptionally pleased. 🙂 Thanks all you wonderful ladies and gentlemen at Automattic! Thankee-sai!

You can find these galleries on the main menu of my Blog, under the title of Photo Galleries. I hope you enjoy them!

photo by: Nicholas_T