Johnny Software's Day

Live Journal now owned by a Russian company

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:49:33 GMT

Information week announced that a Russian media company, SUP - has bought ownership of the Live Journal service.

Season of the Supersoaker

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:47:14 GMT

It rained a ton the past few days.

There was a lot of flooding in my area. Fortunately, not in my neighborhood. For it to flood near my house, there would have to be enough precipitation for arks to start popping up all over.

I would kind of like to hang out a little this evening but I do not fancy get soaked.

yardwork time

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 17:43:20 GMT

Well, I see I will be spending some time outdoors this afternoon!

I just went out to the backyard and found some quick-growing vines and wanna-be saplings have popped in the past couple weeks.

I think I want to try mulching them this time. I might have to take some special measures to make sure they don't return from the grave as revenants from the kingdom of the plants.

It is pretty nice outside today. A little warm for yard work but pretty nice in general.

hot today!

Tue, 30 May 2006 23:07:19 GMT

I have always felt that it was kind of silly to switch from heat to A/C until sometime into June. My reasoning being: why run air conditioning to cool during day, when it gets really cold at night.

It reached 97 today and the top floor of my townhouse is 90 degrees. This is still May!

Anyway, I might change my usual routine this year. The highs most every day this week are going to be 80 to 90 degrees. Lows for the next 2 nights are not even going to dip below 65. Kind of makes the "coasting" strategy to springtime energy conservation infeasible.

As far as I am concerned, it is May!

I have been watching what I eat this month. Well except for some ice cream I had at home and a brownie at a cafe nearby.

Anyway, I feel like my pants are a little looser around the waistline and I feel pretty energetic today.

I have always been kind of a spring/summer time of year person. I guess this time of year really agrees with me.

I just got back from the grocery store a few minutes ago. Had a reverse case of price shock.

My preferred shopper card saved me over fifty dollars on a grocery bill that was under two hundred dollars.

I really do not understand those cards. I mean I could if they gave huge discounts for buying the store brands, but they do not. It is mostly for the name brand foods you can find in any supermarket.

The prices win up being about the same as you would have paid for groceries in the 1980s. I know I like that. I just do not see what the stores get out of it.

Google Notebook

Fri, 19 May 2006 13:28:22 GMT

Anybody else checked out Google Notebook yet?

It just came out this week. From the scant details and screenshots that slipped out from Google engineering/markting on the web earlier this month, it already sounded like a win.

So my engine was funny revving by the time I got my hands on it yesterday.

Loved it.

It is very handy.

It does not seem balky, in general - which is weird. Usually, with something new like that I would expect tons of rough edges: browser incompatibilities that were undhandled, special cases in the HTML copying/extraction that nobody thought of, etc.

Nope. Other than the reasonable fact it does not want you to copy truly huge swatches - just snippets - it seems to gladly do your bidding.

The grab bar to the left of each snippet lets you move it around - either from document to document, or to a different section, or simply a different order, in the document.

Praise Google.

For the work I do, I have a technical library that seems to have as many different titles in its main subject area as the average bookstore. It is a pain to carry around, not to mention keep organized and up to date.

In the last few years, I really more and more for the web to look up specs and stuff.

Now with Google Notebooks, I have a better tool, in some ways - than bookmarks. I still miss the ability to do tagging. But if they add that feature, I will be pretty happy.

yowls of gratitude, all... night... long...

Fri, 19 May 2006 13:09:35 GMT

My cat seems to have spring fever or something.

Last night gave her dinner and she kind of dug into it. It was turkey.

Personally, I look at turkey as high cuisine and her cans of the stuff smell</i> like turkey. However, it is not really her favorite.

I replaced/refilled the water in her dish. I brushed her for the second time that day. I gave her a tiny little strip of that anti-furball gel that is good for them when the weather is warm and they are in shedding mode.

She barely touched the turkey. Looks like she drank a reasonable amount of the water and not an excessive amount. And she just yowled all night long.

She is still doing it. She totally takes time out from it when I brush her. She ceases it while she is eating.

She does not seem to be in pain. I checked her out for any sensitive spots, reluctance to put weight on any of her feet - that sort of thing. All systems go - everything checked out.

Guess I am going to take her out in the backyard and let her sit in the bushes this evening. I have a hunch it is spring fever. She got out a couple times this week.

Oh, she had an extra treat yesterday - not before all the yowling started. She licked a little bit of the new Breyers Sara Lee Strawberry Cheesecake I had just finished my first bowl of.

It so rawked! She had two or three licks of it before I realized what she was up to and she slinked off contentedly. At least we agree kind of food ingredient.

Last night I got some major studying in again. I dropped back from reading my Ruby On Rails book - and went back to the totally huge Ruby programming book I have. It went really fast. I was pretty happy with how much I read.

I have already skimmed the latter book and referred to it a number of times while writing Ruby programs. I decided it was high time I just did a full front-to-back read through it. I am going to spend a few more hours today studying it sometime before I go to bed.

Ruby is a language I really like. I am working on a couple programs in it at the moment.

There is only one thing I want to do it it that I can do in LISP and Python programs: the apply method. It is a staple of functional programming. I can kind of get the same effect by using a *parameter in Ruby, just like I can in Python. However, it is not the same thing. It is just an expressiveness/readability/elegance thing - but it bugs me a ilttle.

Maybe I will come across something useful in that vein tonight when I finish up my Ruby book.

This morning I had a fast, yummy treat for breakfast: scrambled eggs, cheese, and bacon. The cheese was a slice of something called meltables by Giant, the eggs were poured from a carton and they come from giant too. And the bacon was some of that precooked stuff.

It was the easiest delicious breakfast I recall cooking in a couple of months. It was also one of the fastest, easiest - other than cold cereal, that I have made myself in a while.

such a dearth of silly, trite phrases on this Earth

Thu, 18 May 2006 06:39:09 GMT

A phrase popped into my head a couple of minutes ago: raison pour la maison.

It means reason for the house. Which of course is not a totally vital phrase. But I would think it would occur every once and a while.

I googled for it: only 2 hits.

Sigh, what's wrong with this world? It is not nonsensical and it rhymes.

Surely that is good for at least 4 or 5 hits.

And my cat is yowling and she won't say why.

I hate being at a loss for two things at once.

So weird to be surprised when I was not expecting it

Thu, 18 May 2006 05:51:55 GMT

Someone piqued my sense of humor tonight.

Which is kind of weird. Because I went out just after dark to concentrate. I had dinner and studied my little brain out. I was concentrating like a tablespoon of salt under a drop of water.

They kind of materialized just a time or two while I wast studying. Mostly I did not care where they were or what they were doing. But the part of me that was not just absorbing the less-complex than I expected knowledge did care.

Anyway, she made me laugh.

I guess when you are most driven, you are still susceptible to being amused. Kind of ironic, in a way.

Distraction is what the corner of your eye is most vulnerable to. Thank goodness it is a rarity .

Si tu sais, tu ne comprenes pas - mais c'est d'accord pour la meme raison que ca ne fais rien.</ii>

Yeah, I know that is gibberish. It is just kid of cool.

Wed, 17 May 2006 23:38:19 GMT

Beautiful day today. Weather was gorgeous.

Had a nice discussion with the owner of the local cafe about good television sets these days. His spot is going to be the nicest coffee shop around for miles, maybe dozens of miles. Considering how built up the area where I live is, that is really saying something.

I got some shopping done well before the sun went down. I was out of practically everything, at least in my fridge.

While that was slightly irksome to me, my cat was really irked at me this morning. She ate her last can of food last night so she didn't get breakfast. She got a nice can of turkey as soon as I got home this evening, so I guess all is forgiven. At least as long as I feed her another tonight, before I go to bed.

Picked up some books at the local library. I was amazed that they had a number of decent books in my favorite subject area. Not only that, but I found some that were less than a year old.

For the last five or ten years, my books old books have been going to the the public library - I haven't been getting any fresh books from the local library. So I was pleased that librarians are extra on the ball these days.

The last time I got a library card was in the dark ages before DVDs, Mac OS X, XML, XSLT, and CSS 2 had come out. Was that a long time ago? Yeah, that's what I said isn't it?!

So I got a library card while I was there. It makes the gimmickry in modern currency and drivers licenses look like a coloring books. It has:

two 3D images, which alternate when you hold the card at different angles
barcode
web page URL
and a little spot to write your name on it, in case it gets lost

They also had a decent, though unimpressive card catalog system running in about a dozen carrels in the library. The user interface, considering the power available in the latest free web browsers, sucked. It could have been so much faster/smoother/englightening.

They have a lot of books, a lot of metadata about each one. There was zero attempts at visualization, no attempt at graphical navigation. It was all just plain hypertext.

It would be a total no brainer to slap down FF 1.5, a nice RDF/SVG/XHTML GUI with some Javascript event-handling and/or Java applets serving as components or fast-navigration/display aids aids.

Didn't see that. Instead if was just: HTML text/panes/buttons/fields, CSS, and Javascript.

So while I forgot about my local library, they clearly managed to keep pace with the times. Except for their web technology. It is not much more advanced than the last time I checked something out from the library, back in the 1990s.

Maybe libraries will start getting high school kids to work as card catalog system designers, instead of being typecast as library pages. I have to believe there are some really gifted artists in our public school system, with friends who know SVG/E4X/XML/CSS. They could probably put together library systems that would knock your socks off!

Speaking of modernization, my mom is buying a new computer this spring. I got a couple books to look at that I might recommend to her, if they are as good as they seemed when I was looking them over.

Basically, they cover the fundamentals of setting up your home computer infrastructure to access web pages and email. She already has the latest versions of right applications.

These books just explain a few of the major parts of web pages and web browsers so she can have a picture of what is going on. Oh, and that is one of the best things - one of them has beautiful pictures. Not just beautiful artistically, but technically too. Meaning they don't just put a pretty picture in your mind - they put a correct picture in your mind.

While I was out, I spotted a mexican restaurant within walking distance of my house that has hot wings on sale for half price tonight. There is a chance of thundershowers tonight. On the other hand, I really to take a walk.

So, ask yourself. What do I do?

I take a look at the latest high-resolution (IMHO) satellite views of the region, the Apple Dashboard weather widget, and a weather RSS feed. They say/show that: clouds are not too heavy yet - very scattered, temperature is very nice (I know), and it is going to be light for another hour.

So, now that my cat is happy, I think I am going to go out for a little R and R: repast and reading!

springing to order, walking to order, returning to clean

Wed, 10 May 2006 22:31:49 GMT

While I was waiting for dinner to cook, I did a little straightening up in my room. Then I put together a lamp I bought sometime this winter.

Actually, I started to put together the lamp last night before I got to bed. But it was one of those where you have to put multiple pieces all together at just the right angle in 4 places at once. It was not cooperating so I thought I would save it for this evening. This time when I tried I got it pretty quickly. Different approach, better results.

Wow, this music I am listening to by Nancy Sinatra, really brings back memories of the the days when classic rock was not classic yet.

It is a good night for spring cleaning. A little hot now.

After the sun goes down I think I will open a couple windows and air the place out while I go through my things and see how much stuff I do not need I can put out for the trash tomorrow morning.

All I had for dinner is fruit and vegetables. I think I am going to walk up the block for a bite of something with some meat in it.

The weather is pretty good right now. I was indoors practically the whole spring and summer the past couple years.

score 5 points for diet and exercise!

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 17:33:52 GMT

Terrific, I lost some weight this week!

Been watching what I eat for quite a while now. I stepped up the exercise the past week or so too. I am really looking critically at what I eat and passing on foods that are not going to provide nutrition - or have too many calories to justify eating them. I think this helps.

Decided to avoid foods that contain overt sugar this week and I think that has been helping too. Not counting our fruits of course. Natural fructose does not seem like a big weight gainer, as long as you don't go overboard. Vegetables are, of course, in too. A body needs some starch, and they are natural.

I also cut out coffee at the beginning of this week. I tapered down from one or two cups a day at week or two ago down to just one or no cups of coffee. Then, finally this week, none. I think this actually helps concentration very slightly during the day. Maybe I am wrong. It does seem counter intuitive.

I am having a cup of green tea some days. It has very little caffeine and I do like a cup of something hot in the mornings. Another nice thing about tea is that it does not have that sort of oil in it that coffee does.

Also, not having any coffee seems to shift the appetite slightly further towards eating healthier foods. Fewer calories, basically. Again, I could be wrong but this week that is how I feel.

I should probably study my Nutrition For Dummies book to see what it says about the subjects. Yeah, there really is a book with that title in the well-known series. I own it.

My goals is to drop down a size or two on my pants. Also, I want to be really slim in time for summer. At this point, that is just a couple months off.

The temperature outdoors has been just beautiful outdoors this week and I plan to enjoy it with some walks.

Technorati Tags:
health, food

hybrid synergy with energy

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 21:53:52 GMT

I am glad I just tanked my hybrid up Friday evening. Apparently events in the news this weekend drove the price of gasoline up about a quarter (25 cents) per gallon in my area.

It does not make a huge difference. Gas is really the only commodity I buy whose price fluctuates wildly, at least during the past several years. So, when I buy gas right before an increase it's like getting a discount. When I buy right after an increase, it is like getting overcharged.

Hopefully energy prices will start to trend downward again next year, after things settle down.

I just got the newly published electricity rates that go into effect around mid-2006 where I live. I would not call it a soaring increase. However, it will be climbing by almost 40%.

I am thinking now of people who bought huge barn-sized homes during the past half dozen years, when mortgage rates were low - followed by SUVs while gas prices were much lower.

They are probably going to by hating how much their high energy consumption is going to cost them.

Fortunately, my townhouse is pretty modestly sized and my car uses about the least gas of any car on the road.

I am not a tree hugger or anything. It does seem like people could plan out their energy use more than 2-3 years ahead. When I heard in 2002 that the US was going to war with Iraq and my car needed to be replaced, I bought a gas-electric hybrid.

The Honda Insight is a wonderful commuter car. It is great as the main car for singles and couples too. It has plenty of room for groceries in back. I have bought furniture and a computer and stuff and that fit in it fine too.

It is the perfect vacation car too. You could probably fit camping gear or suitcases for a couple people going on vacation too.

If you need something really big for a move or something, you can rent that for just the days you use it. No need to drive a truck around for the other 360 days of the year!

Gas prices

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 19:55:24 GMT

Have a hybrid so I don't have to buy much gasoline. I was kind of irritated that gas prices are over $2.50 a gallon now.

I remember taking a family trip to Kansas one time when I was a kid. We paid 26 cents a gallon. Today, it is ten times that.

I kind of wonder if gasoline prices would be a back where they were a few years ago, if not so many SUVs were put on the roads. Considering some of them only get ten or 15 miles per gallon, I feel pretty sure they would be significantly lower than they are now.

The SUVs I see on the highway in the morning are not filled with families going to vacations in the mountains, or soccer moms hauling kids to practice. They have one driver going to work, and that is it.

Hard to understand why there are not more hybrids on the highway.

from the toaster to my tummy

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 20:02:36 GMT

I had a practically useless breakfast this morning.

A blueberry flavored frosted Pop-Tart and a Bacon, Egg & Cheese Toaster Scramble.

While doing an admirable job of helping me reach a sizeable fraction of my recommended daily allowance of fat, the pastries were not exactly laden with protein.

I pushed lunch back today but at least it is pretty decent. It's very healthy looking Sprng Mix salad from Dole and I am having it with a lite caesar dressing. I'm having some carrots with it.

Not the biggest kick to my RDA's ever - but at least there is nothing unhealthy about it either. It is all fresh stuff too, so that helps.

Dinner is giong to e something high protein. I am thinking fish.

beautiful day outside

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 21:21:56 GMT

It is a beautul day outside! I just opened one of my upstairs windows to let the place air out a little. It is the first time I have had a window open in the past couple of months. It has been too cold.

Washed all my white clothes earlier this week. Looks like it was wise to do them before darks and colors. Spring took its time rolling in but it looks like it is finally here.

Spring cleaning is in full swing! Tonight I'm throwing out some old boxes I had stuff stored in. Along with them I think I will be throwing out some of that inexpensive plastic lawn furniture from the back patio. It gets dingy looking after five years or so and tends to need replacing. Cleaning does not seem to help.

I am so glad spring is finally here. I think I will take a walk after dinner. It would be a shame to waste this weather!

dinner different than delicious lunch

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:26:05 GMT

Anyone who read what I had for lunch was probably pretty spooked. Fear not.

For dinner tonight I am having a Lean Cuisine frozen dinner: Salmon and vegetables (spinach, carrots, and squash). Looks like there is some pasta in there too.

Taste is not bad and seems like it is probably pretty healthy.

For dessert I am having an orange. I might snack on some baby carrots later tonight if I get hungry again.

looking forward to taking Spring photos

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:18:37 GMT

I like taking phographs of my house and yard in the Springtime.

From the looks of things this evening, the blossoms should be ready this weekend. It will be great to get some new shots of everything. It gets pretty beautiful when the leaves are out and the trees and bushes are all in bloom.

The omega sandwhich - a spicy yet slightly unusual meal

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 23:13:15 GMT

I had the weirdest sounding - but best tasting - sandwich for lunch today.

I toasted a couple slices of Martin's potato bread.

I put Heinz tobasco flavored ketchup and some Wasabi flavored mustard on the toasted bread.

Then I threw in a slice of cheese and a slice of canadian bacon lunch meat from an Oscar Meyer South Beach Diet variety pack.

Yeah, I know. It sounds strange. But it tastes good!

You can call it a ham and cheese sandwich. I call it: Wow!

Technorati Tags:
food

get ready to scratch another disease, thanks to worldwide and US efforts

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:20:50 GMT

I read in the news today how Jimmy Carter is about to successfully complete his twenty year effort to wipe out the Guinea worm. It is a terrible parasite that has afflicted African water since the time of the Pharaohs and the Bible.

The article, Dose of Tenacity Wears Down a Horrific Disease, was published in the New York Times the day before yesterday.

When he started in 1986, there were 3 million cases found. Last year, there were less than 12,000 says the article.

A school teacher once told me of a similar, or perhaps same, affliction he had as a young boy living in India.

A worm lays its eggs in the water source. The worms get into water fleas, then into people that drink the water, and then it grows in the body. When it matures and is ready to lay eggs it is quite long. It migrates to someplace in the body, and secrets an acid. The acid really hurts.

The worm cannot really be cut or torn out because that would leave pieces inside. The burning makes the victim stick its limb or where ever the worm is in water. At that point, the worm sticks its abdomen out and lays its eggs, contaminating the water source anew. It has probably been doing this as long as mankind has existed.

The worm, which is a yard long, has to be coaxed out very slowly, twisting it over a period of days - around a twig or stick. In my teacher's case, I think he said the village healer used a matchstick or a series of matchsticks.

Eventually, it is done.

Jimmy Carter's foundation is wiping that disease out by killing the parasitic worm. It is one case of extinction the world probably will not mind.

I read a few years ago that Bill Gates contributed millions of dollars to mount the start of a similar effort in India.

The former business and government leaders of the United States are wiping out diseases from two continents that have troubled mankind since the dawn of history. That gives me a little bit of pride.

Experiences and Plans Regarding Digital Television

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:03:30 GMT

I just noticed that the 20-inch screen of my iMac G5 can only display a 1920x1080 resolution HDTV program at one-quarter resolution. Some programs on some stations are already being broadcast at this resolution, I think.

I guess that means I am only getting 960x540 resolution without scaling. That is better than the old NTSC standard but it still seems disappointing. Here is what a digital TV screenshot looks like by the way.

click to go to a page with more details on this photo

I cropped out the image of the actual television program itself in order to respect any copyright. You can see the information labels for the TV signal and the show itself. This particular one is not the full HDTV resolution I noted above.

My Macintosh's maximum screen resolution is 1680x1050. So, it is clear that it simply lacks the sheer number of pixels to display that image. Full HDTV must require one really huge screen. This is the largest computer display I have ever owned.

There is no way I want to get a TV set with a 30 or 40-something inch picture tube. You are looking at weights well over a hundred pounds when you get to that range. They are very difficult to get in the house. Then they have to be lifted up onto a stand. And if you ever want to move it - forget it.

I think I will wait until sometime after 2009 before I get another television set. In early 2009, TV stations in the US stop broadcasting the NTSC signal used here for the most of the last century.

So at that point, the TV sets I have will become useless. At least by themselves. Supposedly it will be possible to buy an ATSC (digital TV) to NTSC (analog TV) adapter.

However, that seems like kind of a waste of money. Unless they are very inexpensive and work very well. I doubt those two qualities will be mutually possible in an adapter.

My preference would be to get an HDTV television with a really big LCD that could display all 1920x1080 pixels. My best guess is that such a television will not be down into the $600-$800 range until about 2011. No rush, because I will want to get a digital hi-def VCR. Or more likely, a DVR like TiVo series 3.

My rationale is there is not going to be much price pressure on high-def digital equipment until 2008-2010. Around the time the cut-off date appears, consumer electronics manufacturers will race to get the biggest bulge of the sales curve.

There will be the normal upward pressure on prices from peaking demand. However, it is a one-time bonanza for manufacturers. If their price is higher than a competitor's, they will lose the sale. How much profit they would have made will be immaterial because the consumer bought from the competition.

So, manufacturers are going to figure out how to make high-def televisions and accessories far cheaper. They know they will recoup the research and development costs because they can amortize it across several years in the future.

There will be faster, cheaper microprocessors (CPUs) available. There will be more powerful, less expensive application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The TV sets will be thinner and lighter. The power-saving circuitry will probably be better. There will probably be more functions built into the set. There could be more digital inputs and outputs too.

I have one small inconvenience viewing digital TV broadcast television on my Macintosh right now. The digital television antenna I bought for this is a Zenith ZHDTV1 model antenna. The best things about the unit are the price (about $25), the small size (about 1 foot square and one inch thick, not counting the base), and the fact it does not have to be mounted someplace. The unfortunate thing about it is that the antenna is directional. So, I have to point it in just the right direction to receive the signal. Some stations require it in one direction, others in other directions. The other drawback is that it is not quite strong enough to pull in a couple of the stations in my area reliably.

So, I might shop for a new digital TV television sometime in the future.

If you are looking at the different considerations in buying a digital television setup, I hope this little survey of actual choices you I have made is of some use to you. At least it can be a catalyst for you looking over your options and making a good buy. The fewer things you overlook upfront, the fewer problems you will have to overlook while you are watching your new TV set.

Technorati Tags:
television

Forced to be restive, not rested

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 01:00:58 GMT

Really tirred this evening. I laid down for a nap befoer a dinner.

As luck would have it, the neighbor in the adjoining townhouse seems to be building a dresser or shelves right against the wall that the head of my bed is against.

I could hear hammers hitting it and a saw that sounded like it was cutting through would right there. At one point it sounded like he was cutting through his wall or his floor. A lamp on my desk beside my bed was vibrating.

Impossible to sleep. I had a tuna and cheese sandwitch for dinner while I watched the first bit of a movie. Most likely I will be back to try my nap again before it is over.

threw a couple photos up on the web

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 18:23:39 GMT

Hey, here are some photos of me having fun while I was out.

Go ahead and flick the photo and vote for me. It won't cost anything and you don't have to register if you don't want to.

Windy day

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:18:41 GMT

It's a beautiful, sunny day outside.

But I can hear the wind blowing something around really hard out there.

finally heard a politician speaking in person

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 05:47:21 GMT

He did not come off as tricky or devious, misleading, and evasive. Unlike some, he was not quick to use fallacies to win an argument and make his point. He came prepared, spoke quickly, clearly and on the very topics he said he would talk about.

It was really pretty impressive. I would say a hundred to a thousand times more impressive than seeing some B.S. artist try to sway an audience to have "confidence" in some special "program" that was going to allow his biggest campaign contributors to "save the day" for everyone.

Anyway, other than through the media, I cannot think of having seen/heard a politician speak before. It is very impressive when it is done without "sound bytes" and all that stuff. I was impressed.

It was kind of like watching an morning or evening news program. Except there were no commercials and every topic that he spoke on was relevant to the people that came.

have not blogged for a while

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 09:12:18 GMT

This post is just so I don't forget how to blog. ;-)

Okay, everybody be good while I go back to sleep.