Daniel Von Fange

Use "Park" When Stopping at the Bank.

I think I earned a reputation down at the bank today. As you may know, I'm just learning how to drive and I also live, work, and play at home. Trips to the outside world are pretty seldom. Today it was time to take the family business's received checks off to the bank, so Mom called me up on my cellphone as I was setting up a CVS repository for a new web project, and offered to let my drive to the bank. "Great", I said, "I'll be right there." We stopped to pick up the Buckie dog, who loves to go for rides, and off we went.

Everything went fine going to the bank. I pulled into the drive in, rolled down the window, said "Howdy" to the familiar teller, leaned way out to put the checks in little drawer. Then things stopped going according to plan.

The van is a big 15 passenger Ford. To reach the little drawer which was placed a level to be used by little cars, I had to lean way out. In doing so my foot came off the brake pedal. The van began rolling away from the window! I had forgotten to put it in park! I quickly leaned back inside and stomped on the brakes. Sadly, my moving back inside had moved my foot over a few inches. Instead of still being over the brakes, my foot was over the accelerator. Now you have to understand that in addition to being able to take our family across the US, or haul a ton or so of C-Clamps around town, our faithful Ford van has the spirit of a race car. Many are the times I have meant to come gently out of stoplight and almost burned rubber, being used to driving one of our other cars. When you press the gas down about half way you get slammed into your seat. When I meant to stop rolling, I did not press down just half way. It was all the way down. We went flying out of the covered bank drive through like we were bank robbers.

As soon as I felt us rocketing off, I hit the real breaks, and we slowly backed up to the window again. Nobody could stop laughing. The tellers were rocking back and forth behind the bullet proof window. Mom in the passenger seat was laughing and asking me what I had just done. I was grinning quite sheepishly. The other bank teller managed to use the microphone and jokingly ask if this was my first day of driving.

At least if you have to make a big fool out of your self, it's good not to have to do it in front of strangers. And also it's a good idea to use park when you stop!

It's my data, not yours, Mr. Application.

The data that I create on my computer belongs to me, not the program that I created it in. Some programs understand this. Some don't. If I want to open my letter in another program, I should be able too. Why should I not be able to open my accounting information in another account program, just as I am able to open my pictures in many different programs. Data belongs to the user! [/rant]

(Sorry for poor grammar - it's midnight here ::grin::)

His first website.

My little brother Andrew is coding his first website. Gallery du Tervuren's Automobiles is to show his photos of his huge model car collection. He is coding by hand, with Textpad, and learning a huge amount as he goes along.

Family War Driving.

It was dentist time today, and when six of us go to the dentist, it takes all afternoon. I grabbed the Powerbook on the way out - Elizabeth had an old Disney Movie on DVD that she thought I would enjoy watching while waiting. About half way to the dentist, I suddenly thought "Hey! This is a great chance to see if I can find any wireless networks." So I pulled the TiBook out, flipped it open, and started MacStumbler. Within five seconds the computer made a little sound. We found a network! That was unexpectedly soon. A half a second later it disappeared, a natural consequence of traveling 55 miles per hour. Two minutes later we spotted another one. This was beginning to be fun. On the rest of the way there we drove by five more networks.

On a different part of the way home, we were watching for them again - and finding them. The little monotone mac voice would proudly announce, "NEW ACCESS POINT FOUND. LINKSYS.". Then we would all try to guess what building it was coming from. Dad was having fun too, and suggested we drive down into a nearby subdivision to see how many we would find. So we did! Four more wireless access points were discovered, (I had guessed that we would find only two there). Great fun for the whole family. ::Grin::

Conversational Cheap Shots.

Conversational Cheap Shots is a hilarious list of the things people say to avoid the truth. I can remberer quite a few of them from argueing with my brother over Legos when I was very small..

Subscribing to people's responses.

Given time, in the next week I hope to set up a RSS feed that will show all trackbacks, comments, and referring links to Braino. It will be powerful to see what people say about what I say, right in with all the other news I read in NetNewsWire. This should let me respond faster, and spend less time digging around looking for the info.

Snow!.

The Carolinas are covered with snow, to depths we rarely get to see. It's 6-8 inches here, and still falling. Schools are closed (But they close for less than two inches here anyway). Snow is wonderful - at least for snow starved South Carolina.

Great for the high-level executive?.

Look at this catalogue photo from this week's Tiger Direct catalogue. So many outright lies and total exaggerations....

That 366MHz PII would be great for a "High-Level Executive".....

Iron Rice Bowl.

As spelled out in our National Agreement, all career postal workers have a lifetime guarantee of job security after six years of service. -- American Postal Workers Union FAQ

And you wonder why we ship our stuff FedEx?

Oh the Ironic Rant.

Noel Jackson accidentally (we think) makes a double post to his web log while ranting about web design incompetence. (Archived screen shot here).

A little laugh..

It seems D. J. Bernstein, is sending in a letter everyday to the university patent head. Pretty funny.

How does it please both sides?.

Time for me to clarify a little bit on my last post about tabs. Shawn Medero asks, "I suppose this idea as a plug-in is fine, if that is your thing... but not at the OS level, how does that please both sides?".

Watching the frequent Tab Wars on the BBEdit mailing list, one of the often repeated reasons for no tabs was that it was not an application's right to break the operations system's overriding metaphors. On Mac OS the metaphor in question is that of "One window = one document". The concern, and quite justly, is to keep all applications acting the same under the same circumstances, which is one of the Mac's greatest strengths. If good way of handling tabs is provided at an OS level, then all apps behave the same - and power users can enable tabs.

Having tabs does not necessarily imply an MDI, or some such evil... Hehe, and by "Tabs", I don't even really mean tabs, just a one click way of swiching between documents that is in some way attached to the document's window.

Of course, I may be the only ultra-tab fanatic in the world. While doing my website work I often have about five php files open in BBEdit, and I constantly am switching between them, as I add a feature to the back-end php files, then the page file, then the page's template. My web browser often has a test page open, one or two pages in the web site I am building, one or two phpMyAdmin pages open, and often several different documentation pages for PHP, MySQL, and third party libraries I'm using. I often have a conversion going with a customer, over AIM, and perhaps a few conversations with a few friends (I'm a freelancer, so I'm not cheating "the boss"). I often have three to four terminal windows open, SSHed to the various web hosts I work on. On average during a productive morning's work, I switch documents about once every twenty seconds or so. To cut off one second from each document switch ends up being worth $12 of my time - every morning.

Final Cut Express.

We stopped by CompUSA, and picked up Final Cut Express. It's not hard to see why it's such a popular program. The most used work paths have been carefully smoothed to be hyper-efficient. It's not as intuitive as iMovie is, but I picked it up very quickly. The included DVD showing how to use it was very useful.

Here's my first test video clip made with Final Cut Express using video from our first trip to Europe: Monte-Tobogganing in Funchal, Portugal (5megs).

Lil' Puppies!.

There were new puppies at our dog's breeder's house, so we dashed down get pictures, and get our "puppy fix". They were six days old and tiny. One could curl up in one of your out stretched hands. They were less than one hundredth the size of a full grown Swissy.

Jargonizing Poets.

And you think computer people are the only ones to speak gibberish?

Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the "Raven." The former is trochaic — the latter is octametre acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic....

Edger Allen Poe

Make your own Audio book..

I've think I've solved my problem with getting to bored while doing repetitive manual labor out in the shop. Not surprising it's a slightly geeky solution. I download the text of a book from Project Gutenberg, have my computer speak it into a MP3 using iSpeak It, then I put the 10 or so hour MP3 onto my iPod, and then off I go.

The quality level is hilarious - lisiten to a short sample from the Verne book I'm reading right now - but at least I understand the text of the book, and let my imagination do the rest.

Fame!.

I was quoted on the web today for the first time ever, as two squad leaders discuss building a squad. Now I just have to get back to being humble again.

Luminaire 5: "During the second world war, Gen. Bradley said, "Leadership is ninety percent character." A squad leader for a great team must have two attributes - you must take responsibility and have integrity. To put it bluntly, responsibility means you don't blame anyone, ever. If someone your squad messes up, it is your fault for not training them properly, or not taking them out of the squad. If your squad loses a match, it's not the enemy's fault for doing something lame - it's just your squad is not to their level yet, and there are things you can learn from it. If you are blaming you aren't learning or fixing. Integrity just means that you say what you do, and do what you say."

Joey Sondgeroth: Exactly

Luminaire 5: This is all Brains, by the way

Tabs, everywhere..

For starters, I'm a tab lover. Until I got Mozilla and then Chimera on OS X, I browsed with tabs in Opera on Windows. My favorite windows text editor uses tabs, and I missed the tabs when I moved to bbedit. Adium's use of tabs was wonderful, and really saved desktop space.

Many people cry for tabs, but those in the "No tabs" camp say that tabs should not be implemented on a per application basis and the "Document" metaphor should be consistent across the OS.

Okay. While these two sides seem to be at odds with each other, there is a simple solution. Build tabs into the OS and make them work for every document based application. (or at least make a haxie for it.)

Just think, iChat with tabs, BBEdit with tabs, Safari with tabs - we are getting really close to perfect now.

The First World War II.

I've been reading the roman side (as told by Livy) of the Second Punic War - You know the war with Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants, and annihilating the Roman army at Cannae. There are quite a few parallels between it and World War II.

World war II

1. War is begun by the loser of the first world war
2. Lighting attack by the Germans through the "impassible" Ardennes forest, bypassing the main enemy forces waiting to block them.
3. Brilliant leaders on the German side.
4. Annihilation of the French and for all practical purposes, the British army.
5. Britain would not surrender, though without a army.
6. Germany could not take out England when they had a chance.
7. War was fought all over the place in multiple independent theaters
8. Brilliant leaders began emerging on the allied side.
9. The Allies after a long war push Germany up to the wall.
10. Germany would not surrender till beyond all hope was lost.

Second Punic War

1. War is begun by the loser of the first world war
2. Lighting attack by Carthage through the "impassible" Alps, bypassing the main enemy forces waiting to block them.
3. Brilliant leaders on the Carthagean side.
4. Aninnilation of the entire Roman army and then the second Roman army.
5. Rome would not surrender, though without a army.
6. Carthage could not take out Rome when they had a chance.
7. War was fought all over the place in multiple independant theaters
8. Brilliant leaders began emerging on the Roman side.
9. The Roman after a long war push Carthage up to the wall.
10. Carthage would not surrender till beyond all hope was lost.

Hearts of Iron.

I've been playing Hearts of Iron, a World War II Strategy game, a bit this past week. So far I have been working my way up the nations, getting the hang of the game. I started with Portugaul, then Spain, then Brazil, and yesterday, China. Maybe now I'm ready for commanding a small Japan in 1936...

It's a great game, quite detailed, and you really get the feel of the war from a countries' high command view point.

Small World.

We just had our our experience with the smallness of the world. Elizabeth bought a doll dress from a seller on ebay, and upon sending in her shipping address, found out the seller was our aunt in Virginia! We got a good laugh out of it.

Dr. Suess's Lord of the Rings.

"Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!
I am too small to carry this thing!"

"I can not, will not hold the One.
You have a slim chance, but I have none.
I will not take it on a boat,
I will not take it across a moat.
I cannot take it under Moria,
that's one thing I can't do for ya.
I would not bring it into Mordor,
I would not make it to the border."

-excerpt from Dr. Suess's FOTR. (If such a book existed)

Found over here.

Why So Slow?.

Suddenly I'm finding all the apple websites a slow a molasses. What is up this that? Oh, duh, it's Apple Toy Day today, when millions of mac fans line up to see what cool gadgets are they can play with next.

.

Wow, looks like management is not part of the team!

"Misused" Quotation Marks.

This site full of "Misused" quotation marks, is pretty funny reading.

Making a Movie.

Elizabeth and I just decided to bring out the toys and make a movie tonight. Our Mac laptops are out, she has brought some dolls down to use as actors, but we have no story to shoot yet. Now Elizabeth is hurriedly typing away making up a script based on my suggestion of the confusion of using the "Start" button to shut down a Windows computer. This will have the be a quick movie - we only have an hour for this.

i Stop Motion.

Elizabeth and I tried out iStopMotion, here is the first, admittedly amateur result (Quicktime 180K).