Stray Hawkeye

Last we saw Parker, he was roaming the Uptown Art Fair looking for a snack, and had been directed towards Calhoun Square by a friendly stranger.  More of the Dino Saga here.

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“Let’s see, he said thee was food down this way…”

“Uh, Parker, I don’t think it’s that kind of an apple store, I think they actually sell…”

“Come on Parker, let’s get you some real food.”

“Come on Parker, let’s at least play with some of the other toys.  Here, why don’t you try out an iPod.”

“We could get you one of these for your birthday Parker.  Would you like that?”

“I don’t know, I still really like my Walkman.”

“Your Walkman?!?!  You really are a dinosaur Parker!  These are way better than that!”

“Okay, what do they do?”

“Well, you can listen to music on them.  The newest models even have an fm radio built right into them.”

“Does it let you record music?”

“Well, no.”

“Does it have replaceable batteries?”

“Um, no, I guess not.”

“Can you use it to make mix tapes to give to your friends?”

“Well, not really.  I guess you could hook it to your computer and make a play list in iTunes.  But, the other person would need to download the songs too before they could play it, and, well…”

“Yeah, I think I’ll stick to my Walkman.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll have to think of something else for your birthday.  Let’s go get you some food.”

“Look – deep fried cheese curds, and it’s not even the state fair yet!”

“Let’s see if we can find you something a little more healthy.  Here, try some corn.”

“Wow, I’m stuffed now.  I think it’s time for some more art.”

“Okay, let’s check out some t-shirt.  These ones by Batik by Kat are nice!”

“Hello there, little one.  I’m Kat, can I help you find anything?”

“You’re Kat?  Somehow I was expecting more whiskers and fur, and maybe a tail…,  you look much more like a friendly person than a Kat.”

“Ah yes, that confuses many of the little dinosaurs that stop by our booth.  I am, in fact, a person.”

“I see, well, I like these ones, but I don’t think they’re quite me…”

“Oh, I think we have a design you might like better.  Here, try this one.”

“Can we get it Kearn? Can we pleeeaaasssseeee?!?!”

“I don’t know Parker, it looks a little big for you.  Excuse me Kat, do you make this in an extra, extra, extra, extra dino small?”

“Oh, sorry, we only go down to an extra, extra dino small.  And it looks like your little friend would take some growing to fit into one of those.  But here, take our card and you can get one from our website when he gets bigger.”

“Thank you.  Parker, I may have a birthday present idea for you after all, just maybe not for this year.”

“I like that idea.  Let’s see who else we can meet while we’re here.”

Next we wandered past Wild Cat Works‘ bird houses.

But it turned out no birds had moved into the shiny new bird penthouses yet, so we kept moving.

“Parker, I think I see a place you may like.”

Next we walked past the myTalk 107.1 booth, and Parker took an interest in a sign they had our in front.

Next we stopped by a booth where you could get your picture taken in front of a green screen, and have the background replaced with anywhere in the world.  Parker was going to play a trick on everyone and get one with the Roman Coliseum in the background and tell everyone he went to Rome over the weekend.  Unfortunately, the computer had a hard time telling the difference between Parker and the background.  So, he’ll have to find another trick to play.

We kept walking, and before long we pasted in front of James Sauer’s sculptures, and…

They may have been a little too realistic for Parker’s taste.

Luckily, once Parker finally slowed down, we weren’t far from Keith Kinney’s booth, where Parker found a place to rest for a bit.

(I couldn’t find a business card at Keith’s booth, and from searching, the only website I found for him (http://www.stylesofoakheritage.net/) seems to be down / missing, but it was Keith Kinney of Yellow Springs, OH, in case you like the rockers.)

“Kearn, all that running from the eagle made me awfully tired, and we’ve been walking a lot today.  Can we head home and take a break before going to the Powederhorn Art Fair?”

“Sure Parker, let’s get you some rest and some air conditioning.”

On the way out, we walked past the RuTu Paddle Company, which has some really pretty stuff, but Parker was too tired to pose any more.

However, just past there, we came across the strangest thing, and had to pause for one last picture…

“I don’t know Parker, sometimes Uptown just doesn’t make sense.”

Being a computer geek, I have a few computers at home.  The one that I use the most, which I built a couple of years ago, was acting up recently.  Not booting up, making funny (but not hard drive crashing style) noises, freezing at random intervals during start up, etc.  This led to me dissecting the whole thing, stripping it down to the most basic pieces, and swapping those out with ones from my other machines and spare parts.  At one point in this process I decided to take a spare hard drive, use my old Windows machine to format it, and then try that one.  So I booted up my Windows machine, spent an hour or two going through all the security patches, virus updates, required Windows updates, etc (have I mentioned lately how much I love Linux?) and hooked up the spare drive to format.  I opened up the old Computer Management window, and started formatting the drive:

And was reminded of one of my favorite instances of an unfortunate default column width pared with an ellipse:

Doesn’t exactly instil confidence that this process is going to end well.

A co-worker of mine recently pointed out to me that one of the people who is on the offshore team in India for his project has the last name of “Dikshit”.  I of course assumed he was lying as we tend to joke around a lot, but I looked it up in the company directory, and, in deed, there is not one, but around 10 people who work for our company in India (and a couple in the US for that matter), with the last name of “Dikshit”.  I couldn’t help but think of this scene from Spaceballs:

One can imagine a similar scene set at a corporate headquarters (no so different from Dark Helmet’s spaceship after all) with the following unfolding on an IT project:

DARK PROJECT MANAGER

Careful, you idiot. I said update the record in the database, not overwrite it!

CODER

Sorry, sir.  Doing my best.

DARK PROJECT MANAGER

Who made that man a coder?

SYSTEM ARCHITECT

I did, sir. He’s my cousin.

DARK PROJECT MANAGER

Who is he?

COL BUSINESS ANALYST

He’s a Dikshit, sir.

DARK PROJECT MANAGER

I know that. What’s his name?

COL BUSINESS ANALYST

That is his name, sir. Dikshit, Bhanuprakash Dikshit.

DARK PROJECT MANAGER

And his cousin?

COL BUSINESS ANALYST

He’s a Dikshit, too, sir. Software Engineer, Team Lead, Philip Dikshit.

DARK PROJECT MANAGER

How many Dikshits we got on this project, anyhow?
(Everyone attempt to talk at once on the conference call to say “Yes sir, I am one as well as he already.”)

Pretty sure that script is waaaayyyy funnier in my head.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages is the funniest thing I’ve read in months.  I actually fell out of my chair laughing.  That said, I’m pretty sure you have to be a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages to really get much of any of the humor of it.  But if you are a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages, it doesn’t get much better than this.  Snip:

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Via Boing Boing.

When Skynet comes, I hope it looks like this:

(Via Swiss Miss, Kottke, Boing Boing, and basically the entire rest of the internet)

That may be my favorite way for the world to end.  Though I would have been content if it just took out New York and went away.

Bonus fun fact – if you look up Skynet on Wikipedia while making a blog post to check if it’s one word or two, and if the N is capitalized if it’s one word, you may notice that the page has location coordinates for Skynet: 37.921, -122.532.  If you were to find this location in Google Maps (perhaps the start of Skynet itself), it would show you this.

Skynet will apparently be born in the pool of some fancy house in the suburbs of San Francisco.  Now, with the glory of Google Maps, we not only know where Skynet will start, but, low and behold, the place (503 Corte Madera Ave, Corte Madera CA 94925) is up for leasing!  That’s right, for a mere $6995 a month, you could live in this 5 bedroom, 4.5 bath, 5,300 square foot future home of mankind’s downfall!

From the listing, it sounds like our future mechanical overloads really know how to live, … or compute, … or process, or whatever it is they do (emphasis mine):

Listed for lease in Marin County at $6,995, and truly a unique find, this custom-built  5,300 +/- sq ft home* offers gracious style with an expansive layout that makes sense for today’s living.

Built in 1988 and situated in the hills of Corte Madera, the house is close enough to town that you’re just a couple moments from shopping, dining, local farmer’s markets, etc, yet far enough away that you achieve the rare Marin combo of privacy and property.

5bd/4.5ba + office + workout room

Formal entry paved in marble.  Formal living room boasts hardwood floors, fireplace and elevated sitting area perfect for piano or other large scale furniture.  Formal dining room offers big corner bay views and butler’s entry to kitchen.

The cheerful country kitchen faces east overlooking the bay, offering fresh morning sun.  Kitchen includes newer appliances, an open layout, and a wonderful breakfast nook.  Kitchen opens to large family room with additional fireplace, and french doors leading to enclosed lawn, gardens and pool.

Four bedrooms all on one level upstairs.  Master suite includes spacious walk-in closet and elevated sitting area w/fireplace.  Additional 5th bedroom is downstairs – perfect for au-pair or extended stay guests w/separate entrance and mini kitchenette.

Bonuses include:
-formal office or library with built-in bookshelves
-small bonus room overlooking pool – perfect for workout room w/steam shower
-elaborate centralized computer system controls almost everything in home from the den: security, lights, temperature and more

Life in Corte Madera includes access to highly-ranked local schools (see www.greatschools.org) and an excellent San Francisco commute.  Great central Marin weather will allow you to take full advantage of the pool and yard.  Cut over the hill to Mill Valley for great dining, or hop on your bike and be on Marin’s great biking trails right away.

Available this month for 1 year lease.  Looking for non-smoking tenants who will care for this custom-designed home in the family since it was built!  Owners will include pool and garden maintenance – tenant to cover all utilities including renter’s insurance.

Contact Executive Rental Agent Darcy Alkus Barrow to schedule your private tour: (415) 637-8917

Cheers!

*Sq ft quoted per tax records. Agent has not verified.

Not really my cup of tea, but then again, I suppose I do have a soul and all…

Admittedly, this site doesn’t even follow all of them (I keep meaning to do a redesign, but I barely get enough time to make regular posts, as you may have noticed), but a few thoughts on things that make good websites:

• If there is a navigation tree, it should have 3-7 items at each level, no more, no less.  Nine may be allowable at the highest level, but is never actually necessary.
• No one tool / website / page / area should do more than one thing.
• One thing is defined as something you can explain in one sentence without a conjunction.
• Never try to impress your users with how complicated something is – they will not be impressed, they will leave.
• Give the eye room to breath.
• Be consistent everywhere.
• Once your user has seen the home page, no other page or behavior should surprise them.
• You are not all things to all people, your site can’t be either.
• Never, ever, ever build anything in flash.
• Blinking things distract people and we are all already too distracted the way it is – never make anything blink.

Adam and Jamie from the Mythbusters show the difference between how a CPU and a GPU process graphics, using paintball guns. Generally a good demonstration of serial vs parallel processing.  Plus, the last slow motion shot is awesome.

Pleasantly trippy, though simple, Lego illusion.

Cute and clever diorama and detail (via The Brothers Brick).

Using Legos to mend walls.

Lego candles.

An absolutely enormous / insane (read: awesome) Lego aircraft carrier.

Nathan Sawaya makes all sorts of amazing Lego sculptures / art (found via Makezine).

A great/bad pun in Lego:

Attack of the Second Amendment from Jesus Diaz on Vimeo. Via Gizmodo.

On the slightly more serious side, here‘s a really interesting story from The New York Times about Lego as a company and the changes they’ve made and where they’re heading (via Kottke).  As much as I fully realize that things like that have to happen to keep the company afloat, it kind of makes me sick too.  I’ve bought Legos for birthdays and Christmas in recent years and each time it seems like they get more and more expensive, with almost no really little sets, and they’re so specialized that it’s hard to build much out of them aside from what’s on the front of the box.

I remember quite fondly Lego sets I had when I was little (okay, I still have some of them) that came with multiple sets of instructions for things to make out of them, and also had things pictured on the box that you could make which there weren’t instructions for, just to get the creative juices flowing a little more.

I sort of credit the old Lego sets with a lot of the way I look at thing (perhaps I had this view before I got Legos, and they just happened to fit in well, who knows).  Mostly, putting pieces together, taking things apart and rebuilding them, just seeing how things work, and being willing to mess with them a little.  I often explain my interest in computer programming in these terms – programming is Legos for adults.  (Legos are Legos for adults too, but we’re going for a metaphor here people.)  In programming, especially object oriented programming, you have all these different pieces you have to fit together and line up just right, and when you do, you have built a new toy to play with from the parts you had.  And you can combine them in all sorts of ways, and swap out pieces here and there, and build whole new things no one else has thought of yet.  And when you’re done, you can reuse it all and not have a mess.  And the building that happens is a mix of building with your hands, and planning it out in your head as you go, and adjusting as you run into problems.  In an overblown metaphoracal sense, Legos are life.

So, in closing, here’s a great, very simple Lego ad campaign (via Swiss Miss) that’s the way I like to remember them.

Random Fact: Linus Torvalds (the guy who started Linux) and the state of Iowa share a birthday – today, Dec 28th.  Linus is 40, Iowa is 163.  Happy Birthday to both!!!  In other news, I’m pretty sure noticing that makes me a huge dork, but I’m pretty okay with that.

It’s not often at all that I get gadget-lust, but wow, the Nokia N900 looks AWESOME.  *drool*

• 800×480 touch screen
• Full keyboard
• Wifi
• GPS
• THIRTY TWO GIGS of internal storage
• FIVE mega-pixel camera
• and it goes on, and on

So, all of that is awesome in it’s own right, but the real reason this makes me salivates is that it runs a full Linux distribution as it’s operating system, which means it’s totally hackable, instead of the usual locked down cage that most cell phones come in (iphone, cough, iphone).  In other words, instead of being a vessel through which you can buy things from your phone carrier, or from a single corporate store – this is a real computer, you can really program.  And since it runs Linux, I would tend to guess instead of having an app store to throw money at, there will be a lot more free / open source apps for it so you can actually take advantage of the awesome hardware.

Via /.