Roboquad : the latest addition to our family

The latest addition to our family: A WowWee Robotics RoboQuad.

http://www.wowwee.com/en/products/toys/robots/robotics/robocreatures:roboquad

He was rescued from a second-hand shop, where he wound up due to a broken leg.  The left-front leg wouldn’t stop spinning, but after some minor home-surgery (a lever that pushed against an actuator had jumped out of place, so it just needed to be put back in place) he now appears to be fully functional and adjusting quite nicely to his new home.

Exploring Social Media

New post on social media (twitter specifically) at http://www.vxrs.com/twitter/exploring-social-media/

Really? You’re going to do that to yourself? Again?

To be honest, it really wasn’t all that traumatic last time.  It’s been nearly a year so the memories are fading.  But it’s true, I am officially announcing my participation once again in NaNoWriMo!

Nanowhoha?

Say it with me: Na No Wri Mo.  It stands for National Novel Writing Month and it takes place during November each year.  The challenge is to write a brand new, fresh out of the creativity oven, 50,000 word novel in just one month!

Can you believe it?  Fifty THOUSAND words in 30 days!  That’s the ultimate goal, but I have a much more achievable goal in mind first:  I just want to do better than I did last year.  Last year I ended up under the gun to get my GIAC Incident Handling certification by December 1st, so I ended up in a 6 day class in New Jersery for the first full week of November.  The class went from 9:00am to 9:00pm nearly every night, so I didn’t get a lot of writing done that week, and when I came back I spent most of my time studying for the two exams.

The good news is that I did indeed get my GCIH certification on time. The bad news is that I only managed to eek out a meager 1200 words for the entire month.

I’ve been training up for the competition this year by writing 1000 word short short stories on a semi-nightly basis and I’ve been rather proud of some of my mini-creations.  Maybe I’ll share one or two of them here some day.   In the meantime, I’ve been resting up for the last week with nearly no creative writing whatsoever.  Now starts the run up to the starting line:  I’ll be doing some plot and character sketches, an outline or two, that sort of thing.  However, I am still adamant that the primary style will be the same as always:  Start with a sentence and let the story take me where it will.

That style has been very successful for me in the sub 2000 word stories I’ve been cranking out, but how will it hold up beyond that?  If all I do is beat my wordcount from last year, I will view this as a success (so I just need to write for two full nights to be successful ::grin::)  I do still dream of actually hitting the 50,000 mark and I want to see just how close I can get.

Follow along with the Nanowrimo badge I’ve added to the bottom of the sidebar.  It will display the number of words I’ve written (although it relies on me to update the site, so it may lag a bit behind from time to time)

Who else is up for the challenge this year?  Charlie?  (He’s a winner from last year!)  Kevin?  (You know you have it in you…)  Christopher? (You can do it!)  Who else?  Leave a comment here and play along!

Keep your fingers crossed, say your prayers and get ready to start writing!

Simple way to avoid fake website logins

I just posted a short write-up over at Intuition & Elbow Grease on a very simple method to avoid fake website logins:

http://www.vxrs.com/security/simple-way-to-avoid-fake-website-logins/

Quick iPhone Update

Just a quick update to let you know that I posted a follow-up to the previous post (iPhone Impressions) over at http://www.vxrs.com

iPhone Impressions, One Month Later

So it’s been a month since I stood in line that was too long to purchase my 16GB iPhone, and I’ve been putting it through its paces.  I even messed around with jailbreaking it.  (short answer: not worth it for me)  Overall, I am very pleased with the device!  Would I recommend it to all of my friends?  No, actually I probably wouldn’t.  This is the perfect device for those folks who are used to carrying a PDA of some sort and are looking to consolidate devices.   If you’re just looking for a replacement cell phone then the iPhone is most likely overkill.  With the addition of a few apps from the App Store,  I’ve now completely replaced both my trusted palm pilot as well as my Motorola RAZR with the iPhone.

Using the  3G network to check email and browse the web is not as fast as I would like, but it is definitely useable.  It was a fantastic companion when I flew to Las Vegas last month allowing me to alternately read some great fiction by Cory Doctorow,  listen to some of my favorite classical music and get caught up on some old episodes of Doctor Who.  Battery life has been great; I don’t think I’ve seen the meter drop below 50% once in the past month.

The phone portion works great for me.  I’ve been primarily on the 3G network when using the phone (usually with the included earbuds) and I’ve been quite pleased with the sound quality.  To me the call-quality is every bit as good as the Motorola RAZR that it replaced.

The one feature (if you could call it that) that I loved about my palm pilot was the abundance of third-party apps.  The iPhone’s 2.0 firmware and the App Store bring an abundance of third party applications for my downloading pleasure!  I can even browse and download new applications directly from the iPhone.   I wish it was that simple with my old palm pilot!  I’ve downloaded, used then deleted several dozen applications and there are now just a handful (five to be exact) that I use the most.

My top five favorite apps so far:

1. Pandora (free)
   Streaming internet audio while I drive to work! I plug my iPhone into a cassette adapter, fire up Pandora, choose one of my stations and I get to enjoy and discover new music! Because of this app I no longer feel the need to sync more than a handful of songs via iTunes. With Pandora, I always have a great selection of music available anytime.
2. MobileFinder($2.99)
   Once a loooong time ago, I made the switch from using the Palm Memo application to using plain text files to maintain all of my notes and memos. Boy, has that decision ever paid off! This app not only provides an ftp server on my iPhone to transfer files back and forth, it also allows me to edit and create text-based files!  How could this be better?  How about adding scp file transfers instead of or in addition to the ftp server.   Maybe add the ability to assign a username/password to the ftp connection?  At least the server is only on for a very short time while I actually transfer the files from my desktop, but I’d feel so much better if the connection was encrypted.
3. Stanza (free)
   With all the talk about no one reading anymore, I was really concerned that I was not going to be able to find a suitable replacement for Mobipocket. Stanza is turning out to be quite a fine e-book reader! It handles the simple comforts like being able to change font and background colors to providing an online catalog that you can access from the application to download free books from Feedbooks, The BBC, Wired Magazine and others.
4. Twittelator (free)
   This is one of several twitter clients available, and so far it’s my favorite; narrowly beating out Twitterific. I like the fact that it can post my current location via Twitter (although I almost never use this feature)
5. WeatherBug (free)
   The built-in weather app is nice, but I like looking at the radar maps and this app has them!  (you have to pinch-out and center the world-map on your location; not sure why this isn’t automatic, but maybe in a future release it will be)

I haven’t added an ssh client yet.  There are now at least three apps available purporting to be good ssh clients, but each one seems to have its drawbacks of one kind or another.  Since I haven’t had the need to connect to a command line lately, I’m waiting for these apps to go through a round of updates to see how (or if) they mature before making a purchase there.

Adventures in iPhone Land.

When the iPhone launched last year, I promised myself that I would wait until the 3G version came out before I took the plunge.  You see, I use a pda (Palm Pilot TX) on a daily basis for such things as checking email, reading ebooks (a lot), watching the occasional video, tracking todos and maintaining a large list of text files (think ‘memos’ on steroids)   Besides the pda, I also carry around a 20GB ipod photo for listening to music and podcasts during my daily commute, which can end up being nearly two hours round trip on very bad days.   And of course, I always always always have my cellphone with me no matter what.

So there is a certain logic in yearning for a convergent device that rolls all of the  necessary functionality into just one, shiny little object.  I wouldn’t need to lug around three different devices (all with separate charging needs, no less) and lighten my load, so to speak.   I’ve kept a close eye on the iPhone developments over the past year (including the whole ‘jailbreak’ thing) but after seeing how quickly the new 3G version sold out, I realized it would probably be a few months before I finally got my hands on one.

Read more »

Catching up

So I’ve slowly been adding my archives to this site. I’ve got most of the data all the way back to the very beginning way back in 2000. There are quite a few gaps still but I hope to be able to fill them in as I find the data. Thanks to archive.org, I’ve managed to find probably 80% of my missing entries and pull them into this blog.

It’s really quite surreal going back over eight years of journal entries. Back in 2000 we didn’t use tools like Wordpress or Blogger or MySpace, we wrote our own journalling software. That’s right. From scratch. Using the barest of html, and eventually adding perl, php, css and nifty interfaces and backend mysql databases. And yes, I used either vi or emacs to code it all. Uphill. In the snow. Both ways!

And we liked it!

But after a while it got to be just too much work trying to maintain all that code; the new blogging tools were doing nifty things like pingbacks and such. And after a while it just got to be easier to let someone else maintain the code. And the styles. And let someone else worry about the security for a change.

Sometimes I wonder if that was the right decision. Maybe we shouldn’t have given up on our code so easily. (not that it was an easy decision by any measure)

Just some quick links

Here’s a quick bunch of links to check out in your spare time…(which, if you’re reading this site you must have in abundance -spare time, that is…)

One Word – Fun little writing exercise.
Blue Oyster Cult – an old favorite, in honor of the free concert they’re giving downtown tonight.
User-Friendly -Don’t Fear the Penguin
St. Louis traffic -Thanks to Christopher for posting this one in the comments for the previous entry.

That’s it.

Cross-town Traffic

* Remember a few months ago (okay it was more like six months) when I was complaining about the extra fifteen minutes it took for me to get to work because of some rubber neckers along highway 44? Boy, those sure were the good old days! This month we moved into our new house out in O’Fallon (to accommodate our growing family) and now I drive highway 70 to the riverfront. On a good day, the 70+ mile round trip commute will take about 40 minutes each way. Unfortunately I’ve only had one ‘good day’ of driving in the past three weeks! Twice in the past week it has taken two hours to get home, and yesterday it took an hour and forty-five minutes to get to work. This morning a single-car accident in the opposite direction added an extra twenty minutes onto my drive time just from the high RN factor (Rubber Neck factor) of the drivers going east. And it really wasn’t that spectacular of an accident… just a pickup that bounced off the median once or twice.