Sunday, April 30, 2006

OS X Apps falling out of the sky

Still playing around with the new OS X. I am still having fun and glad I switched, plus everything is so "clean". I found a number of cool sites and programs that make me feel a little more at home.


Wow, a list great.
Word of Caution: I would suggest being very careful of walking under a palm tree, you are never sure what may fall out.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Bird Mumps

I am sick today and it is terrible. I keep hearing news about Mumps and Bird Flu, which both have flu like symptoms. So I figure I have both. My beak is beginning to swell and my feathers are covered in goose bumps from being hot/cold. Icky. I hope to be better soon.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Back and Forth

Spent most of today and yesterday running about fixing code for collegues as well as my own. In between those times I played a bit with the son of a visiting collegue. I think playing was more fun than debugging code, but it involves much more slober. The codes were dumb little things that if not set properly will propagate and create lots of havoc. The scripts of course do not check for "saneness" of parameters, it just assumes that they are present and correct. I guess that is what you get for code research codes handed down from person to person, with the origin basically unknown. Munge.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

demolition day

Today, GSO was the hottest spot in all of Rhode Island. Governor Carcieri declared GSO as the official state viewing site for the demolition of the old Jamestown Bridge (no doubt Buddy Cianci had his hand in it somewhere too). Traffic has been flowing across the "new" Jamestown-Verrazano Bridge since 1992. So every family in the whole state packed the kids in the car and camped out on the GSO beach to see the big event. What a zoo. I got to watch from the roof of my building. Ka-boom!

San Francisco 1906

Today is the aniversery of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. There is a whole lot of information regarding the earthquake with a meeting in SF. Movies of earthquake simulations can be found here and further down the page. Many of the people I know and work with were involved in makeing these movies. For those who do not know, this is the kind of work that I do and I am glad to see it getting some good press. Pictures from 1906 can be found here. To note, the story about a cow being swallowed by a fault is incorrect, the farmer squeezed the cow into the hold made by the fault.

Friday, April 14, 2006

Shouldn't you be working ?

Found Maelstrom and Apeiron for OSX yesterday. Could not find PuyoPuyo though. I played these games my first year in college and they are still incredibly fun.


Aperion

Maelstrom


Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Busy Weekend

Oh, what a weekend. It was jam packed. On Saturday I went to the Air and Space Museum Annex at Dulles Airport with Kelly and one of her family friends. Katie was jealous of me going. I told her we would go the next time she was in DC. They had the Space Shuttle, a Concord Jet, and a SR-71 Blackbird on display. From there we tried to find Arlington National cemetery. We ended up at the Pentagon and stopped the car because we were lost. The pentagon police asked if what we were doing, we said we were lost, so they gave us a police escort to the cemetery. Following that I went to a birthday party for someone at work.
Sunday was the Red Sox - Orioles game at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Kelly and I decided to go early and have brunch because it was a mid-day game. We found Blue Moon Cafe and the food was excellent. However, during the meal I realized I forgot the baseball tickets back in DC, almost an hour traveling each way. We called the box office to try and get new tickets and they told us we could get our tickets reprinted for $5. Yeah. The game was cold, but the Red Sox triumphed behind the pitching of Wakefield. After the game, we joined some of my friends from work at an really good Afghan restaurant. It had the same name as a one in Boston and San Francisco. The Baltimore version was owned by the brother in law of the owner of the other two. Busy Busy weekend.

Friday, April 07, 2006

New Shiny Computer

Got the new little computer yesterday. It is, as some one said, "shiny and pretty". I have been installing software on it all day and it is very easy to use so far. I got the wireless easily setup at work and at home. Some things were a bit confusing, like how to install x11 and how to get my ipod to talk nice with the laptop. Thanks to Katie again, a program called Senuti, copying songs to and from the ipod, and restoring the ipod I was able to accomplish this. It really should be much easier.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

News on News

Listening to the news today, the big story was the one anchor moving from one tv network to another. Do I really care ? No. Apparently the news outlets, all of them, seem to think we need to know about it. It is really something that should have had maybe a few minutes devoted to it, but they used up almost half the day. The news outlets developed such a woody about the story. News about News, like me telling everyone every detail about my work. I don't care.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Dying Computer

My computer is on its last leg. The hard drive is crapping out and the computer does not like to be booted unless it is made it an offer it cannot refuse. I decided to get a new computer and I am going with an Apple. No more Windows, no more Linux. It will be a little, silver 12 incher Powerbook G4. Katie was kind enough to let me use her new computer for the time being to store my files and use the screen for work. I should be getting it within the week. I can get all my work done on this machine and still play around if I want to.

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Rhode Island

On Thursday I travelled up to Rhode Island to visit Katie. We went to lunch with collegues from GSO on Friday. On Saturday, Katie and I were incredibly exciting. We took the recycling to the recycling center for the first time, got a spray bottle and furniture pads from the hardware store, had really good brunch at Phils, checked out the butcher and fishmonger, and Katie got a bike. Besides the recycling center, it was all within a 2 block walking distance of her house. We also watched a pre-season baseball game while eating cheese and drinking beer. I should up in RI for almost a week.