Does your computer have a cigarette lighter? No? Well, for heaven’s sake, get busy and install one. What do you mean, you don’t smoke? Use it to plug in the car charger for your cellphone. Do I have to spell everything out for you?
Sep
29
Sep
29
The dullest blog in the world
Sep
28
Robo Rally returns!
If you’ve ever played the boardgame Robo Rally, you know that there’s nothing else even remotely like it. If you haven’t played it and you are at all interested in games, you owe it to yourself to try it out. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, stopped producing the game several years ago, and the basic game and expansion sets routinely sell on eBay for upwards of a hundred dollars. But now the game is poised to make a comeback next spring, according to GamingReport.com.
Sep
23
A bright idea
Energizer has just unveiled an omnivorous flashlight: one that can use multiple types of batteries. An AP article reports that “the Quick Switch takes two C, D or AA batteries and works by merely adjusting a switch to the proper cell size, automatically locking the batteries into place.” If you ask me, the ultimate flashlight is the NightStar, which requires no batteries at all — but the NightStar is expensive ($39.95). The Quick Switch sells for $9.99 to $12.99, so it’s much more affordable.
I think I will buy one just so that I can finally use up my C batteries, which are currently gathering dust. Almost nothing uses C batteries anymore. (I don’t recall what device I originally bought my Cs for — but it must have died shortly after that, leaving me with a stockpile of batteries that I can’t use.) But the biggest advantage of the Quick Switch may be that, in a pinch, you can raid almost any gadget in your house for batteries to power your flashlight. That ability could be a godsend during a power outage.
Sep
23
Sweet!
Astronomers have discovered a cloud of frozen sugar near the center of the Milky Way. This is bad news for Atkins dieters who were hoping to live in a low-carb galaxy. (Well, with a name like Milky Way, that wasn’t very likely anyhow.)
Sep
15
No surprise there
I know I’ve said that I don’t usually do quizzes, but I couldn’t resist this one: What High School Stereotype Are You? And it’s been so long since I posted anything here that I suppose even a lame post is better than none at all.
Take the What High School Stereotype Are You? quiz.
No one who knows me at all can be even mildly surprised by this result. But I found the quiz a bit more challenging that I expected, because I had to figure out how to respond to quiz items that would have been utterly meaningless back when I actually was a high school student (1974-77):
It’s finally Sunday. I’m . . . One of the listed responses is “role-playing.” Well, Dungeons & Dragons did exist back then, but it was brand new and only a few thousand hardcore wargamers knew about it.
The school requires everyone to take a computer course. I . . . Another quiz item refers to “computer games.” In 1977, there wasn’t a single computer or computer terminal anywhere in my high school. Computers were for universities, big corporations, and the military. And outside of those places, the only computer game you were likely to see was Pong.
Make a saving throw versus poison. That’s another D&D reference, and would been completely incomprehensible to me in my high school days. Since then, I’ve racked up 25 years of experience playing D&D, and could make saving throws in my sleep. I mean that literally — if you whispered “Make a saving throw versus poison!” in my ear at 3:00 a.m., I would probably sit up in bed and lunge for my dice without a moment’s hesitation. (Yes, I keep gaming dice in my bedroom. Doesn’t everyone?)
I considered taking the quiz as if it were still 1977, but most of my responses would have been “huh?” So in the end, I pretended that I was attending high school now, and picked the responses accordingly. I suspect that my actual high-school persona was probably closer to Outsider, but only because it wasn’t possible to be a Geek by today’s standards (the closest you could get was to be a Nerd). But if I were thirty years younger, I’m sure I’d be a Geek now.
Jul
19
Repairs
A lack of new content isn’t the only thing wrong with this blog. In recent weeks, it has also been brought to my attention that the template I’m using is flawed. It looks fine in Internet Explorer (IE), but lousy in any other browser. Users of both Mozilla Firefox and the Mac-based Safari have reported seeing exactly the same formatting glitches. The problem seems to be with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used by the template; IE interprets the CSS code incorrectly, but the person who created the template evidently was using IE to view the result, and concluded that it worked properly.
I’m not proficient with CSS, but my son Ben is, thanks to the HTML classes he took at school. He did some tinkering with the CSS code, but was unable to find a way to make it look right in both IE and non-IE browsers. My friend Virgil came up with a compromise that he says looks OK in both sorts of browsers, and I may end up using it. But there’s one other thing I want to try first. In the course of researching the problem, I stumbled across this trick for putting two versions of the CSS code in external files — one of which is used only by IE, and the other only by other browsers. If it works, this solution will be the best of both worlds. I hope to have it implemented in the next day or two.
UPDATE: The trick I mentioned above did not solve the problem — it doesn’t work with newer non-IE browsers like Firefox. But Ben wasn’t willing to give up. The problem is now fixed, thanks to his supreme excellence as a Javascript hacker. (I was going to say “his l33t h4x0r sk1llz,” but I thought that might be confusing to readers who aren’t fluent in Leetspeak.)
Jul
19
Dry spell
I’m back. It was never my intention to abandon blogging for such a prolonged period, but other things got in the way. During May, my spare time pretty much vanished for reasons related to my sprained ankle (a story I started to tell here, but never finished). In June, my involvement in the play Smokey Joe’s Cafe had a similar effect. During the first part of July, it was my job: the Project from Hell, which I had been working on since last fall, suddenly demanded a lot of extra hours.
But that’s finally over. My ankle is mostly healed, Smokey Joe’s Cafe is over, and I’m finished with the Project from Hell. If anyone is still reading this, I thank you for your patience. Actual posting of new material will resume shortly.
At least I’m in good company. It appears that none of the GNO blogs have been updated more than once or twice in the past month, except for those of my teenage offspring. Ben, of course, has been consistently putting us all to shame for a long time with his frequent and thought-provoking posts. He even had a moment in the spotlight recently when he wrote an essay that reduced Kim du Toit to tears. And Ruth, whose blog has been silent for months, has suddenly become talkative again. I hope it lasts this time.
Jun
06
Getting the news
The hallmark of a historic event is that people remember where they were when they first heard about it. I don’t know whether the death of former President Ronald Reagan will be remembered in those terms, but I will record here that I was in the Green Room at Raleigh Little Theatre. Tech Week for Smokey Joe’s Cafe began today. That’s the week of dress rehearsals (with light and sound cues, scenery and props) that precedes opening night. It’s traditional for the cast to provide dinner for the crew on the first night of Tech Week, so it was during Tech Dinner that I heard the news of Reagan’s passing from the other techies sitting at my table.
I remember where I was when President Reagan almost died in 1981. On March 30, 1981, I was in my room at the Bates West dormitory at the University of South Carolina. I don’t recall exactly how I first got the news, but I remember that within an hour or two of the shooting, The State published an extra edition reporting all of the information that was available. The newspaper carrier who normally delivered the paper to Bates West subscribers came through the dorm knocking on doors and offering the extra for sale. I bought a copy, and I still have it somewhere. It was the only extra edition of a newspaper I had ever seen.
And I’ve never seen another one. It’s hard to imagine a newspaper rushing out a special edition today. What would be the point? By the time they can print it and deliver it to customers, those people will already have seen the same information on CNN, or read it on any of a hundred news sites on the Web.
Of course, the same thing is true of the regular daily edition of any newspaper. By the time it reaches your front porch, it’s already out of date. That’s one of the reasons I don’t subscribe to a daily newspaper anymore.
Jun
04
Coming of age
When does a child become an adult? Our society doesn’t have a simple answer to that question. We confer greater freedom and responsibility on our adolescents gradually, in bits and pieces, as they pass through their teens. Instead of a single rite of passage, we have lots of them at differing ages, from bar/bat mitzvah (age 12 for girls, 13 for boys) to the ability to buy alcoholic beverages (age 21). As a result, it’s not possible to meaningfully say exactly when your children grow up. But when your family experiences several of these events in the space of a week, you can no longer deny that something momentous is going on.
My family has just experienced such a week:
- On May 26, Ben (our 15-year-old) passed a written test and obtained his Limited Learning Permit. He can now legally drive a car with adult supervision.
- On the 29th, his sister Ruth turned 18.
- The morning of May 30, we attended Ben’s confirmation at Christ the King Lutheran Church.
- That same evening, Ruth graduated from high school.
- On June 2, Ruth obtained her Driver License. And she registered to vote.
All of these were major milestones. But the one that really got to me was something unscheduled and unexpected. Ruth enjoys baking, and on the evening of June 2, she felt the urge to make a batch of cookies. But when she started to gather the ingredients, she discovered that we didn’t have enough eggs. Marie suggested that Ruth walk to the nearby Food Lion (it’s only five minutes away by foot) and buy some. Ruth grinned and said, “No, I’ll drive. Dad, can I borrow your car?” I nodded, and she picked up her purse, strolled out the door, and drove to the grocery store. Alone.