What's it all about, Alfie?

Today (3/14) is being called Pi Day in a lot of places - including Marie's 6^th Grade Language Arts class. For today, the teacher allowed all the kids to bring in pies to have during class. Interesting that it wasn't Math class, but that's another issue.

Sometimes I really do miss teaching. I never did the 6^th Grade level, but even at the college level it was a lot of fun. There were fun talks with students really trying to "get it", and when they "got it" the look on their faces was always priceless.

So here's the all the educators - Happy Pi Day.

I was reading boing! boing! this morning and came across this post about Jill Bolte Taylor - a neuroanatomist that one morning realized that she was having a stroke, and how she studied the stroke from the inside out. It is probably the most uplifting 20 minutes I've spent in a year. Truly incredible.

as quoted on boing! boing!:

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

However, in my opinion that's not the most fascinating part of the story. No, the most interesting part of the story is how she feels about the experience. How she is changed - not physically, but emotionally and mentally, to see things not from where she has always been, but from where she allowed herself to sit - even if just for a few days.

We are all born to that narrow slice of life that we know. For some it's wider than for others, but still, it's pretty narrow for the vast majority of us all. Here's a person that had it as narrow as any have her eyes opened up to what could be. And how she feels now about it.

I have been trying to find this quote for a while, and today I finally found it. I remember first seeing it in a friend's office and liked that she felt that hard work was the answer - no questions. She worked hard, that's for sure. Anyway, here it is:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. Calvin Coolidge

A few times I've mentioned how important it is to me to continue in the face of adversity. Hopefully, I'm not only persistent, but maybe a little talented and educated so it makes for a good combination. But I have to admit that of the three - persistence is the thing I value most. You have to continue.

This weekend already I've had more than my normal share of surprises. There was the GCC bug I found, and then late yesterday as I was taking a break from that I realized that my iMac G5 was frozen. I mean like a poster frozen. So I power-cycled it and it came back - for about 5 mins.

Crud. I can't have this guy die! This is important stuff to me.

So I took off the back and reseated the memory. Tried it again... same thing. Uh oh... not good.

I was thinking last night "Disk drive - it's the only mechanical thing to wear out. I'll get another tomorrow and put it in." And I left my office for the night.

But as I thought more about it that evening, I was convinced that it couldn't possibly be the disk drive. If it were, there would be a normal message on the boot-up about a "sad mac" and a bad disk. I've had this before on other models, so I know what it looks like. No, this appeared to be something far more insidious. Like the system board.

So I put the drive in, and closed it up and took it to the Apple Store at Oak Brook. Because I had an appointment with the Genius Bar I only waited about 15 mins. Not bad, really. They hooked up a keyboard and mouse and did a dump of the machine to their diagnostics site there - whatever it is and looked at the report.

"Well... how long have you had the memory?" he asked.

"Since I got the machine." I said - wondering what was up.

"Well, it's the memory or the System Board. I have a new System Board in stock, but let's see... the cost for that will be $900 plus tax."

Crud. Well, it's less than a new iMac, and I mentioned that to him.

"Not by much", he shot back.

So I looked around the store, and he was right. For basically $1200 I could get a new dual-core iMac and have a faster, better machine.

Double Crud. I loved my G5 and planned on keeping it for years. But it was clear that the smart thing to do was to get a new iMac.

And so I did.

It's basically the same machine - a 20" iMac with 2GB RAM and a 320GB drive. It's got all the same standard things my G5 did, but updated to the latest from Apple. It's got the nice display, and boy is it really nice, but the nicest thing about this machine was something I wasn't expecting - the new keyboard.

Basically, this is a laptop keyboard for a desktop machine. It's thin and sleek and feels wonderful. Really, I knew they were out, but I hadn't played with them for any length of time, but when I started working with it, I was floored how nice it was. Smooth as glass... wonderful feel... I'm a very picky keyboard-kind-of-guy and this was stunning. Amazing.

So I got everything back on the machine based on my TimeMachine backup, and that was a very pleasant surprise, and in less than half a day I was back in business. I think I'll still try to make the G5 work - maybe with another G5 from eBay or something with a good logic board. But I can't imagine giving it up - not just yet.

[3/7/08] UPDATE: I worked on this guy today and I'm convinced that it's a thermal problem. The machine will run fine for about 1 to 5 mins (depending on the temperature of the box) and then it'll lock up. Video is fine, all LEDs inside the box are fine, tried new memory and hard disk - no difference. It's the logic board for sure, and it's a drag that it's thermal in nature. It's not a cold solder joint as that would not allow the start... it's something that's 'in spec' at lower temps, and the fans don't kick on fast enough to keep the temp in the box below that level. I think it's the CPU to be sure, but can't be 100% positive without a swap. Bummer. Don't know what I'll be able to do with this guy - if anything.

I've written about games that have held my interest over the years, and again I have to mention that the game at the top of that list is Risk - on the Mac it's iConquer. It's not fast-paced... the graphics aren't like individual leaves on trees that you mow down with some flame-thrower... but it's a fun game. The problem is more of trying to get the people together.

My kids play the DS, or the PSP, or the Wii - which can be a lot of fun, but it's not the same as a game like Risk. Turn-based, dice-rolling, fun memories of playing with friends in high-school for hours on end. Alliances made, broken... winning, losing, being one of the last two... being one of the first out. It's just an experience with people as opposed to machines.

I guess it's like a lot of things... it's what you bring to the game that makes it special. And on that score, I bring a ton of great memories, and that's what makes it a great game.

It's not as often, that's for sure, but it's still there - the bug in Adium 1.2.1 where when I open my laptop and it wakes up from sleep the sound effects in Adium are missing, gone, silent, whatever you want to say. It doesn't seem to happen every time, and maybe it's in OS X, for all I know, but it would be nice not to have to restart Adium when this happens.

I know there's a new Quicktime 7.4.x update that I need to apply, but I'm doubting that that update is going to really effect me, but I'll give it a go and see if that helps anything. Meanwhile, I'll just have to restart it as I've already sent in the bug report on this already.

UPDATE: I did the Quicktime update. We'll see if this makes any difference on the sound from Adium.

OK, this is something I never thought I'd have to do, but this evening I had to password protect my blog. I was getting more grief about it from the management where I work - specifically saying that I could no longer discuss anything related to people or events that took place at the office. In one sense, I can understand my manager's issues - he's told by his boss that this shouldn't have happened, and it shouldn't have, and he responds by trying to make himself look less of the bad guy and more of a sympathetic representative of The Man.

Interestingly enough, you can't do this password protection in the WordPress configuration. At least not unless it's hosted at their site. I don't know why this is, but I found a plugin that allows me to put a password on anything related to the weblog. I'm not sure it's 100% crack-proof, but it's certainly well past a good-faith effort to keep people out of this blog.

UPDATE: If I turn this on, then I can't use MarsEdit to write my posts. That's not something I can live with. What I can do is to post all the messages as drafts so that they aren't visible to the average viewer until I specifically publish them. They are still held on the server, just in a draft state. This way, I can make it appear as though I'm not posting anything else while I am - just not making it visible to anyone but me.

[2/7/08 3:31am] UPDATE: I'm trying to get the password plugin to work with MarsEdit. Hopefully, this will work. Excellent! By excluding the XML-RPC URL from the default password protection, I can allow WordPress' password protection on that to work and the plug-in's password protection to work on everything else. It seems that I have a very workable solution now. No one can look into these pages without the password.

[2/11/08 4:00pm] UPDATE: I've taken it offline simply because I've received more talking to about this weblog. I was meant to help me feel better, enjoy what I've done, and act as a record of the problems I've solved so I don't have to solve them again. But it's become a boat anchor and I've got to shut it down.

Having a tough morning this morning... feeling a little behind the 8-ball. Nothing impossible, hey, even Cowgirls get the blues. But when I'm feeling a little blue I like to put on some of my favorite music on my iPod and force myself to go through the motions of a regular day knowing that everything is temporary and in a little bit things will change... problems will arise needed to be fixed, and the day will be off to a running start.

One of the things I do every morning is to scan all the systems making sure that everything is looking normal - within limits. Just giving everything a once over. Like every morning this included my laptop - I put notes here and there to remind me of things and the way I'm sure to find them is to check each morning. So I'm flipping around and I stop on this little simulator I started writing back in 2003. Nothing fancy, but it's written in Obj-C for the Mac and it's using the BLAS package - kind of fun. Anyway, I was just scanning the code - reading it to see where I was. And it started to make me feel good.

Like Beans-n-Weenies and Cornbread.

Comfort Code. I'm sure that just about any language can appear artistic or beautiful to someone. It's what we each read into the code - like a painting. It's just that Obj-C has always been one of the more beautiful languages to me. Maybe I was just lucky and learned it from a couple of the sharpest guys I ever knew. That certainly helps. But it's also that I wrote this code not on a deadline or from someone else's specs - but what I wanted, so all the comments are nice, all the code is done really well. It's just a really nice piece of work.

I ended up running the example I had worked up for the simulation and it's almost to the point that I could make it dynamically recalculate the results on any input change - it's fast. Sure, that's the box and the BLAS routines and the OS, but it's really neat to see something that used to run as a batch job run about as fast as the blink of an eye. Another smile.

We all like comfort food... it makes us feel like home really isn't that far away. Comfort Code is a lot like that. Makes me realize that things are all that bad, and maybe I need to get back to that.

Well... it's hit my minimum size for a new iPod - 32GB. Apple today announced the new 32GB iPod Touch. It's very very tempting as I've wanted to have something that can play my movies and pod casts on the train when I get a little tired of reading my book at the time.

At $499, it's steep, I'll grant you, but it's still exactly what I wished they had released the first time. And with WiFi and the new apps, it'll be a lot more useful than the original 'Touch'.

Yes, very temping indeed. I may have to go to the Apple store this weekend and pick one up. It's just exactly what I wanted to get.

Again, I try to stay out of the mergers and acquisitions business realm, but sometimes I have to say something. Microsoft's offer of $44bil for Yahoo is one such time. There was a time that Microsoft was the best thing for the computer industry. Prior to Windows and it's abstraction of the peripherals like displays and printers, every application needed to have people on staff to work out the graphical interface and write drivers for each printer they wanted to support. WordStar was a classic example. Gobs of driver disks and you have to make sure that what you needed to be supported was, in fact, supported by the code.

Major hassles. Then came Windows with it's printer driver model and graphics support. Application support teams no longer had to support each and every printer and display. Way easier for someone to make an app now. This was really the 'gift' of Windows and Microsoft. And it was good.

Similarly, in the beginning, there were a few web crawlers, like lycos - ones that you could use, but you almost always had to have several, and there were even applications on some platforms that would hit several search engines to try and get you something useful with a single query. Then came Yahoo. Again, it was an early pioneer, and it made a big difference in the search engine landscape. It also was one of the first to have 'busy' home pages - portals, many called them, with news, groups, etc. all on the front page.

But with absolute power comes corruption. Unfortunately, Microsoft, like IBM had to battle a horrible reputation that it had taken years to build. Yahoo sat on it's lead and didn't work to keep itself on top of the heap. Now Microsoft finds itself in the position of playing 'catch-up' to Google in the search engine space. Yahoo has long since fallen to Google as well. It's not surprising that Microsoft (with tons of cash) tries to close the gap on Google with the acquisition of Yahoo, but you can't really catch up to #1 by buying #2. The best you can do is to close the gap a bit.

In the end, what needs to happen at Microsoft is they need to go back to the days when they were innovative and not just making money. Like IBM, they need to repair their image with the developers who ultimately make them look good. Take the time to embrace the non-commercial developer. Make amends, and over the long haul, they'll get back into the coveted spot they once held. But it's going to take more than buying Yahoo to do it.