We bought an area rug for the living room and it caused the Roomba to hang up while it was doing the cleaning. Basically it would stop in the middle of the rug because it couldn’t enter areas where there were dark patterns on the rug. After reviewing what might cause this I found out it was due to the “cliff sensors” under the Roomba seeing the dark areas and it was interpreting it as a ledge and to not go over it.
Scott Hanselman recently published a really great podcast on his always-good Hanselminutes show, “On Empathy with Leon Gersing the Ruby Buddha”. They discuss how important it is to maintain empathy when dealing with others on the Internet as well as in real life, and the importance of keeping a direct connection to your end customers and colleagues in your community. It is a good listen for anyone in the software industry.
Steve brought a lot of greatness to the world. I remember buying my first Apple computer back in early ‘82. It was an Apple II-Plus and I remember how cool it was that it did color graphics with a TV output. My brother and I were playing the Swashbuckler game right after we got it out of the box. It was also fun and easy to program in Applesoft Basic. Then along came the Apple IIc which was small and easy to haul around, although it wasn’t a true laptop.
Sometimes you might want to print a small section from an email that has 30-embedded replies or just a snippet of code from that big class file. The Clipboard Printer Windows app makes it easy to do by copying what you want to print into the clipboard (CTL-C or right-mouse “Copy”) and then print it to your printer.
I built this small app for this purpose a couple of years ago and thought I’d share it here in case someone else needed to use it.
I bought a magic gadget from Best Buy called the LiveScribe smart pen and paper after watching a colleague using it for making notes during a meeting.
Technology The smart pen is really a small computer with an infrared camera analyzing a series of micro-dots in a matrix pattern on paper (originally invented by Anoto in Sweden). You write as with an ordinary pen on special notebook paper and the pen also optionally records audio.
We were visited by the “dirty” (west) side of Tropical Storm Hermine on September 7 which dumped some significant rainfall on us. The main density of rainfall walked right up I-35 in what the weathermen call a “train” effect. Then again on September 8 a second load of rain was pulled up from the gulf by the tail of the storm. Unfortunately the ground was still drenched from the previous rain and it resulted in some flooding in our area.
I previously wrote about how much I like wild rides, and my friend Mike was kind enough to take me out for a fun ride in his newly rebuilt ’72 Nova hot rod this morning. And by rebuilt I mean the engine has been transformed to a monster, as in “It’s aliiiiiiive!!“. The engine’s displacement is 496 cubic inches and horsepower has been estimated at 700 BHP. When started it often sets off car alarms and scares any nearby kids and elderly.
One thing I noticed about the tragedy at Virginia Tech is that the media constantly played the monster’s video and kept mentioning the monster’s name. They were playing right into his hands and should have just left that video with law enforcement agencies. This kind of notoriety only encourages copy-cats and zeros that want to gain a sort of immortality to their name (also see Kennedy’s assassin and the Columbine scumbags for other examples).
This is an update on the XM Satellite Radio that I wrote about earlier. I was able to improve the installation in the Matrix by adding a bracket that mounts it to the right of the radio and angles it toward the driver. Also, I wired the power inside the dash so I wouldn’t have to keep using those bulky power plugs. The Sony dash unit was useful in that it has an Aux input that allows the signal to go straight from the XM Radio into the Sony unit.
There’s been an interesting trend lately to turn any adverse publicity into an opportunity to absolve oneself from responsibility by entering into a rehab program. Historically that was limited to drug or alcohol use, but lately rehab has been a “cure-all” for public relations disasters such as rants about ethnicity (Gibson) or sexual-orientation (the guy from “Grey’s Anatomy”). Of course there is still the usual parade of Hollywood stars going to rehab for the classic reasons.
