Quarterflash Designs

The love story of Ralph and Edna…

Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.  Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital.  One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end.

He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there.

Edna promptly jumped in to save him.  She swam to the bottom and pulled him out.  When the Head Nurse Director became aware of Edna’s heroic act she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable.

When she went to tell Edna the news she said, ‘Edna, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is you’re being discharged, since you
were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love.  I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness.

The bad news is, Ralph hung himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him.  I am so sorry, but he’s dead.’

Edna replied, ‘He didn’t hang himself, I put him there to dry.  How soon can I go home?’

Today is Mental Health Day!  You can do your bit by remembering to
send an email to an unstable friend…

Done my part!!!

Or so the email says.

One of the more imaginative Nigerian schemes, to be sure, but still full of typos. Maybe I could get rich just getting hired out to make their emails look more realistice. A 1% fee should be a nice additional income, right?

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I find myself wondering how many different support companies HP uses.

A while back my 6 month old laptop stopped booting up. Lights would come on, but nothing would ever happen. Wouldn’t even boot off of a CD.

So, I send an email, exchange a couple of things with this support person and before I even completely finished running the tests he suggested, I got an email that said they were sending a box for me to ship the laptop back in.

Box comes, I send it out, 5 or 6 days later I have it back with the memory replaced.

Great service, no questions, excellent experience.

Then there was today. Read the rest of this post »

Beginning Open Office 3:
From Novice to Professional

Apress / http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781430215905
ISBN:978-1-4302-1-590-5

A Review

I had a chance to review this recently published book and my overall impression is very positive. The author has spent time getting to know the program and how it works.
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A very nice day today for a change. Well, really it’s not been all that bad here, we didn’t get the deep cold that a lot of the rest of the country did. Still, today was warm enough to get outside without a coat or even, for that matter, a sweater. Since it was that warm I headed out to work on my router table.

I’ve had the base done for a while now. It was made by trimming 2×4s to square up the edges, notching the legs to put supports acrss and then screwing the two sides together with some other supports. It’s pretty sturdy. I had started a top before, but used plywood and 1/4″ hardboard. That combination ended up warping on me. In one of the other magazines there was a plan for a much fancier router table and his top was made of two glued up 3/4″ MDF pieces. I’m sticking with my original plan, but using the MDF as the base for the top.

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Well, now that Sherri mentioned me in Charles’ newsletter, I suppose I need to keep things updated over here as well :)

A bit of background – I had to give up flying after I had the two discs in my neck fused as I no longer had the range and motion I needed to be safe flying. I was about one flight away from soloing and it was a dream I had had for years.  Well, I needed something else to fill my time and I’d always had an interest in woodworking, but not much interest in doing big projects.

I’ve always been fascinated by puzzles. I used to be able to solve a Rubic’s Cube, but I haven’t done that for years. I decided to start working on puzzles and somewhere in the search for information I ran across this Charles Neil guy and he made the mistake of being helpful so I decided to stick around for a while. Read the rest of this post »

Now, I’m not a major music seeker, but on occasion I like to listen to something other than the local station. Recently I’ve had more time to look for music because they changed up the Morning Show and it’s just not as much fun any more.

I ran across this site and since I’ve found some stuff there that I find that I like I thought I’d post up a short blurb about it here.

This music is all free because it’s uploaded by the artists under a Creative Commons license. The site is Jamendo. Of course, because it’s freely licensed you won’t find any mainstream artists (at least not that I’ve seen in the short time I’ve been on the site.)

Still, I’ve found some nice things to listen to.

I’ve decided, as I may have mentioned before, that I plan on using C# and GTK# built using MonoDevelop as my cross-platform platform of choice. I’ve always had one problem with this – getting the GUI to be responsive.

You have to understand that I’ve been programming a long time (the first program I wrote I had to flip the toggle switches on the front panel to toggle in the 0’s and 1’s), but just about everything I’ve done has been command line based. Mostly utility programs, programs that operate behind the scenes, programs that are used by other developers or systems people – in short, nothing graphical in nature. This is a whole new issue for me. Read the rest of this post »

For a project I’m working on I needed an assembly that would easily parse a command line.

“A command line? What’s that?”  you might ask. I understand that most of the programs you run always start up with a GUI that you can then use to set up all your parameters. This is not always the Right Thing to do. A lot of what I program are utility programs that do things to files in a scripted (or batch) mode. GUIs, in this case, just get in the way.  Thus the command line – you tell the program what to do when you start it up and it never talks to you again.

For example:

 playMP3 --directory /myhome/music --background true

The convention is that a long name option has two preceding – (dash) characters and a short name option (a single character) has a single preceding dash character.

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Someday I’ll get good at this blogging stuff – so far I really suck at any kind of regularity.

At any rate, you just gotta check out this link – it’s very cool, but a bit creepy. It’s called Big Dog and it’s a 4 legged autonomous “vehicle”. Watching the video is just a bit weird. I have to admit that the very first bit when it’s shown walking through the woods the very first thing that came to my mind was Monty Python. It just reminded me of some of the parts when they’re carrying baggage on the Quest for the Holy Grail.

It does do some amazing things and it has better balance than I do on some days.