a broken thought

Just released: MorseLED

This little program uses your keyboard’s scroll lock to to show Morse Code.

I’m out of shape.  Jesse got me a bicycle for Christmas that we picked up today.  I finally got it all set up and took it out for a spin.  Wow.  After just a mile and a half, I was really starting to feel it.  My commute to work (the reason for the new bike) is about 3.5 miles (mostly down hill).  I imagine that I’m going to be pretty out of breath for the first week or so.  It’s been a while since I’ve been regularly running, so my cardiovascular is probably pretty weak.

Over the last couple days I put together a little weather gadget for my home page.  It queries a National Weather Service server for the forecast for my area and then prints out a brief summary of relevant information for my commute.  Hopefully it’ll help me stay comfortable and safe.

Here’s a little prime factors calculator that I threw together while reading Cryptonomicon (which, by the way, I’ve really enjoyed so far). The calculator isn’t very special, there seem to be plenty of others online.

Jesse and I picked up Guitar Hero III for our Wii today. It looks like it’s going to be popular (as if the last two weren’t). The two people in line in front of us were also buying copies. Once we got home, we sat down a played for about six hours straight. I made it up to “Raining Blood” by Slayer on easy before I got stuck. Once I get some sleep, I should be able to get unstuck. Anyway, it’s fun and I’m looking forward to really rocking out in the future.

Last night, we (Jesse, John, Amy, and I) saw They Might Be Giants at the House of Blues in Anaheim. I really like this venue. It has good food, and there’s the line to pass the other line if you eat there. The big problem is that it takes so long to get there. According to Google, it’s about 64 miles away, but the drive took about 2.5 hours.

We had dinner and got in line early, snagging spots 8 – 12. It was a little cold waiting outside, but we all survived. A group of about 10 people got in early somehow got in early which meant that by the time we were let in, all of the good spots against the stage were taken. Luckily, some guy that was up front liked my Dial-A-Song shirt and offered us some space at the stage.

The opening act, Oppenheimer, was pretty cool. It’s just two guys, Shaun and Rocky, from Ireland with a great sound. Rocky’s hair hangs down, covering his face. I suppose he like it that way. Shaun apparently shaves his head bald and does all of the talking. They played a good set of about five songs and then quickly cleared the stage.

The Giants came on at about 10pm and started with “The Cap’m.” They put on a great show and were energized the whole night. A highlight for me was when Flans offered his pick to the audience. It was between Jesse, a guy to our left, and me. Neither of them took it, so I did and got to play (well, strum and make noise) for what felt like 45 seconds or so. I think I did something wrong because in the next song, the guitar had to be taken off stage to be tuned. Oh well, what do you expect? It was still a lot of fun.

They played two brief encores and wrapped up a little before midnight. We hung around for the crowd to clear out and then stopped by the merch booth to buy some shirts and CDs. I picked up a copy of Oppenheimer’s album and got it signed by Shaun (Rocky left early to go watch another concert).

We stayed at the Sheraton on Disneyland Dr. which is huge and pretty nice. Even after sleeping in, I was pretty tired. We had a late brunch buffet at the hotel and then drove home. So far, it’s been a very nice weekend.

IE doesn’t respect your CSS height value of an empty div if it’s smaller than the non-existent text in the div. For example, if you have:

<div style="height:3px"></div>

the div could be 13px tall instead of 3. Two suggested fixes are:

1. put an HTML comment in the div, or
2. set the font-size and line-height to 1px and 0 respectively.

To give credit, I found the answer at 9mmfilm, which found Bruno’s suggestion.

Okay, so I know I’m really behind on my blog.   August is almost over, and I haven’t posted anything all month.  So, even though I’m really sleepy (yes, I know it’s not even 9:00pm yet), I’m going to post something, even if it’s bad.
We’ve been really busy at work, building, testing, and debugging the latest version of AssistedResponseAgent.  It feels really close to being “done”, but there are still some problems that have been driving us crazy trying to find.  The whole process is draining me, so on nights and weekends, I don’t feel like doing much.  Which leads me to my next paragraph.

I haven’t been flying in quite a while.  I’d love to go, but don’t feel up to it.  At this point, I need to go with an instructor before I go by myself.  Ideally, I’d take a week off of work just to fly every other day, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Playing video games is one activity that I can just about do in my sleep and have used to relax.  I’ve put in about 30 hours on Zelda: Twilight Princess, and I figure I’m about half way done.  It’s a really great game and love playing it.  For any Wii owners out there who like adventure/RPG games, I definitely recommend it.

I downloaded and installed the a demo version of a new game called BioShock.  It looks beautiful — too beautiful for my computer.  The game runs, but can’t render anything correctly on my video card (which is about two generations too old).  I started looking into buying a new computer just to play BioShock and other new games that are coming out soon.  For now, I’ve decided to wait a bit.

I did end up finding a game that will run on my (nearly) four year old computer: World of Warcraft.  They’re offering a free 10 day trial, and some of my friends are playing so I thought I’d give it a shot.  Of course, I’m hooked and will probably end up buying the full version.  It’s not the prettiest game I’ve played, but it does the job and is a lot of fun.  Besides, as long as I’m playing it, I won’t feel like I need to buy a new computer (ha ha).

So… enough about video games.  I’m currently reading The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006.  It’s not bad, but a lot darker and more depressing than I expected.  Oh well, at least it’s different from my usual fare.  I should probably order some new books so that I’ll be ready once this one is done.

Last weekend, we visited with family and celebrated my mom’s 50th birthday.  Happy Birthday Mom!

Yesterday morning, I woke up early to see the lunar eclipse. It was fun, but my pictures didn’t turn out very good.  My camera batteries were almost dead, and I don’t have a tripod, so I just had to make due.

Today (ok, yesterday), I found this nice library for creating shortcut keys with JavaScript.  The code was straightforward enough that I didn’t have any trouble modifying it for my needs, and it’s also quite easy to use right out of the box.  I definitely recommend checking it out if you’re writing a web application.

I’ve been listening to, and enjoying, They Might Be Giants‘ new album The Else for a week now. It’s been a while since their last real album, so I was definitely ready for something new. On the whole, I’d say it’s on par with Factory Showroom and Mink Car, although maybe not quite as good. I think several of the songs are going to rock live, so I’m looking forward to getting to a concert.

It would be too hard to pick out the songs that I like (or not), so I’ll just limit myself to talking about just a few. “Contrecoup” is currently my favorite song on the album. Who couldn’t love a song comparing a brain injury with being in romantic love? “The Mesopotamians” is nice little introduction to the fictional band composed of ancient Mesopotamian rulers: Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh. “The Cap’m” is fun, but evades description like a man not driving a boat.

Check it out on Amazon or iTunes to listen to some samples.

Last weekend I picked up a copy of Make Magazine. After skimming through it, one project really caught my eye, the Tabletop Biosphere. It looked pretty easy to make and didn’t require any special tools. I did have to buy some supplies at the pet store, but it wasn’t too expensive. My favorite part was going down to a local pond and playing in the water and muck to get a good sample. I don’t know how long anything will live in there, but it’s already been two days of fun.