girton’s devnotes

Northerly view of the mountains at sunset.

From left to right: headphones, Dell Quad core (Vista) (24 inch monitor), Macbook pro (17 inch), Behringer C-1 microphone attached through Blue Icicle (that little blue thing), LaCrosse Technologies radio-controlled clock.

Two 16 Gigabyte USB sticks (both filled up) used to transfer demographic data. Sending these babies through the mail is a lot faster than downloading.

   

Click here to download:

Workplace_photos_August_2009.zip (355 KB)

Please note in bookcase: Ski KT22 plaques made for me by Nicole when she was in school, and finally I skiied itt last winter: I carry ski movies I made of a run down KT22 at sunset in my iPod touch.

While software work goes on inside, bird life on the balcony continues apace.

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Hello everyone! Happy mid-summer day!

 I received an email from one of my sisters, about ten days before we all attend a family get-together. The email included, as a word attachment, a page with the questions shown below, with space left for an answer under each one, as shown.

 It occurs to me that in addition to knowing the answers from my family, I would also be happy to hear from many of YOU about YOUR year. And since there are ten questions, and ten days, perhaps I can give at least some of an answer for one question every day, and by putting them on my blog here at devnotes.posterous.com, also be able to include pictures or a movie.

  
Here are the ten questions:

  
How was your year? Mention where you work or go to school.

 What has changed in your life from a year ago?

  
What can you do this year that you couldn’t do a year ago?

  
What was the most challenging thing you did this year?

  
Where did you travel? What was your favorite place that you visited?

  
What was your most memorable meal or favorite new restaurant?

  
Do you have any new hobbies or interests?

  
Did you read any good books or see any movies you’d recommend?

  
Did you make any new friends this year?

  
What do you need to do to make your vacation complete? e.g. trip to Oinks?

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Once again I had to use a Mac to rescue a Windows machine. How else was I going to look up what to do, when my keyboard stopped working after a reboot? Funny thing is, that's usually supposed to SOLVE Windows problems, not cause them!

 When I couldn't enter my Windows name and password, even after switching to another keyboard (both were fully functional though, as it turned out), I used the Vista on-screen keyboard (c:\windows
\system32\osk.exe) to start the registry editor (regedt32.exe) and replace all Upperfilter and Lowerfilter occurrences of "kbdclass VMware" with the simple "kbdclass." (VMWare is a highly regarded virtual machine software that you can install on a computer to make it pretend it's another computer -- and after this episode, I "sure felt smart" **)

 Then, thanks to the cryptic online instructions of the anonymous BAS13, I uninstalled the keyboard driver, rescanned for changed hardware, and as they say on the internets Wah-Lah! I never thought I'd be saying this, but wherever you are, thanks, BAS!

 I won't bore you with the details of how discovered what I needed to know: Google for "keyboard driver error code 39." I just thought it was cool that when I was typing in "keyboard driver error..." Google popped up the words "... code 39". Somebody had been down this road before!

 ** Can you say this sentence without laughing? "One smart feller, he felt smart, two smart fellers, they felt smart, three smart fellers, they all felt smart." If not, then try again until you do...

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Well, well, well.  I just tried to look at the Feynman lectures in the Google Chrome browser, but it would not download -- it said it was "not officially supported" in my browser.  I have been avoiding Microsoft's Silverlight video plug-in to avoid exactly this kind of experience.  It installed o.k. on my Macbook, but then the Mac's  fan went on and stayed on even though nothing was running, so I tried it on the Dell.  I use Google Chrome because it is faster than anything else, and Silverlight wouldn't install.

I wonder what Feynman would have said -- I have a pretty good idea.

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