OK, this is seriously geeky, but I love it:

Exhibit A: Distance of stars from us, in light-years, and other information.

Exhibit B: definition of Light Cone.

Exhibit C:Your Personal Light Cone RSS feed.

"From the moment of my birth, light (that I could have influenced) has been expanding around the Earth and light (which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin) reaching it -- this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone." My light cone has 61 stars in it. The next star to be reached is Beta Leonis, 4 months from now.

Hat-tip to james_nicoll.

I ran across a site with some non-intuitive iDevice tips.

http://www.todaysiphone.com/2010/01/vid-iphone-101-%E2%80%94-how-to-set-up-multiple-emails/

If you use gmail, gmail address book, and google calendar, they will all link two-way with your Touch/Phone. I never set up the address book and calendar, so I gave it a go. It works, quite well! Now my non-phone is good for two more things, offline! (I had set up gmail, previously. But I really rely on google calendar.)

All it requires is setting up a new email account with "Microsoft Exchange" (instead of the "gmail" choice) and supplying 'm.google.com' as the server. The link above has a video demo/instructions.

--
I remain a neutral observer on the iPad release. It certainly isn't billed as a do-everything device. Which is ok; maybe that will happen with v.2 or v.3. v1's success will depend on how people react to actually having it in their hands. I was fairly "meh" about the Air until I saw one in person. (And then melted_snowball notes that it isn't really a full laptop replacement either).

I'm unconvinced that it will be a credible business device, unfortunately. Could it be a traveling laptop display extender? It's exactly the same height as my 15" macbook. I've seen displays that work over ethernet; if it's fast enough for full-screen video, it's probably fast enough to handle display extending over wifi. ...so then you have a little monitor you can carry around the room and connect to different machines at once. Hey?

It might be an OK device for creating things. melted_snowball suggests that it's apparently been constructed as a device to buy and consume things created by others. I am not so certain that's a hard limitation; if text input isn't too clunky, and their iWork applications aren't so clunky, and the developer kit makes it possible to DESIGN good creative apps... I'll just say if I had a lot of free time, I would enjoy trying to develop for the platform (casts jealous eyes at the iPhone devs around).

Last night I went to see my friends Jason (aka mrwhistlebear) and Karen perform at the Registry Theatre, as Gaedelica (named from a Gaelic book of poetry, Carmina Gadelica). They are both quite talented. One of their pieces was an original arrangement of The Huron Carol, which I hope they record. Great job guys!

They were followed by a Celtic band, Rant Maggie Rant, which I knew nothing about, other than the evening theme was "Celtic" and "Christmas music". If you know me well, you might know this pairing might make me apprehensive. It did, but I'm glad I stuck around. The Registry Theatre was packed to the gills; they were turning people away when I got there (20 minutes before the show). The band was talented, very energetic, and their two lead singers were attractive, too. One sort of looked like a slightly more fey version of Sting. The other singer made me want to start wearing vests- he wore his well- black vest, black dress shirt, purple tie, gray slacks. Porkpie hat.

And home by 10:30.
--

This weekend's main project was cleaning my home office floor. I rented a carpet vac, followed the instructions, and hey, the carpet is clean! ...-er, at least. I'm worried about the off-gassing- my last attempt to clean carpet in this house resulted in a severe reaction from dan, and while it didn't smell like anything yesterday, today there was something like new-car smell, so I went over it again with the vac with just water instead of soap. And there was a distressing amount of dirt picked up the second time around, as well. I suppose this is a cost of dog ownership. Yeah. I'm blaming the dog. She's the main reason we still have one room with carpet- it would make her unhappy if we took it out, because she uses it as her towel when she comes in from the rain and snow (after she's already been dried off).
--

Also yesterday I made fudge for today's Christmas Desert Potluck at Quaker Meeting. I was, once again, apprehensive (it's been years since I've made fudge), but it got a number of accolades, including people coming around asking who made it, so I'm happy. Meeting was good, too.
--

My desk is a disaster area. I haven't gotten back on top of the scattered papers since getting back from two weekends away, and we're reaching critical density. Ack.

At least the house is otherwise clean. Except for the furniture from my office which I moved out to clean the floor. Hm, I guess I should put that back when the floor's dry, or dan will be surprised.
--

Dan comes home on Tuesday! Yay!

--
I finally upgraded my laptop to Snow Leopard; the "family pack" DVD has been sitting on my desk since dan did his upgrade. It wasn't as painless as I'd hoped, because when I last swapped drives, I apparently used the wrong default partition map (Apple Partition Map instead of GUID) so Snow Leopard said I had to wipe the drive. So I babysat a reformat/recopy/upgrade (in the process discovering that my backup was not, in fact, bootable as I had thought; whoops.)

Apple did an excellent thing with this release, by the way- I was still running 10.4, and the upgrade DVD jumped me up to 10.6. They didn't have to make it this easy, and in Windows and Linux, I would be looking at either a sequential two-step upgrade, or wiping the disk and reinstalling my software and data; both probably a more fault-prone process than whatever Apple had to do to make this upgrade work in one step.

And I like Snow Leopard.

(Although, chatting with dan in iChat, we discovered the graphic for :-P looks like a big smile-and-tongue, which is just wrong. I don't know if it was that way in 10.4, but NOW IT IS WRONG.)

Ahem.

I want 43things.com crossed with a project-management tool. Crossed with delicious.com social-tagging. A crowd-sourced life coach.

Does anything like this exist already? Is the idea insane?

[The following won't make much sense if you haven't looked at 43things. Check 'm out; I'll wait here.]

What I'm picturing:

You're prompted for a goal you're working toward. (Such as "Learn Japanese.")

Then you're prompted to supply a list of things (sub-projects) you need to do before you can complete the goal. You can type in a list, and there is a pre-populated list aggregated from other people working toward the same goal; which you can tick "Need to do this" or "Already did this" (or, "what? this has nothing to do with my goal. Bury it.")

Then you go into each of the sub-projects, and fill in what you need to do to complete that goal. Also pre-populated with other peoples' suggestions. And so on, until you've mapped out a tree of the concrete details between where you are and your goal. Ideally, the terminal nodes are either already done, or "Next Actions" you could take right now (in the right environment; more on that in a bit).

Alternatively, you can start at the beginning, making a numbered list of steps. The site can present your project in either direction- detail-first or big-picture first. The problem with a numbered list of steps is it can artificially limit the order you do some tasks- so this site has to make it easy to rearrange tasks and look at your goal in many different ways. (Some folks do this with mind maps; I'd hope this system could switch from entirely text to a visual mind map as well).

A task might also need to specify a context in which it makes sense to do it; necessary conditions that are environmental, not items you do. ("At the office", "After September 1st".) With that addition, we've built something based on "Getting Things Done". But there's the social aspect, which is lacking from GTD, and a big part of my motivation for describing this.

Projects and sub-projects could have "testimonials" from people who successfully finished them,
as 43things.com currently has - such as "I did this and it was easier than I thought. The key thing was..." "achieving this made me feel ... " and "people who are doing this are also doing ..."

I like this idea, though it doesn't go far enough. Psychology tells us if you want to achieve something difficult, you will need to break it down. And the further you go into detail, the more likely you are to succeed. I saw this when I was making phone-calls for Obama: they had us ask "do you know when you're going to vote tomorrow? Do you have a plan for how you'll get there?" and the claim was that asking these questions would improve turnout by 25%. So, yeah. Motivating a task by breaking it down into little pieces is powerful.

But I want more. Once you have a recipe for achieving a big goal, not only could it build you a map to get you there; it could also aggregate for many people. As I said previously, it could suggest sub-projects from others. Things you hadn't fully thought out yet; an intervening step you missed; or different options for doing the same thing.

With aggregation, you can browse. Find out what other goals are made possible by your goal. This is a choose-your-own-adventure for REAL LIFE things people have done. And where that eventually got them. This is a powerful motivator, I think: in addition to breaking down your project into sub-projects, it's a step-by-step story of other peoples' successes.

So. Finding patterns. One example: if you spent a bit of time checking off things you've done, it could list you some easy "new projects" characterized by few additional steps. Sure, lots of them won't appeal; but I imagine some could be inspiring surprises. And building the list of accomplishments could make you feel pretty good about things you've done and forgotten, or mentally discounted as unimportant.

Some large amount of 43things seems to involve doing something repetitive, like "go to the gym three times a week." For that, the social motivator could be a little calendar where you tick off the days you met your goal, and show a little public "43 weeks successful at goal" progress-marker. There are certainly lots of tasks that just involve bearing down and doing it; perhaps all those websites to track peoples' progress at exercise or whatever are relevant here.

A bit about how realistic this is. It's possible the aggregation would be impossible. At least there are these gotchas: how to accurately match up the same goal with slightly different text; and whether all goals with the same text are actually the same goal. Perhaps the matching is made on both the text of the goal, and what kinds of sub-goals it has- it can track and differentiate multiple goals with the same text, depending on whether aggregates of people pick certain sub-goals. (I'm thinking of "Proposal to Partner." Either you toss the sub-tasks "get on one knee" and "buy a ring" or you toss "determine full spec" and "book conference-room." Maybe that works?... At least it gives the user an amusing moment when they see the suggestions.)

[Edit to add: I forgot something important. Many steps aren't binary "did this" or "have to do this." There has to be a state of "working on this." So you can see a view of "what am I currently working on?" This isn't exactly the same as "this is a sub-project with sub-items and some are done." Maybe it's close, though. Perhaps if you ticked "I started this" and there aren't any sub-items, it could warn you after some period of time with no change, "are you sure there aren't any sub-items you need to identify?"

I also didn't mention "I am not going to do this." Which is a valid and useful thing to acknowledge about projects you changed your mind on.]

So... yeah. Can you build this for me, dearest interwebs? Thanks!

I would consider prototyping this in some web 2.0 language, coming up with a clever name, and seeing what happens, but I have enough experience with my idea-backlog to say that I'm perfectly happy if the idea is just out there for somebody to take if it sounds good to them.

I'm curious what you think, even if it's "why would anybody bother?"

ARPANET, it is claimed, was born on October 29, 1969, and the first message sent was supposed to be "login", but it crashed before they got to "g."

I learned this in today's Globe and Mail, which comes to me on large sheets of bleached paper printed with soy inks. Yeah- woah.

ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency, became DARPA, a Defense projects agency, the year before I was born. It was the parent agency responsible for GPS, Gallium Arsenide integrated circuits, and of course for the Internet.

They are also responsible for stealth bombers and the mechanical elephants that ravaged Vietnam and led America to military victory oh wait maybe not.

Some months ago, I read an opinion piece (I wish I remember where) claiming that DARPA held [edited to clarify] distinction among US government agencies for successfully funding innovative R&D for over 50 years. DARPA goes for high-risk/high-reward projects, with flat hierarchy, tiny labour pool (fewer than 150 employees), and a distributed development model. "Cool," thought I, "if only they cloned the model for non-military agencies."

This evening (in googleblog) I learned of ARPA-E, which hopes to have the same success in the Energy sector. Visiting his friends at Google Headquarters, the US Energy Secretary announced $150 million in grants, high-gamble projects in projects like energy storage, carbon capture, fuels, and desalination.

[Checks watch]

C'mon folks, it's been two days already.

(ARPA-E was actually created in 2007, but it didn't get kicked into gear until it got its first budget in Obama's first few weeks on the job.)

[Checks watch]

C'MON already!

The last week has seen me:

* startle Neil Stephenson [1]
* have an annoying contact lens incident [2]
* apply the necessary teachable-moment to a kid outside my workplace who was messing around with my bike when I left the office
* meet Stewart Brand
* watch a superconducting toy train, a sort-of real quantum computer and a really pretty 3-d movie which was narrated by Stephen Hawking [3]
* document the activities of the zombies at City Hall. Well, the zombies attracted to City Hall by a certain video. This was surprisingly fun.
* play with a working reprap, a supposedly self-replicating machine. [4]
* be part of creating and solving various problems; technical, social; problems of planning and problems of execution. Be pleased with some outcomes. Be exhausted at work, but not too exhausted.
* see melted_snowball off on his trip to Japan. Missing him a lot.
* not get enough sleep. Not get the rounds of bugs that are sweeping my workplace. Now if I can just get my flu shots before I have any flu symptoms, I'll be even happier.
* feel simultaneously lonely and not like talking to people. Sometimes I wish I were wired to be more social.
* spending quality time with Rover.

[1] I saw Neil Stephenson speak twice last week; afterwards, I thanked him for providing fun role-models for geeky people everywhere. I offered that I was occasionally inspired by Sangemon, the "hero" of Zodiac, whose style of bicycling in Boston traffic was over-the-top assertive. Neil looked a bit nervous at this- "I hope you do that safely." I laughed. Anyway, he was very polite.

[2] on second thought, I won't describe it. Not fun. [5]

[3] The toy train zoomed around a magnetic track. The "train" contained a super-chilled magnet and it was propelled by a shove from the demo-guy. The "quantum computer" was very poorly explained by a volunteer docent but it had an oscilloscope readout with a squiggle. And a plexiglass and metal assembly. Sorry, but that's all I got. I found my favourite part of the video, animated by NCSA - flying from the western spiral arm to the center of our galaxy. This was the most effective use of 3D I've yet seen.

[4] This evening I went off to the local nascent "hack lab" (clubhouse for tinkerers, more or less). I brought my arduino and stepper-motor. But I spent a lot of the time there socializing, playing with other peoples' toys [6], and such. It's a cool space, and my life isn't compatible with spending much time there, but I'm glad to see it exists.

[5] but my optometrist's office is 5 minutes walk from my office; and they gave me a new lens to replace the one that was stuck in my eye. Oops, I wasn't going to describe it. Well there you go.

[6] the reprap was a surprise to see in person- by the end of the evening, it was working, and it did "print" a plastic part used to make itself. Re-reading reprap.org, I had forgotten they only produce 60% of their own parts- yes it's a toy, but it's a fairly cool toy.

I'm missing some stuff in this update, but that's what I get for not posting frequently enough.

Unclutterer reports that O'Reilly tech books has an ebook promotion for $4.99 per book you already own. This looks quite useful to me:

- O'Reilly ebooks come as a bundle of three common formats (mobi, pdf, epub)
- they are un-copyprotected, a.k.a. not locked to existing software/hardware readers
- while only a fraction of their books are currently available in ebook, some others are also available as pdf

To get the $4.99 books, you need to make an account on their site, register the ISBNs of your books, add them each to your cart, and use the 499UP discount code. I tested one book, and it appears to work.

I may just have to get busy with our barcode-reader at work, since that's where my O'Reilly books live now. I figure at least a dozen of my books are worth future-proofing in case I eventually buy a portable bookreader. :)

There are moments I get, that the world is full of promise. Anything is possible.

In this one, I will attempt to re-join my LJ.

I've been following my friends-list for the last while, but one thing and another, I'd not had time to really figure out what I wanted to say in this space.

Over the last month, my overall mood has been grateful.

That's the main theme. There are sub-themes, including full of joy, awed, stressed, frustrated, and ow. And I could write a post about all of these, but I will instead try for a one-liner: joy at time with dan and with other friends; awe at wonderful theatre; stress from repercussions of having too much on my plate; frustration with "this should be easier"; and "ow" at my body. Each, a side-note to the main-theme of gratefulness- Life? It is good.

And I have been enjoying the nudging I've been getting (from friends, from God, from readings) that being grateful is a perfectly fine response.

It doesn't make for gripping reading, though; so let me tell you a story.

[oh geez, why did I write that? Now I've totally written myself into a corner, I haven't even come up with what story I'll tell.]

[Back from Quaker Meeting, a ride home with beartalon, and a bit of lunch...]

This story is about the future.

Last week at work I was emailing with the campus bookstore about their print-on-demand service. They have a book-printing machine, and I was curious if it was reasonable to print this for me. They quoted $50 setup, $19.95 to make the book. But, since I said that co-workers would probably want additional copies, he added they could waive the setup fee if they deemed the book worth keeping in their library. Sounded great; he'd talk to his boss; I'd get back to him when I needed the book...

On Thursday, when I was in the midst of finishing programming edits on this month's project, I got an email from the bookstore, "We've printed a sample. Come and take a look."

Oh. Oh no. As I told dawn_guy: that was so totally unfair, I didn't have time to do that, I had a million things to do.

So I was an adult, and kept fixing bugs, even though in the back of my head, there is a book that wasn't ordered on my behalf, it was printed and perfect-bound on my behalf, and it was just sitting there waiting for me to go collect it. So, ya, I'm a bit of a book nerd, and I wanted to go kick the book's tires.

Just before 5pm, I dropped by dawn_guy's office and said, "I need a walk. Wanna go down to the bookstore?" And we did. And the book machine was sitting there, and Sean showed me the sample he made, which was pretty much exactly like the PDF, a slightly oversize paperback book, with a black-and-white cover-page because we didn't give them a colour page to work from. And Dawn and I realized the bottom edge was off by a couple of millimeters, and he checked with a level and yup, the cutter had gotten a bit out of alignment. And I was craning my neck to get a better look at the machine behind the counter, so Sean asked me if I wanted to go back and look at it.

And he ran off a copy of Heart of Darkness while I was there, just to show how it works. And it looks more or less like the video- from when you press "print", it plunked out a book in less than five minutes. More or less indistinguishable from any paperback, except the colour cover felt warm, and not quite dry yet.

Which feels yet another step closer to Matter Compilers in various bits of science fiction.

As I remarked to Dawn, I have seen the future, and it is slightly tacky.

The book will serve well. It is a well-written manual (also published by O'Reilly Press) for the revision-control system called "Subversion". Which is why I made a bookmark last week to "Subversion Best Practices", a title that slightly disappointed peaceofpie when he saw what it really was. :)

My bike odometer just rolled past 215 miles, which means it's gone a total of 6,215 since I put the odometer on the bike nearly exactly 9 years ago. As melted_snowball pointed out, that's 10,000 kilometers, so I'm going to reset to kilometers.

I wonder where the next 10k will take us.

Tomorrow, I'm off to IAD (Dulles) and ROA (Roanoke) thence to Virginia Tech for Friends Gathering. This year, as last year, I'm not taking a workshop, as I'm helping out the community instead. The week promises to be very full, very warm (Virginia! Summer! Oy.) and hopefully with surprises of the good kind.

My bike odometer just rolled over another 1,000 miles. I expected it to happen in the middle of the park, and I briefly considered taking a photo of the llamas/swans/bridge/whatever was in sight at the time, then decided it was unnecessary; I'd remember it well enough as I remembered the last 5 times and that was sufficient.

Probably that choice was for the best, because it rolled over on University grounds, just at the first path intersections where you've got loading-dock on one side and shopping-plaza Bank Machine on the other, with a side-helping of advertising signs. I'm all about the urban photography, but if you've seen one mini-mall you've seen them all.

And equally valid, if you've seen one odometer roll from 999.99 to 0.0, you've probably seen them all, too.

The university exams continue this week. Students walking singly or in groups into the buildings, with palpable energy/fear/resignedness. I've been there and done that countless times as well; still have dreams about it, and who doesn't? Grateful for the opportunity to swing past, hold the door for them, go up to my office and do the work I can to make their profs' jobs easier.

lim-i-nal \ˈli-mə-n^əl\ (adj) Latin limin-, limen threshold 1: of or relating to a sensory threshold 2 : barely perceptible 3 : of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition

Check out the video for a new painting and sketching app for the iPhone/Touch. Very neat looking. It's got: infinite zoom (vector graphics), free rotation, a clever palette, and brushes that seem to work very much like real brushes (blending, washes, translucency.)

If I had an iPhone, I would be all over it, even though I, um, don't really draw; and not just because I know the author. Who happens to have an art studio in town AND a long history with writing software for artists. So I know the next version of Paintbook is going be even more sophisticated.

Anyhow, happy Monday!

Not figuratively, literally. My bike has developed a (dangerous) tendency to lose its gear, often when I'm starting up from still, and also when I'm coasting. Not the chain, but likely the freewheel, according to elbie_at_trig, who was conveniently going home at the same time as me, just as I was thinking, "if only I could ask someone to jog along next to my bike..."

So, yeah. Tomorrow morning, cycle shop is my first stop on the way to work.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm not spinning wheels, quite the opposite.

Work is going, and the three active projects are interesting, if potentially long. But the structure of things allows me to interleaving the work, and I can't imagine getting bored with it. Really, this still feels like perfect job for me. And hey, I missed my boss, who was gone a week on vacation, but I can hardly fault her for that.

Life feels adequately social, these last weeks. Care and feeding of my introverted self- it sometimes feels like I need a push, but I'm getting most of what I need.

This Thursday evening is the third and final Quaker Seekers at Laurier session we have planned; we're speaking on Equality. I think there's an LJ post sitting in my brain, to help me organize what I'm saying in my two 6-minute pieces.

Last week I had a conference-call with co-organizers for the Quaker Quest Traveling Team. A month from now I'll be one of two presenters to a regional Quaker gathering, and in early May they're sending me to Pendle Hill for a weekend conference with other trainers. This work feels both like something I'm pulled to do, and a big side-order of "what the hell was I thinking when I said yes?" Where it goes nobody knows, but I am loving the finding out.

In late May melted_snowball and I are taking a vacation to Nova Scotia for my birthday; it's our first time to Atlantic Canada and I am already having dreams about rocky shorelines and whale-watching.

This week has featured two meals with duck (breast; and burgers), and two meals with pesto. It is a good life, my friends.

I'm midway through installing linux on a mac mini. I'm in love with this hardware; it's so quiet, runs cool, and is barely bigger than my hand. I'm putting Xen-enabled debian onto it, so alongside the web and email services it can run virtual servers such as Asterisk, or possibly freePBX. Anyhow, my coder.com server will move over some time in April, I hope.

Also in April, my geek crew of Perl Mongers are doing a hardware hacking workshop with Arduino microcontroller boards. So far, I've tested sample programs that play a simple tune; flash LEDs; and (sort of) replicate a Clapper but send a signal over USB to computer. My goals are to control a 600x200 pixel LCD display, and to precisely control a stepper-motor to... well, it'll be cool if it works, that's all I will say for now.

So, all you folks who haven't posted about yourselves recently- what's up with you?

As dan was making dinner, I told him how I just spent a frustrated hour fighting with Apple Automator, trying to convert a ten-page PDF into ten jpegs, which I could then run through the text-recognition program that came with my scanner to ultimately have a plain-text document to email. ( Whinge whinge ) Dan's response was, "You only need to get this to half a dozen people, right? Why don't you just make copies of the document and snail-mail them to people?"

*sigh*

Maybe he's right.

But in the meantime, I've ( been a good geek and learned this stuff good. )

Today was great; I went to Quaker Meeting, had lunch with a group of 12, including hajen, who I just discovered is LJ-enabled today!

melted_snowball and I went for a country drive with roverthedog, and he made tasty duck and broccoli stir-fry, and since then I've been playing on teh computer.

Yesterday I whinged about Quicken; one of the frustrations was with historical USD/CAD exchange rates. Getting the proper exchange rate for a list of 30 dates is... somewhat labour intensive.

Apparently not one for the simplest route to an answer, I had to do this:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=puQxoYrt-CYqRz0mGUzsVAA&hl=en

...What you'll see there is: a list of dates on the left; columns of calculated data in the middle, and a graph showing USD/CAD exchange rates on the right, with google-finance style sliders.

The graph is sort of pretty, but it's entirely for show. The calculated data's the good part as far as I'm concerned. Each row is doing a lookup on oanda.com for an arbitrary date's USD/CAD exchange rate. The formula for each line is something like:

=ImportHtml("http:// www.oanda.com/convert/fxhistory?expr2=cad& lang=en&date="&B2&"...&format=HTML&redirected=1","table",7)

That is: get the HTML from this URL, replacing this parameter with whatever is in cell B2 of the spreadsheet, and display whatever is in the 7th table in that HTML.

Basically the entire internet is scriptable into a google spreadsheet. ...Maybe excel or openoffice can also do this, I really don't know (I know excel can download a webpage, but this was MUCH easier for me to understand.) And the updates are quite impressively fast; I cringed every time I changed the date-range because it instantly meant 20 more hits on oanda's server. But it was quite speedy. And this whole experiment was maybe an hour of playing. Google docs, you rock.

(If anybody with a google docs account wants to play with the source, you're welcome to it, just let me know; I apparently can't share an editable version with the wider world, only with "invited" people. Though, you should be able to see the formulas yourself. And I'm happy to answer questions...)

I want my work mac to lock, with password, when I'm away from it, but I'm not too keen on typing in the password when I come back. I've gotten my home desktop to do The Right Thing. The tricky part is unlocking without password, since that's not a standard feature of OS10.4 or 10.5.

To replicate, you need: mac with bluetooth, phone with bluetooth, BluePhoneElite (shareware, $25, boatloads of features I find useful [edit to add: if you don't want the other features, this free donationware script will do the trick], and Mac Development Tools installed.

Steps:
1) Open Script Editor, start a new script, and paste in ( this script )

2) Compile the short C program here, with the provided instructions. I stashed the executable in ~/bin/notify

Now's a good time to test the applescript, perhaps with ( this code. )

3a) If you don't want BluePhoneElite's other features, follow the rest of the instructions here to install the freebie proximity script.

3b) If, like me, you wanted to download all your text-messages off your phone when the memory filled up (instead of deleting them), you'll probably want BluePhoneElite. Give it an install (the trial is free for two weeks). Do the install-related tasks, such as pairing it with your phone. Next, handle the proximity detector: go to Preferences->Triggers and select "Bluetooth phone in range". On the right-hand side, hit the plus, add an "applescript reactor" (in the Notification sub-menu). They have a docs page which shows pictures of the general process.

Click the gear on the right; provide the filename for the AppleScript you previously saved.

It's a good idea to check the "filter" box at the bottom, and Edit Filter to choose the phone you just added. I don't know what happens if someone else's phone comes into range, but you don't want just any phone unlocking it.

And that seems to be it. I've done a bit of testing, and it seems to work consistently. I am curious whether this bluetooth activity will suck my phone's battery much faster, though.

Three years ago, I read about 9-block quilt patterns and I turned it into a perl program and article, purely for amusement-value. And a Christmas present.

Someone else has taken the original idea and made them into a security feature for web discussion-boards to prevent spoofing. It's a one-way hash from someone's IP address into a unique picture. Quite a clever idea!

I noticed a few weeks ago when these shapes started showing up on wordpress blogs. It seems they've added it as a standard wordpress plugin option. It will take me a while before I don't do a double-take each time I see them though. :)

Should I buy "I'm going away" doughnuts for the four coworkers in my area?

Monday is semi-officially my last day, and I don't start in CS until the 28th. Although I'm not sure how I managed to swing it, I am fairly happy about two weeks unpaid vacation. What should I do in it? I might visit my folks, though I did just see them, and I don't want to leave dan without a car, since he is in fact NOT going to China next week.)

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I've got the head-cold I got rid of before I went to NYC (three countries ago, four if you count home). It seems to have lodged partly in my ears this time, which just sucked yesterday on the plane. The ears are mostly OK now, as are my sinuses partly, but I'm feeling really slow. Bleh.

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A last bit of suckiness: Windows, why do you do this?

Finding programs on your All Programs menu can become difficult if you have a lot of programs installed. When you install new programs, Microsoft Windows XP adds each new item to the end of the All Programs menu. You can, however, quickly sort the items on your All Programs menu in alphabetical order.

[three-click instructions to sort alphabetically]

That's it—your programs are instantly alphabetized. Enjoy your newly organized All Programs menu.

[... Y]ou'll probably need to go back periodically and sort the lists again, because Windows XP doesn't automatically keep the list in alphabetical order.

Gee, I can't think of any reason that would be useful- partly alpha, partly installation-order. And you can't go back to installation-order either, which could be useful. Talk about lazy UI design.

...Did I mention how happy I am that my next work computer's gonna be a Mac?

I just watched myself add a new travel routine. I was packing my suitcase, and the last thing I put into it was my travel kit, at the top of the suitcase, and I said to myself, "yes, that's right; it has to go at the top."

And then I thought, "why would that be? It's no less convenient to get out from the bottom if I lay the suitcase down first." ...And then I thought of all the times I had previously tried to get at the travel-kit in the airport and it was inconveniently somewhere other than the top. I idly wonder how many times I've said "that was stupid, I should've put it at the top of the suitcase" before I started doing it reflexively, and how many times I've done it reflexively before it became routine.

Maybe there are people who often find themselves doing things for no reason they can tell, and then it turns out they'd unconsciously anticipated something else later on. I wish my memory were good enough for that; instead, I'll be happy enough with just noticing the occasional pattern. And avoid going around saying, "what is it that I've forgotten to do next?..."

I'm not sure this post had a point. Oh well. We're off to the airport soon, and melted_snowball has a few Air Canada Lounge vouchers which will get us dinner and a quiet place to sit.