Roblog

I was doing some menial task at work on Friday - data entry, essentially - when I went to enter the name of "Cain, Nicole". It was supposed to resolve into an email address as part of the process. I moved on and went back to check my work, and realized I it hadn't resolved into a proper email address. I had typed in the wrong name: "Cain, Valerie".

It took me a minute to recognize where this came from - Valerie was someone I had worked with in 1995. I would not have come up with her name if you asked me, but there it was, and I had typed it. It brought back a flood of the names of people that I had worked with back then, people who I had not thought of in years.

I spent a few minutes trying to satisfy my curiosity about some of them. Many were on LInkedIn. So now I'm considering adding them to my network on LinkedIn to see if I might be able to meet them again. They were the group where I had my first "real" job after college, so there is a fondness I have for that job and the people that worked there. I'm not sure what I'd say to them, but it feels like it would be "neat" to say hi.

But I have not yet made the plunge yet of connecting with them. We'll see if I do before our next trip back to the north east this summer, where I would have the opportunity to see them.

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This weekend I completed the first pass at designing a font based on my wife’s printing. I turned out pretty well for not spending any clean-up time on it yet, but there are a few things I still need to fix:

• The letter spacing is not refined
• There are no braces characters
• There are no accented characters (except for the n-tilde)
• I may need to tweak the relative line thicknesses (so that all the characters looks like they were drawn with the same pen)

Even in its current state, Donna’s font is much more usable than the font I created based on my daughters’ 4-year-old printing, since it has all characters represented on a keyboard (except for those braces). It seems a little small, so I may need to tweak that, too.

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My favorite umbrella has been a large, black golf umbrella. It is big enough to cover me in the rain even if the wind is blowing a bit. Even after the tab that keeps it closed fell out, I just used the Velcro strap to wrap around it to keep it closed. Recently, one end cap snapped off of the rib (so that the fabric wasn’t taut right there), but it was still perfectly functional. This past week, however, I had to put “large umbrella” on my birthday list because it broke in a new way.

At first, I didn’t realize it had a new flaw when I grasped it tightly in a rain storm last week while walking from my car to my building downtown. I quickly realized something was amiss, though, when I felt water dripping onto my head even though it was completely under the umbrella. Looking up I noticed my umbrella now had a sunroof! The “wind cap” that is the extra disk of fabric that sits on the very top of the umbrella and overlaps the larger umbrella fabric had separated from the main umbrella fabric and was happily flapping in the breeze. This left an opening right in the middle of the umbrella, rendering it somewhat less useful as a rain repellent. I tried to spin the umbrella around so that the wind would blow that flap of fabric down instead of up, but the swirling wind around the buildings downtown made this impossible.

I tried gluing the cap back onto the umbrella, but it did not hold. It really needed to be sewn to repair it properly, but given my lack of sewing skills and its other signs of age, I didn’t bother to try that repair. So for the next month or two, I’ll be using my emergency backup umbrella I keep at my desk at work: a Houston Astros umbrella I got at a game this past year. It’s actually a fairly decent umbrella for being free, but it’s not nearly the size of the umbrella its replacing.

I posted a few new pictures to my picture catalog yesterday. Enjoy!

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I just finished a fun project. Using the free FontForge program, I meticulously traced some letters I had my daughters draw when they were 4 years old. I had imagined creating a font based on their writing back then, but did not complete the project. Recently, for some reason, I got the urge to complete them - so I did!

Elena4yo.ttf

Amanda4yo.ttf

As fonts, these are both rather incomplete. The lower case letters are identical to the upper case letters, and there are no numbers, punctuation, or symbols. I did artificially create a period and comma for both, but that's it. Although this is all consistent with how they wrote at the time, it makes actually using the font a little less practical.

Next, I'm going to see if Donna wants me to create a font based on her writing, and when the girls turn 8, I'll do another font based on their writing.

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I was always a high achiever academically in school, and my favorite subject was math. I got into a “fast math” program that taught Algebra I and II in middle school. I loved it, and I now wish I remembered the long-hand way to compute square roots I learned in that class. The next year, as a freshman in high school, I took geometry (typical for a 9th grader) and pre-calculus (decidedly not typical). The end result was that by the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had run out of math classes to take at my high school (pre-calc was as far as my small school went). The solution we came up with was for me to take evening math classes as a local college.

Continue reading "The most hated 11-year-old in Calculus" »

Almost 2 years ago, I had a bad car wreck that totaled my Saturn Ion. Amazingly, I had no serious injuries, save for some severe dizziness a few days later. It was so bad that I went to the doctor that day.

The diagnosis was there was nothing permanently damaged, but that if I wanted an MRI, the doctor would be willing to order that procedure. I said that as long as it got better, an MRI seemed unnecessary to me.

That's where I thought we left it, but a week or so later, I got the following letter in the mail.

I ignored the letter, but have found it quite amusing ever since. Forgetting to have an MRI of your brain seems like evidence right there that you really need the MRI of your brain. I wonder what the person who filled out that note thought my state of mind was, and if they thought the note was going to be helpful.

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Today I’ll tell you the tale about when I got trapped in the Waste Management Smoking Patio. I call it “Trapped in the Waste Management Smoking Patio”

Continue reading "Trapped in the Waste Management Smoking Patio" »

A few months ago, I was moved at work from sharing a conference room (which afforded a certain amount of privacy) to what is called a “trading bench”. This is basically one step down from cubicles, in that I’m sitting at a long desk with people on either side of me. I have some desk space and a low (3’) wall facing me. Although I can do my work OK, I have no space to personalize and little-to-no privacy.

To block out some nearby conversations, I’ve started occasionally using my headphones. I’d been bringing in my CD collection, a few at a time, to rip onto my work computer so that I can listen to music when I need to block out the background chatter. For whatever reason, I stumbled upon the iTunes Radio Stations, which are a large listing of streaming audio from various internet sites. This is really nice, since I can listen to and discover new songs in categories of my choosing.

I tend not to listen to NPR at work, since that actually distracts me from what I’m supposed to be doing, but I do listen to pop music, guitar instrumentals, and a SomaFM station called Lush which is what I’ve been listening to a lot recently. It seems to be the right balance between being entertaining and ignorable.

My camera is dangerous. I love my (still new) Nikon D60 DSLR, and I’m still using it whenever I can. I finished my stint as my daughter’s swim team photographer this week, and I continued to get compliments on the photographs I took every week. In fact, the swim team organizers are looking for someone to bring an LCD projector so they can show the pictures during the swim party this weekend.

And this past weekend, I took a few pictures at a “water day” event at my family’s church. There were only a few people there, but I had my camera with me and tried to get some good splashy action shots. About half of them were good enough to share, and after posting them to my Picasa album, I get several compliments.

Water pictures are especially dramatic with my new camera. The good optics combined with the low latency of the shutter release (so that I can take a picture precisely when I want to, and not 2 seconds later) allow me to get people’s faces with abstract water blobs seemingly floating in air. It’s the kind of shot you can’t get with a typical point-and-shoot digital camera.

People just don’t realize that it’s not actually that hard with the right equipment (which I now have). Granted, I do color-correct the photos, only show people the good ones, and crop almost all of them (cropping photos correctly makes a huge difference), but it still isn’t difficult.

So the dangerous part is that I like taking pictures with my new camera, but when I do people are really excited about the results. I foresee being asked to be the official/unofficial photographer for future events. That’s not all bad, but I don’t want it to feel like a burden or that I’m obligated to be the photographer for every event.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to find the right balance. In the mean time, I’ll enjoy taking photos and the ego trip I get from all the effusive compliments afterwards.