Sun, 01 Jan 2012

Things I wonder about

OMG Facts cited this study of why strings like your headphones get tied into knots in your pocket. It's one of those things that I have always wondered about. Why, when you put away the Christmas lights neatly at the end of the season do they come out of the box next season all tied into knots. Well, someone has obviously too much time on their hands and actually performed a scientific study to give us the answer. I didn't read the entire study -- I don't have that sort of free time, but, they performed 3,415 trials to answer this question. As it turns out

It is well known that a jostled string tends to become knotted; yet the factors governing the “spontaneous” formation of various knots are unclear. We performed experiments in which a string was tumbled inside a box and found that complex knots often form within seconds. We used mathematical knot theory to analyze the knots. Above a critical string length, the probability P of knotting at first increased sharply with length but then saturated below 100%. This behavior differs from that of mathematical self-avoiding random walks, where P has been proven to approach 100%. Finite agitation time and jamming of the string due to its stiffness result in lower probability, but P approaches 100% with long, flexible strings.

I'm not certain what a selfpavoiding random walks are, but your headphones are long, flexible strings. Now if they could just study Breedlove's law of plugs which states

A plug will always plug into the socket in the opposite direction that it naturally lays.

posted 08:43 [/SimpleThings] permanent link

Sat, 31 Dec 2011

Icon for Today

I originally wrote this in July of 2009. The old one represented the increased use of cell phones.

But I have a new icon to show now the last day of 2011. It seems that the art of conversation -- even on the phone -- is going the way of the letter. Now texting is the preferred mode of communication. It's so rampant that California has declared a maximum enforcement period over the New Year to stop distracted drivers. They have issued 15,000 tickets for texting while driving and it isn't even the first yet.

----------- Original ------------------------------------

Because it's hot here, I get out in the morning to walk. I have noticed that the early morning icon is the bicycle and trashbag full of aluminum cans. But the REAL icon for our times is the person with the cell phone stuck to their ear. You see them in all sorts of places across all social strata, age groups, and ethnic groups. Usually, they're talking really loud as if everyone needs to hear their conversation.

posted 14:26 [/bloids] permanent link

Happy New Year 2012!

From our house to yours, a happy and prosperous new year.

I thought I'd pull out last year's blog and see if my wish for the world came true. Although the media keep claiming that the economy is getting better, I don't see all that much improvement. Sure, the rich are richer, but the poor seem to be doing as bad or worse and I don't call that improvement. The U.S. is out of Iraq and, THAT is an improvement as far as I am concerned since I thought it was a mistake to go there in the first place. I'm uncertain whether we actually achieved anything by being there other whan wasting our soldiers' lives and lots of money. I am sure someone MADE lots of money by us being there, otherwise, we would never have gone and stayed so long, but all-in-all Iraq was another Viet Nam. We can only hope that we will be out of Afgahanistan soon without much more loss of life or waste of money.

Happy New Year, 2011!

Another one gone by. The last two have been pretty tough with the economy and all. We can only hope that 2011 will be the start of a better period for everyone. I look forward to a productive and peaceful year for everyone and hope that we can learn to compromise in our politics and show compassion in our lives.

posted 13:07 [/Thoughts] permanent link

Tue, 27 Dec 2011

Giving . . . Caution of the Professionals

This is the time of year when we receive lots of solicitations for charitable giving and we want to help. But you have to be careful when you give through professional solicitors. Very little of the money actually makes it to the charities and, after some charities take their cut, even less makes it to the people it is intended to help. The percentage passed through to the charities fell this last year to near 1/3 of the money. That means when you contribute through one of these professional services, out of your $100 contribution, only about $30 makes it to the charity which then must remove their overhead percentage meaning that even less makes it to the actual constituents in aid. You can cut down on those percentages and increase your giving to the actually needy population, give directly to a very efficient charity. Here in Sacrameno, I like Loaves and Fishes which serves the needs of the homeless.

posted 18:01 [/compassion] permanent link

Sat, 24 Dec 2011

New Meaning to Moving Yourself

It looks like someone didn't like the position of our basketball hoop around 1:30 AM this morning, so they decided to move it to another part of the front yard, specifically on our newly planted lawn. Unfortunately, they decided to move it by hitting it and backing their car over the lawn. As you can see, the new position is some 20 feet+ away from the old position. This brings up some questions:

1. Why were they backing up?
   Ok, we live on a dead-end street and there's a large fence with reflectors at the end, but, didn't they see the TWO "No Outlet" signs on the street?
2. Didn't they realize that they had hit something and were pushing it?
   I'm not sure how they did it, but there is no damage to the basketball hoop.
3. Didn't they realize that this is a paved street and that grass is NOT part of the pavement?

I have to assume that the "movers" were drunk. It's a good thing that this was just the basketball hoop and not a person or car.

posted 15:26 [/FromMyFone] permanent link

Sun, 04 Dec 2011

TreeDBNotes Version 4.1 Evaluation

I'm looking at TreeDBNotes as a temporary substitute for OneNote on a portable drive. So far, so good.

I have tried a couple of things including exporting this note as an HTML entry to apply to the blog. I'm not certain just what will happen, but I'm going to try now. It worked. I had to export this note as an HTML page and then modify the first line to fit the way that the blog software works. It also appears that I have to only put a single carriage return between the paragraphs, otherwise, the software export appears to put an extra paragraph and break set of HTML markup between the paragraphs.

posted 20:50 [/Technology] permanent link

Thu, 24 Nov 2011

Family and Friends -- a blessing

I am thankful for the blessing of my family and friends . . . and no, I won't be lining up at midnight or earlier for the black Friday savings at any store. I'm thankful that we all have our health and are together.

Thank you, Father, for having created us and given us to each other in the human family. Thank you for being with us in all our joys and sorrows, for your comfort in our sadness, your companionship in our loneliness. Thank you for yesterday, today, tomorrow and for the whole of our lives. Thank you for friends, for health and for grace. May we live this and every day conscious of all that has been given to us.

posted 08:32 [/Thoughts] permanent link

Wed, 16 Nov 2011

A look at JEdit for Ubuntu

I'm evaluating JEdit, a Java editor, for Ubuntu as a possibility to edit files on the website blog. Remember that the requirements for the blog are pretty simple. The file is basically a text file with some HTML markup.

This means that I have to enter the paragraph tags myself, but that isn't such a big deal. The thing that I wanted was to be able to FTP the text files to the system from the editor without having to use another FTP client. This didn't work so well with Bluefish, but I'm going to try it now woth JEdit.

Well, that worked although, the FTP addin is a little lame. I think that once I have this saved, I can save this part. Let's see . . .

Yep, I'm able to save parts of the file by simply saving once I have it saved. I think I'll have to work some more with this to see if it works well for general use.

BTW, I'm doing this on my Acer netbook so things are pretty compact the portable. It's one of the reasons that I'm looking at this as an alternative.

posted 07:31 [/WebSite] permanent link

Sat, 12 Nov 2011

Looking at editors

I'm looking at editors. This time, it's Bluefish on Ubuntu. It is a genuine HTML editor which makes the creation of pages easier. I really want to know if it can satisfy my blogging requirements. It is NOT a WYSIWYG editor, but works at the HTML code level. That's OK, however, because the blog really uses text files rather than actual HTML files.

This is a short entry, more to test the upload capability rather than to actually type something profound into the blog. So here goes . . .

posted 21:15 [/WebSite] permanent link

Computer Upgrade Woes

I have been working on a one of our laptops ever since I upgraded it to Windows 7 Ultimate from Vista. It has been VERY FRUSTRATING. It's a Toshiba and I finally upgraded the bios and hopefully, things will be OK after that.

This experience shows me that I don't do all that well with things like this. I sure hope that this works as I like to have systems that work and that I don't have to fiddle with. I still have a number of updates to Windows 7 and the Office products to install. One of the problems has been that every time we seem to upgrade things, the system refuses to start and can't repair the startup process.

I'm writing this now on that laptop, so I can only hope that things go better.

posted 13:21 [/Technology] permanent link