Stanley 55-099 FatMax Xtreme Fubar Functional Utility Bar

Amazon.com: Stanley 55-099 FatMax Xtreme Fubar Functional Utility Bar: Home Improvement

Every time I see this tool, I just have to smile. One of these days I’ll actually buy one, but still have no idea what I’ll every use it for… probably a more fitting tool than I’d guess, but just looks like something you’d find in warcraft somewhere

update: just had to add it to my wishlist…

My new kite

Well I finally got a new dual string kite. I went for a power kite by Prism. I got the Stylus P.2. I know that there are lot of great power kites but I think this one is a good start. Hopefully I'll get a chance on Sunday to fly it. We doing a walking tout tomorrow on the Mall so I'll bring it along in case I have some time.

test post from ScribeFire

Sorry for this ‘fake’ post, just found ScribeFire and wanted to test it.

Wired: Garbage In, Garden Out: Inside the High Tech Trash Disassembly Line

Wired: Garbage In, Garden Out: Inside the High Tech Trash Disassembly Line

Now here is a concept… why we try to separate the two entities is beyond me… it is all ‘trash’ some is just more useful than others… actually it is all re-usable. Maybe the term shouldn’t be recycle and refuse centers… maybe is should be ‘waste reuse centers’ or something… anyways I like this plant… it separates recyclable material (materials that can be reprocessed and used again) and then makes use of other materials in what ever way it can, in particular energy generation, and not only for themselves but the neighboring grid. Now I know the price tag is pretty big, but somehow I just think that we’d see the benefit long before we saw the cost.

So anyone want to take bets on if we will ever see a plant like this in the US?

New Wishlist

Last month included my birthday, and like usual, no one new what to get me…. that has mostly to do with who I am, I’m picky. Anyways… a few years ago for the holidays, I created a wishlist to help people out. My research actually started when I was trying to build a ‘Fair Trade’ wishlist for our wedding. Anyways… I knew that many stores had lists, but I wanted something that could handle outside items. I initially tried and used a site call MetaWishlist, it worked for me, but not for our registry… I liked it but is was in way early beta and eventually I got tired of it. At the same time I used GiftHat for our fairtrade registry. So when I heard that the developer of GifHat had an import option for MetaWishlist, I migrated. So for the last few years Gifthat has managed my wishlist, and managed it well. I on the other hand was terrible at updating it and a number of the products, well they were no longer available. This all said, last month my brother remembered that I had a list and managed to find on Google, and bought probably the only item on it I had added in the last year, a Creative Zen media play (other than that, the only thing I’ve added to my list was books for me to buy). It was probably one of the better gifts I’ve received in many a year, not because I selected it, but because it was something I really wanted but had no idea some one would or had bought it for me. So it reminded me the value of a wishlist. So today I was looking through my wishlist, and with the exception of a few items, almost everything was from Amazon. Not just that, the items that were directly from Amazon, they were actually there through the partnering shops (most of my items were from ThinkGeek and DealExtreme, both list many if not almost all their items on Amazon). Now while I’ve heard that Amazon does not treat there employees the greatest, you can’t argue with the amazing selection. So basically I’m announcing my new wishlist which is available on Amazon, actually there are 3 wishlist, 1 for generic stuff, 1 for movies and music (and other related stuff), and a 3rd which is basically book about programming and such learning materials that are on my list to eventually buy.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/1ETY9C5IV9LDV

When White spaces aren’t White

As most know, most of my programming work relates to data processing. One of my responsibilities with the Hurricane Research Division and the H*Wind team to be exact has been to process data and insert it in our database. So over the years (almost 12) I’ve written a number of programs to help along my way. A few years ago (before I discovered Python), I wrote a rather significant program for my own use. It is a generic parser. I wrote it as part of a project to re-analyze Hurricane Katrina. We had data coming in from all over the place and almost none of it in the same ‘format’, format in quotes since I refer to column order, field delimiters, units, etc. but almost all the data was ASCII. Anyways… I’m digressing from my point… so this parser was basically designed so that the user (basically me) would simply list the column order and such, and out would pop a file ready for the database. Well to the point of the blog post title, today (and yesterday) I was trying to figure out why my program wasn’t working. The default delimiter in my program is WHITESPACE, basically any not alpha-numeric-symbol character, aka space, tab, return…. well incomes this file I processing… it was generated in Fortran, so my first assumption is that it should be space delimited, but it was not, it was TAB delimited. Okay no problem, my program can do that, but it didn’t. For some reason, TAB is not being recognized as a whitespace…. argh, however when I distinctly tell my program with command-line arguments to accept TAB as a delimiter, it works…. argh….. Oh well, at least it works… thankfully. I sure the issue has something to do with being prepared on a HPUX machine, transfered to a Linux box, emailed to a Mac box and then processed…. you know somewhere in there something had to get lost in whitespace translation…. anyways… again the program works, but it is always fun when you write a program to do something and it doesn’t work the way it should… thank goodness for Unix and the many workarounds that are available.

Of course this whole experience is another reason I’m really starting to like Python programming… maybe I should take the time to re-write this c program into Python… then again it works 99% of the time, so if it is not broke, why fix it?

WordPress… tried it, and I’m back

Well I gave it a quick look… maybe another day I’ll look at it again, but for now I’m sticking with Blogger. Currently there is a copy of this blog on wordpress at [http://nickc321.wordpress.com]. But for now I’m staying.

Another day I’ll sit down and write why, but indeed there are many features on WordPress that I wish were on Blogger, but there were enough other issues tat make me want to stay.

Maybe oneday…

Well I’ve tried WordPress, I like it, but I don’t think I’ll be using the freebase version… to many limitations and I don’t want to have to apy for anything right now… so maybe one day I’ll come back and give it another shot, but for now I’m sticking with Blogger [http://nickc321.blogspot.com]

Debating Migration?

I’m debating the possibility of migrating from Blogger to TypePad or WordPress. I’m leaning towards WordPress since they offer an import feature, plus like Blogger, it is FREE. This all said, this has nothing to do with Blogger or its features, just I like some of the themes provided by WordPress and some of the client applications offered for Palm OS. Well I’ll ponder longer and make a decision in the next week weeks.

Yahoo Mail acting up: Error Code 5

I’ve been a Yahoo! Mail customer for years… probably as long as they actually had an email product…. Heck a few years ago, I even decided it was time to upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus…. again in support of a great product. But recently, coincidentally around the same time that Microsoft announce they buy out bid for Yahoo, my mail has been acting like shit. If I’m lucky, I can actually access my email 1 a week without getting this stupid ‘Error Code 5′ crap. If I could actually access my email I’d post a copy of the responses I’ve received when I’ve contacted them.

This is actually the full message I see when I try to long into my mail:

You’ve stumbled upon a temporary problem we’re having with Yahoo! Mail. Usually this problem gets resolved quickly, without you doing a thing. In fact it may be taken care of now.

• Try pressing the Reload or Refresh button on your browser, or logging out then back into your Yahoo! account. Hopefully that will take care of things.

If that doesn’t fix the problem, please be patient while we sort it out and try again shortly. The fact that you’re reading this page means we’ve been automatically notified of the issue, and chances are we’re working on it now.

• If you think you’ve been more than patient and tried the tricks above, feel free to contact Customer Care about Error Code 5.

Thanks,

The Yahoo! Mail Team

Sorry for the inconvenience.

You know temporary issues only last for a short time, and they should be happening every day for weeks at a time. From what I remember of the responses I’ve received from my contacting customer support, basically they said that it is typically caused because of an external reader issue, and that basically I must be accessing the email from either 2 computers or the Web and a client at the same time… okay then what is the point of offering POP access for plus members??? I use the POP support to check my email from my PalmOS Treo. Anyways… just to humor them, I disabled mail from my phone about a week and a half ago (mind you, I’ve been using a mail client on my phone for over 6months…), and the problem still remains….. well Yahoo! get your act together or I’m out of here…. you are quickly loosing a customer that has supported you for years….