Nathan Alter:

I’ve been doing a lot of stooped running lately, after removing 4-year-old Sean’s training wheels.  I saw a few tiny kids riding tiny bikes and figured, “how hard could it be?”  As soon as I took off the training wheels, I learned he’ll happily lean against whatever’s holding him up.  The best method seemed to be to hold the back of the seat, gradually letting go, but being ready to upright him.  So, he doesn’t even realize I’ve let go.  He seems to have the hang of it after a few days.  My legs are tired, but I’m proud of the little dude.  Bicycling seems to be one of those “dilemma cycles”.  You need to have some speed before you can get going, but you need courage to have the speed, which comes from experience.  This seems to happen in other things like snowboarding and job requirements.  You need the experience to get the job and the job to get the experience.  The only solution I can see is study, practice, study, practice.

We installed a programmable thermostat last night.  What would probably have been a half hour installation for the average handyman was, of course, a 3 hour nightmare for me.  The handyman incompetence field I emit was in full effect.  Screw blue wire into contact.  Blue wire falls out.  Screw blue wire into contact.  Blue wire falls out.  Screw blue wire into contact.  Blue wire falls out.  You begin to get the idea.  Wire colors didn’t match what the manual said. Wire types didn’t match.  New thermostat has a contact for the C wire, but no mention of it in the manual.  Didn’t seem to do anything.  I learned that our old thermostat was plugged into the phone line…I assume for remote setting.  Too bad you practically had to put your thumb through the old one to get the buttons to respond.  Well, I learned a bit about thermostats, which I’ll probably forget by the time I need to install another one.  The best part is that it didn’t start an electrical fire…yet.

[For my future reference, here are some lessons learned.   Take a picture of old contacts before you start.  Ignore wire colors and go by previous thermostat connections.  Several experiments finally taught us we needed to configure it as a 4-wire installation with AC and heat power connected together.  The brown C (common) wire was connected to old thermostat, but is unused in new one because it has batteries.  Green wire seems to be nothing.]

I used to watch Pee Wee’s Playhouse when I was in…highschool.  I remember classmates quoting the show.  I watched an episode of it yesterday and I think it still holds up…but only to me.  Vanessa and Sean seem to have a less favorable opinion of it.  Vanessa actively dislikes it, while Sean watched it, but didn’t seem to find it as funny as I did.  The theme song (mp3) is a wacky little ditty by Cyndi Lauper.  In the first episode, Pee Wee and Cowboy Curtis (a southern accented, mulleted Laurence Fishburn) put on mohawk wigs and do the pogo dance in front of a video of a bunch of punks.

For a while now, I’ve been missing a nerd badge.  I haven’t been running Linux at home since college.  Of course, I waited until it was as easy to install as Windows before I tried it again.  I installed Xubuntu on an old PC with 384 MB of memory.  Xubuntu is Ubuntu for low spec PCs.  I only briefly had a chance to try it out after install.  It’s cute.  But now that computer sits in the corner without much point, except to say that I run Linux.  I’ll hopefully use it to study some Linuxy things.  I may try having a novice use the computer to see if it would be practical to set up all my Internet Explorer virus-laden relatives with Linux.  Yeah, I’m prolly dreamin’.

We ate dinner at Korean BBQ House on Central.  We ate bulkalbi and kimbap.  The bulkalbi were super-delicious grilled beef ribs.  So so tasty.  Unfortunately, it was served with a bunch of kimchee and pickled tofu and sprouts that seem to be an acquired taste.  It seems you either love kimchee or you hate it.  So, it was a combination of super-delicious and “I don’t like this so much”.  Kimbap is the Korean version of sushi.  It had beef instead of fish and the rolls were wider and flatter than sushi.  They had some tasty sauce to dip it in.  The restaurant is in the same room with another restaurant, Sushi and Sake, and owned by the same people.  I wonder if you could get the bulkalbi and sushi at the same time?  That’d be sweet!

I was just thinking about teaching methods in programming books.  Why do so many of them use this method:  “You might try to code it with method X, but that would be silly.  A better method would be method Y because of blah blah.  But that wouldn’t really work.  The simplest way to do it would be this single line, method Z.”  Why didn’t they just get to the point in the first place?  Or sometimes, they’ll go through the history of how something was done in a language as it changed over time.  Irrelevant!  The absolute best way to teach something in code is to give an example.  Three pages of confusing computer science language can be summarized in a small bit of code example.  If you care to see an example of this, look at the bit of pseudocode on this page that easily summarizes the main point of the previous three sections.
method1 {
   try {
      call method2;
   } catch (exception e) {
      doErrorProcessing;
   }
}

method2 throws exception {
   call method3;
}

method3 throws exception {
   call readFile;
}

The original Hansel and Gretel story was kinda gruesome.  Aside from the point that the witch wanted to eat the children, the childrens’ parents abandoned them in the woods in the first place, because they couldn’t feed them anymore.  They don’t make kids’ stories like they used to.  Apparently, child abandonment like this was not unknown during the middle ages.  Anyway, there are often three phases of revision in old kid stories.  The original is kinda unpleasant.  Then, Brothers Grimm would make a gentler, more kid-friendly version of it.  And then Disney would Disney-ize it even further.

Ya know, with the iphone and other cellphones having GPS, I hope they start doing location-based alarms.  You get near the garage in the morning and your phone beeps you to remind you to check for your wallet.  You get near Costco and it reminds you of stuff you needed from Costco.

In Lilo and Stitch, the Hawaiian dude says, “auwe!”   (He’s voiced by Jason Lee, who played Bruce Lee in a movie…not to be confused with Brandon Lee who was Bruce Lee’s son.)  Anyway, I liked the word so I looked it up.  It means something like, “oh no!” or “what?!!”

Google tip:  To find the current time in Lovington, search google for:
time in Lovington
(Works for any place)