Nathan Alter

I saw the Albuquerque Lamborghini the other day.  We only have one.  It’s yellow.

A few miscellaneous things…

We went walking along the Rio Grande near Tingley Beach the other day and I had forgotten how cattails can be explosive when they’re ripe.  Sean was having fun with the fuzzy ‘splosions.  In case you’re unfamiliar with Albuquerque, “Tingley Beach” is just some ponds near the river.  The model yacht club sails their boats there on Saturdays and the geese are all over the place.  Between the main ponds and the river are a couple of secret ponds with lots of neat plants and a little swampy mud pass area for the kids to fall into.

We tried Blockbuster instead of Netflix.  It seemed nice because they offered games for the same price.  Unfortunately, they’re so incredibly slow that it’s not even worth it.  There are no Blockbusters in Albuquerque to do the “manual trade-in” anyway.

There is nothing sadder for a PC gamer than to have to buy a low-end video card.  In our media PC, the PCIe x1 slot for the TV card and PCIe x 16 slot for the video card are right next to each other.  So, the cards are right up against each other…giving little ventilation to the video card and a very short life.  Thus, I ran out to Best Buy the other night to buy a low-end video card to replace it.  How many polygons per second?  Who cares?  It’s just a video card that does the minimum…wasting away there.

We went over to the Speake family house in Northeast Albuquerque where he’s set up Christmas lights synchronized to music.  He has speakers outside as well as broadcasting on 91.1.  I talked to him a bit and he’s using Light-O-Rama software.  He has it controlling over 300 devices and even worked it into the neighbor’s yard this year.

Yesterday I went to the Realtime and Embedded Computing Conference.  One of the presenters was a guy from micro-machines area at Sandia Labs.  He showed us videos of microscopic gears and motors they’d built.  In one video, a dust mite clung to a gear as it turned extremely fast.  The dust mite was visibly dizzy afterward.

Why would Visual Studio use ctrl+Y for redo like everything else in Windows?  I mean why would it?  Anyway, if it’s deleting lines for you instead of the normal “redo”:

Tools->Options…->Environment->Keyboard.  Change keyboard mapping scheme to (Default).  (It was probably set on Visual Basic 6.)

We happened to be near an R/C hobby shop yesterday so we went in.  They had a PC with RealFlight R/C flight simulator set up.  It was really neat to be able to fly an R/C plane, crash it,  reset, and try again.  It had a real R/C controller.  I assume it can simulate harsh New Mexico desert winds.  Unfortunately, the price is $100 for the most basic version.  I think you can get a cheap battery-powered plane for that much.  As long as you don’t crash it, it’s more cost effective.  I wonder if those trick R/C helicopter pilots practice with this software.

You usually know that you don’t want to search within zip files, so I’m not sure why Windows XP defaults to search them.  Anyway, here’s how you disable it.

At the command line or Start->Run:

regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll

regsvr32 /u cabview.dll

Restart your PC

We got a big bag of dried fruit at Costco.  Kinda healthy, you’d hope…until you check the nutrition facts and see that it’s HALF SUGAR.  Even the ANTIOXIDANTS featured prominently in large letters are apparently just marketing hype.  Also, it doesn’t contain asbestos!

Many documentary shows on cable are just there to string you along for an hour to get you to watch 17 minutes of commercials.  One such show is The Detonators.  It’s about 40 minutes of boring preparation before the building is finally demolished in the last five minutes.  We had fun yesterday just watching the last 5 minutes of several episodes.  They usually show the same guy in a hard hat doing a fist pump.  “It blew up.”  You could watch Mythbusters this way to see their best experiment in the last five minutes….but it’s not so boring that you need to.