Computer changes

Lots of chanages going on in our computers here. I've bought a new MacBook Pro so I could work with the full set of computer graphics shaders for my textbook project, and I've instilled Windows Vista on it as well using Boot Camp. It seems to work pretty well, and I can use Mike Bailey's glman application on the Windows side and access geometry shaders. Of course, the machine has some new bells and whistles, including an onboard camera, so in the true "new toy" sense that had every new Macintosh user in 1984 using the San Francisco font, below is a photo of myself with one of the built-in Photo Booth special effects. Yes, Virginia, it is more than a toy, but old boys can still enjoy the toys...
Most of the changes involve repairs, though. Judy's PC has been in the shop for a successful disk transplant and memory upgrade (boy, what I'd pay to get one of those upgrades for myself!) and my older Mac is in the shop for a fix on the display. And Rick's machine is down, but he was able to get most of his files off it and now we're trying to figure out if the disk is fatally broken. But that's life with machines, I guess. And a big tip o' the hat to Julie Gorman, the Stanislaus computer science sysadmin, who's been a great help in consulting with us on Rick's system and has continued helping me in many ways after I retired.

Shampoo bottle instructions

Anybody in computer science is familiar with the shampoo bottle instruction

Lather - Rinse - Repeat

that many of us use as an example of an infinite loop. On a hotel shampoo bottle recently I came across an example of another interesting instruction:

If seal is broken do not use

Of course, if the seal is not broken you cannot use the shampoo, so I guess this is an example of an always-negative logic statement...

Seen on a fortune cookie...

Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow

Robins!

There's been one big change in Iowa since I left a couple of weeks ago -- the robins are back, in flocks of a dozen or more, picking through the remains of winter woods and yards as they get ready to start nesting. It's good to see them. Spring comes late in Iowa, but the robins are a sure sign that it will come!

There and back again

It's been a while since my last posting, but as the sign on the door says, I've been out. My adventures over the last two weeks were nothing like Frodo's, but they were enough for me. I've been to the west coast twice and the east coast in between, but I'm now home (*sigh of relief*)

The first leg of the trip was to Portland, where I attended the SIGCSE Symposium on Computer Science Education. The highlights were seeing many friends, having a good conversation with my Prentice-Hall editor, and getting a couple of good ideas for future projects. Judy came out for a couple of days and we enjoyed good food, Powell's Books, and some nice walks along the Willamette River.

I next went to Arlington VA for some NSF work. This is always enjoyable and I always learn a lot from talking with old and new friends.

Finally I went to California to help Rick, our son on Steve's side, move to Iowa. The photo above shows us by the rental truck and his car that we were towing. It was a typical move, with hard work loading, lots and lots of driving, and more hard work unloading. There were a few highlights of the drive, however ...
* a nice visit with our son Rob on Steve's side in Sacramento, where the photo was taken,
* heavy snow on the Sierra Nevada summit that Rick drove at night,
* dust devils in the Nevada desert,
* more snow showers in southern Wyoming, and
* thousands of sandhill cranes flying and in the fields along the Platte river in Nebraska.
And, of course, it snowed here on the afternoon we were unloading the truck. Not a lot, but enough to tell Rick that winter's still hanging on in Iowa, even if all the almond trees in California have already finished blossoming.

Rick's now moved in and is doing a job interview today. It's good to have him near us and we're looking forward to his getting settled and getting into the rhythm of his new life in Iowa.

I'm getting tired of politics

I'm getting tired of politics. In this election we have a Republican candidate for President who is basically a really decent guy with some ideas that don't come from NeoconsRUs, but he's turned the steering wheel hard right in order to appeal to the Bob Jones University wing of his party. If he had had the guts to avoid accepting the endorsement of the Current Occupant ... but he didn't.

And also in this election we have two Democratic candidates. One of them is fresh and brings a new balance to the Tennessee feudin' match we call the American political system; the other is being supported in the primaries by the Texas Republicans because if she runs, all the BJU wing will run out to vote against her, and a lot of moderates and independents will likely stay away. See the LA Times online poll results in the figure that show Clinton barely ahead of McCain but Obama hugely ahead. After her "3am phone call" ad, I might leave the top of the ballot blank too, because I cannot abide the running-on-fear campaign that Cheney-Rove-Bush used, McCain is adopting, and Clinton stooped to. What hypocrites -- to run on public safety and to oppose reasonable gun control, when uncontrolled guns kill thousands of people every year.

Yes, I'm pulling for Obama, and keeping my fingers crossed that voters will get tired of fearmongering and choose someone who can look at rebuilding the reputation of the country without trying to do that at the point of a gun/tank/aircraft carrier/nuke.

Melting snow

Until I came to Iowa, my model for melting snow was the Sierra and Cascade mountains. In the mountains, and when it is undisturbed, snow melts gently and smoothly, keeping a nice surface until it's finally gone. But when snow is disturbed (for example, is shoveled or plowed) it has an uneven surface that can catch the rays of the sun to create melt pockets where melting is accelerated by focusing the sun's rays. Sometimes these pockets will actually melt so much that they leave a light lace-like tracing over them. This can create some very beautiful effects. Look at the images below (he said, going into Professor mode):
The left-hand part of the image shows a photograph of one of these snow pockets. If you look at the right-hand part of the image through a pair of red-green, red-blue, or red-cyan glasses, you can see the same snow pocket in stereo. Click on the image to see a full-sized image; the stereo is much better that way. (This uses a tool to create anaglyphs from stereo pairs that Mike Bailey and I talk about in our textbook on computer graphics shaders. If you want more details, drop me a note...)

Winning the lottery?

My parents may be turning over in their graves, but we play the lottery. Well, if you call buying two tickets a week "playing the lottery," that is. We call it a small amount that gives us fun to talk about.
So this week we actually won! Well, we won something that was larger than anything either of us had won before, but before you decide that we should help you out with a pet project, or finance your retirement, we won a whopping $7.00. And that's what we mean by playing to have something to talk about.

Ginkgo

We've been taking ginkgo daily in the hope that it will help our memory as we grow older. It's not clear that it's helping me -- names and nouns are getting harder and harder to dredge out of my memory -- but with a sample of size one it's difficult to say anything for sure. Randy Brown, our son on Judy's side, once commented that in Los Angeles, ginko bottles come with the instruction "Take one a half hour before thinking." So you can draw any conclusions you want about the value of ginkgo as a supplement.

And so, apparently, can researchers, based on an Oregon State University study. If you look at a UPI report, a Newsweek article, or a supplement industry newsletter, all reporting on the same study, you get mixed results. The overall results are apparently relatively negative, but with some inconclusive evidence that regular use might be helpful and a general "need more study" feeling. But ... what was I saying? I forget.

Signs of a stroke

This was passed to me by a friend (Hi, John) and I thought that perhaps this blog would be a good medium to pass along the message. This isn't just for persons of a certain age (like us); younger people need to know it as well, especially if you're often around people and might encounter someone who is having a stroke.

RECOGNIZING A STROKE

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke .

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:
S * Ask the individual to SMILE.
T * Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE coherently (i.e. It is sunny out today)
R * Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

And one other sign of a stroke -- Stick out Your Tongue
Ask the person to stick out his or her tongue. If the tongue is crooked, if it goes to one side or the other, that is also an indication of a stroke.

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within three hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.

Rick's been visiting

Our son Rick on Steve's side has been here for the last week. He will be moving to Iowa in a couple of weeks, so he was looking for a job and an apartment. He found a nice apartment at a decent price, and he got some job leads but nothing firm yet. And he got a good dose of late winter weather, with snow, ice, and a thaw, all in a week. He even got some experience in driving on snow and ice. We certainly enjoyed his visit, and we're looking forward to soon being able to see him much more often!

Genre fiction, take two

So, no sooner do I write an entry about genre fiction and mention the culinary whodunit than I pick up another book -- from the same book sale where we got "Sticks and Scones" -- and its cover says that it's the first in a brand new series of Sudoku mysteries. Once again, there seems to be only one author in the series, Kaye Morgan. It never ends, I guess, but it seems kind of like a racket to create your own genre...

Genre fiction

I knew that there were certain broad categories that fiction writing falls into, such as western, romance, adventure, mystery, fantasy, horror, historical, and science fiction. I'd even heard of some subcategories, such as police procedural mysteries. But at a book sale recently Judy picked up a book that was categorized (by Entertainment Weekly) as a "culinary whodunit" -- a category that seems to be populated almost entirely by one author, Diane Mott Davidson, at least as shown by a Google search. I don't draw any conclusions here, just a bit of amusement...