Autoduel Comes To Life
So here I am reading my morning items. Last thing on my mind is how to rig a flame thrower to my car (not that I haven't spent time thinking about that when I was a tad younger). Yet, I ran into some interesting side notes (
which never happens on the Internet). That led me to ... you guessed it ... how to mount a flame thrower on your car.
OK so this is seriously dangerous, but with commercially available products you can get side mounted "
ball-o-flame" launchers and a
rear tail pipe flame thrower. Both are of course adjustable to your tastes in "distance" to affect and both claim to NOT peel your car's paint. Oh and you can put both on your car for less then $1000.
I wonder how many geek points
(tm) it would be worth. Autoduel really is coming to life. I think I'll rent
Blade Runner and
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome tonight and rethink where we are going.
Labels: gadgets, things I must possess, where we are going
Project Management leads to fun games
Well this was unexpected. I was researching the Project Management Process. Which was going great, I have been reading a lot of papers and books on the subject and getting much more comfortable with some of the more common TLAs. Problem is that it seems that every single author decided to come up with her or his own set of TLAs which makes the whole area of process and more specifically project management very fuzzy.
Ran into some very nice items though:
- Simon Wallace Has put together a complete book on Process/Project management called the ePMbook and it really is a good read. I find his style very friendly and easy to stay awake to. Honestly his prose make me chuckle from time to time and I get the impression that in person he would be very funny. Then as I poke around to find out more about the author I ran into his LinkedIn Profile and even better a puzzle game called Brain Buster that he created.
- I also ran into the Process Impact site which has a lot of nice resources for Process Management stuff. Although their licensing costs are pretty expensive.
- Then there is the Project Management Principles & Training web site which has a very high ratio of content to text. Honestly this site is more like a light primer on the whole topic. Which makes it a great starting place to delving into the subject.
Coming Robot Revolution
Well thanks to my good friend (
Grimmtooth) I have a little more to worry about tonight. He points out that most people laughed at the Terminator movies and that he didn't as he saw them as more prophetic and now he has the proof...
Samsung is making killer sentry robots with BFGs (5.5mm machine gun).
Labels: coming robot revolution, friends, gadgets
Fabulous Mini Database in Java
I am very impressed with the
HSQL product (a lightweight 100% Java SQL database engine). It is not only the best SQL relational database open source product I have ever seen, it is also one of the best written code I have seen in a long time. It is fast and lean but it doesn't skip corners for speed. Which is very nice as it means there is a higher chance of this not doing something unexpected on older or new versions of the JVM.
I also rather like their web site layout too. It has some nice elements that I think I might mimic for my upcoming software distribution project. I am currently writing a fully automated web site engine to let me publish my "memoirs" easily. Which means I can publish talks by dropping the ppts and zip files into a dir and let the engine link them in for me. Source code and product releases will be as easy. Why am I doing this? Because no one else has a good enough web site template engine that does what I want. Specifically using templates that do not have an entirely new template syntax, where each page can be edited separately using ANY HTML editor and the right bits will be merged into the right locations on the templates, where code and presentations can be added without having to do more then drop them into place, and where the table of contents and site maps are generated automatically. Oh and I want all of it to be very intelligently cached so it isn't doing file scans on every hit. More to come on that.
Any way HSQL is pretty cool.
Getting a grip on my daily routine
Well I need to force myself to be better at time management and project management. It has been a long time since I taught my time management course and I find that without that regular refresher my time management skills have been slipping.
So what to do. Well obviously start researching time and project management again, dust off the course and start collecting data.
So far I have found some very interesting things.
First off there is the
Borg-Calendar program. Which has a lot of project management stuff built into it. But I am not happy with the fact that I can not have sub-tasks, and that the completion data nor the dates a project moves from one state to the next are not tracked. Admittedly they do say that the project management stuff is tacked on.
So poking around the forums for the BORG-Calendar I found a reference to another project called
Memoranda that does not have the ability to for enforcing the project management aspects (states of the project etc), But it does have a very nice task manager...
I am now poking at that one a little hard. It is not really finished, looks a LOT better the Borg-Calendar but still I want something that will let me do my tasks, to-dos, calendar and other things from multiple computers that have a shared drive or at least a copy of the recent "data set." Preferably using a system that keeps NO locks on the files so they can be dynamically shared between computers with the soft ware continuously running.
I also ran across a great web site for project management skills and knowledge apply named
Project Management Institute.
I also found a very cool tool called
TimePanic which is designed to fulfill the tracking needs described in paper by Watts S. Humphrey’s article “
Why does Software Work Take So Long”. The paper discusses learning to work better by improving your work style. But you need to know what you are doing in order to fix it, hence,
TimePanic. I sense a whole new short course coming into being...Well first I need to find a way to get things done. I still love the ABC system by Alan Lankein as described in his book "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life" (out of print). If only I could find something that is NOT as complex as MS Project, lets me do what
TimePanic does combined with
Borg-Calendar's enforced project stepping stones with
Memoranda journal and date time stamps. Oh and for less then $50.
Let me know if you know of such a product please.
Labels: Borg-Calendar, Memoranda, project management, time management, TimePanic
Pool room is mostly ready even if it is too small
Well last night John and Jeremy came over. We chatted and relaxed for nearly two hours. We ordered out from Quiznos for diner. Funny thing is what was delivered wasn't what we ordered. In fact I signed the wrong credit slip all together. Unfortunately what we ordered LOOKed exactly like what we got (sandwiches and everything) except that they were different sandwiches. So we opened them up and bit into them before we figured out we had the wrong order.
The driver was still in the driveway (he was trying to figure out if he had given us the wrong food without opening the other set). Well he gave us our right order and we got to keep the other order too. So we got to try samples of some of the other Quiznos sandwiches. I have to admit the BLT is better then I thought.
Then we attacked the unassembled pool table I got in September. We cleaned the room, the table, and tried to make space. Managed to get it back together (I still need to go get some new balance feet for it and wood panels). Oh and it really needs new bumpers and felt. But it was good enough that we could play. Without the balance feet we had a minor shift to one end that made for some funny shots.
Problem is the room is about 3 feet too narrow. So shooting from the sides is a little tricky. I still have to move the piano and book cases out of the way to clear the entire area around the table. But I think we are going to have to move it to the other room (once that one is finished, right now it is bare concrete) as that other room has the extra 3 feet width.
But, now we can play pool. So that is cool.
Labels: billiards, Jeremy, John, pool, Quiznos
The quest for a Qwest cell phone
Man what a stupid catch 22 to get caught in. My cell phone died and I now need to get a new cell phone. My problem is that I want to shift to a different carrier then Qwest. Problem is we have 3 cell phones with Qwest on contract till next May. If I cancel early there is a $200 per phone early disconnecting fee per phone. So I have to hang out till May.
So what is the problem? All I need to do is get a new used phone. Except in the last few years almost all the cell phones have moved to using smart chips or SIMMs. Qwest does not support this technology and are stuck in the old CDMA phones using ESNs only.
So if I want a new phone it is pay FULL price (which is highly inflated to prevent someone in this situation from getting out easy). The crappiest phone is $189.95. Qwest is more then willing to give me one of the $19.95 phones (which is any phone they have just about) but only if I renew for a minimum of 2 years.
If I switch to a new carrier I can get 3 new Razor phones and save $40 per month while picking up a few extra features for our combined cell accounts. So in short that means I do not want to renew with Qwest.
Hence I need a cheap Qwest only cell phone to get me from here to May 2007.
As Qwest does not support smart chip phones they will not activate any phone that is not made specifically for their network. I have already had 5 phones from friends. 4 were smart chip phones and the 5th had an ESN that was connected to an account that was closed with some fees left on it and until the owner of that phone called Qwest and cleared the balance due they would not switch it over. When I asked how much was due (figuring if I could just pay it as the phone itself was free) they wouldn't tell me because I didn't know the name and SSN of the person whose account the phone belonged to.... SIGH
If only Qwest wasn’t so behind the times. Then practically any phone that could be unlocked would do. I’d save the activation fee as they'd give me a duplicate Smart Chip for free. Plug it into the unlocked phone, or your proper provider-locked phone, and presto, problem solved.
Halloween Concert at the Fenix
What a very different Halloween experience! Instead of the fancy dress up costume and many parties I lost track of time (I was in the baby warp zone). So no Halloween decorations around the house, no pumpkins and no costume for me or my daughter. I suddenly realized it was Halloween pretty much the day before (ya on the 30th). So I was trying to figure out what to do. My wife was not up to partying (we are still feeding about every 3 to 5 hours 24 hours a day and her back is not exactly fully healed up). I was tired and Sapphira was off in her own world with friends.
Then I noticed Nintendo had a drawing for some tickets to the Seattle Halloween night show of the fourth annual Nintendo Fusion Tour that was making its way across America. With Evelina at her sisters it was only Sapphira and I. So popping out for a Halloween night party / concert with
Hawthorne Heights leading the bill, and including
Relient K,
Emery,
Plain White T's and
The Sleeping! (You can check out the bands and sample their music at
nintendofusiontour.com.)
Well it was 2:30 PM and the entries for the tickets had to be in by 3:00 PM. So I entered and (since I am talking about this you probably think I got them, well your right) at 3:15 PM I was notified I had won 2 tickets for Halloween night. Cool!
So Sapphira and I suddenly had just plans for Halloween but really GREAT plans for Halloween. In addition to the music The Fusion Tour was also showing off the new Nintendo Wii console. Wii, music, food and kind of a “Dad’s Night Out With Daughter” thing! I was pretty excited. Plus the show was at the
Fenix (formerly the Premier).
Forgot the camera. But boy was the party a blast. The music was great and the games were fun. Sapphira got to play the new Zelda game using the Wii wireless controllers and she is excited about that.
How do you follow that up? Well like last year the following day Wednesday, November 1 at 12:00PM, Hawthorne Heights came to Nintendo's Redmond campus for a private performance! I let Sapphira skip school and she joined me for a great lunch hour of more music (just the band, simple instruments and about 40 people). Hawthorne Heights brought the sound level down a notch in an exclusive acoustic set. After which we got to personally meet and chat with the band! Got pictures and signed posters / CDs to prove it (picture below). It was great!!
Leeland with Hawthorne Heights
Picture compliments of A.J. Blount shutterbug extraordinar for Nintendo of America
Labels: concert, Fenix, halloween, Nintendo
