Month: March 2013

I’m desperately looking forward to the time when, during the first year of life of our child, I’m asked how old he is and I get to answer, “Zero.” That will make my day.

In anticipation of that wondrous experience, here are some more pictures of Jenn. She’s at 23 weeks in this picture. Contrast these with the last set we took five weeks ago.

During the shoot, Apollo decided he wanted some attention. He didn’t stick around or we would have a better shot of Jenn and Apollo together.

“My life is ennui; growing this baby has me casting for validation.”

There’s a baby in here!

When I was learning about dependent and independent variables in experimentation, I had the hardest time remember which was which. To this day I have to take a moment to make sure I’m describing or graphing something correctly. At the age of 39, and as a practicing engineer, I still have a bit of trouble with this. I blame this on poor teaching, or poor learning ((Probably best to blame it on poor learning if you knew me in high school)) but I have found the best graph to simplify everything!

Jessica Hagy does wonderful and funny index card graphs and diagrams at her blog Indexed. This one perfectly teaches where the variables need to go (although it doesn’t help with remembering what is independent and what is dependent).

There are two ways you could read this graph:

1. As the number of Chihuahuas go up, the number of Eagles go down, obviously due to rampant little yappy-dogs armed with stinger missiles.
2. As the number of Eagles go up, the number of Chihuahuas go down, due to eagles eating the yappy things.

One of those items is wrong and one is right. If you can remember the way that graph is drawn, you now have the perfect mnemonic because I don’t think you’ll need a reminder that Eagles eat Chihuahuas, rather than vice versa.

I will haul this out the next time I have to explain dependence to someone.

Over time I’ve had several posts on Idimager the most recent of which was my learning that Idimager is now dead software, to be replaced by Photo Supreme.

As I have an enormous amount of time invested in tagging and organizing images in Idimager, I am not about to make the jump lightly; I need to know if key features in  Idimager are still supported. The most important are:

• Easy image tagging
• Easy file management

I have a number of other custom-built items in Idimager (batch exports for various purposes to various places, automatic downloads from various folders for various reasons, custom recipes for altering and managing images) but I’m not as worried about those. It’s the two bullet points that are the killers.

From reading blog posts and making inquiries and checking the Photo Supreme forums, It seems that Photo Supreme continues Idimager’s legacy of easy and efficient tagging of images. Unfortunately, from the same forum, I learn that Photo Supreme does not do internal file and folder management (yet) and that kills if for me right now. From the forum sticky: (requires log in)

Tip 1: How to update catalog’s reference of resource paths when moving images on file-sytem:
a. outside of PSU, physically move or copy the current folder to the new location (e.g. from local disk to external harddisk, one local drive to another, or one area of file system to another)
b. in PSU, choose “By Folder” for Catalog view
c. right-click on the folder you just moved and select “Relocate Folder…” [ed. emphasis]
d. in the navigation dialog which opens, select the new location of the folder
e. verify by right-clicking on a thumbnail available in this new location and select “Locate in Windows Explorer”
f. if the option is available (it is greyed out when the media is disconnected) then the image should open and you know the catalog has updated the resource location

Note the emphasized item above. To relocate a folder I would have to individually find it in the new location. This destroys Photo Supreme’s utility for my particular case. Why?

I have a laptop that is my main computer. It has a 400 GB hard drive. 400 GB is a lot, but not nearly enough to contain all of my images. As it fills up, I regularly move the images out to an external hard drive (which has 2 TB). I store images by year/day folder arrangement to make it easy if I’m searching for a particular date in the file system. Photo Supreme isn’t getting a test drive because as of today, March 24, 2013, I’ve got 73 folders under the “2013” folder which would need to be individually relocated once I moved them to the external hard drive.

No thanks.

I could always move the entire “2013” folder at the end of the year, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t run out of space before then, and I’m unwilling to experiment to see what happens when I move the “2013” folder, and then dump a bunch of new folders into the moved “2013” folder later.

My principal philosophy here is that I’m unwilling to be a paying beta tester for the software, and I’m also unwilling to abandon a software I know works for something I don’t think will. So for now, I’m sticking with Idimager. That’s unfortunate because I have a nice 50% off discount for Photo Supreme sitting in my inbox.

Alas, I will wait until this software has matured a bit more. Photo Supreme is supposed to be an “integrated photo cataloging and photo management [software]…” but until it truly is, I’ll stick with the old.

PS. There’s an argument to be made in favor of Photo Supreme that no one has weighed in on, and I’m unwilling to be the tester: Would the time savings inside the software (Photo supreme is supposed to be way faster than Idimager) be sufficient to justify individually relocating hundreds of folders?

I’m happy to report that the Google maps mystery from a little while back has been resolved. The army is no longer going to build the new Atlanta Airport right on top of thousands of homeowners. What am I talking about? Compare today’s Google maps snapshot with last month’s.

Everybody is saved.

I received a speeding citation ((I-285. I regard this as the cost of driving in Atlanta. Eventually they’d pick me out of the crowd doing 70-75 MPH. There were a bunch of Dunwoody cops and it was Saturday night of St. Patrick’s Day weekend. I think they were doing sobriety pull-overs.)) last weekend. I paid the $100 fee online today. This is my final screen.

Someone with more experience with municipal court payments will have to tell me whether I would have had to pay a “convenience fee” if I’d shown up in person.

I desperately wish online ticketing agencies would call this something more truthful:

• “PROFIT”
• “WE HAVE TO PAY THE INTERNET SERVICE COMPANY”
• “BECAUSE WE HATE YOU”
• “BECAUSE YOU’VE CLICKED THROUGH THIS MANY SCREENS AND WE WANT TO SEE IF $5 ADDITIONAL WILL DRIVE YOU AWAY”

Seriously, this type of thing has got to be near the top of the most annoying customer service interactions.

It’s been something like nine days since my last update. I’m honestly too lazy to go check the date on the last posting. It is amazing how quickly the time can fly when you’re not paying attention, busy with other things, having fun with people, or just plain tired from work.

I have a couple “serious” posts in the works, but they require more thinking and editing than my normal “have a thought without the limits of twitter” method of writing here. Perhaps those will see the light of day this weekend.

Partially I’ve been having difficulty writing because I have a large report at work that I should be working on if I’m writing anything at all. Unfortunately, the report isn’t getting the time it deserves because there’s a gazillion ((That’s a metric unit representing 2.3 cubic shit-tons.)) of little/medium things that I’m not managing well enough to give me the large blocks of time to work on the report (this all work-related, by the way, not anything to do with home life, baby prep, etc.). Therefore I will sometimes open up the drafts folder the blot and mind dump on the page, which is process you are participating in right now. Thank you.

The mind dump will often clear some of the writing cobwebs and let me move on to other things. It’s not a big investment in time and hopefully will allow for additional productivity after I’m done. For instance, I think I’ve spent about 8 minutes on this and it’ll ship unedited (which will probably be obvious).

So off to work again I go. Here’s a cat for your trouble.

My recent posts have been way too long. Here’s a cat. Two cats, actually.

I was listening to the Mikes on Mics podcast a few days ago and heard of some Elite Harvard Ivory Tower Intellectual pooh-poohing my paper notebook. Alexandra Samuel actually isn’t an elite Harvard intellectual in the sense that I’m lampooning, but she is a writer for the Harvard Business Review and she put up a piece entitled Dear Colleague, Put the Notebook Down which filled me with righteous wrath.

Go read it first. I’ll wait.

A search of the Eyebrow will tell you that I like notebooks. I’m a firm believer that if you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen. But “writing things down” can mean many different things nowadays. Typically, I take notes in a spiral bound, graph-ruled notebook that lets me keep everything together. This notebook goes everywhere with me and I just have to flip, flip, flip back to the appropriate page and there’s what I was doing, and who I was talking to.

Which made the blatant and horrible condescension of Alexandra Samuel’s piece so enraging! I actually read the article while at a stop light immediately after finishing up the Mikes on Mics podcast so I was driving home full of anger. How dare this woman insult my work skills?! She called me a useless hire because of the time it would take to transcribe a set of meeting minutes into an official document. Fuck her and fuck the horse she rode in on.

Then I thought about it. And I thought about it some more. And I realized that she had a point.

My veteran notebook serves me well and I have a stack of them in my drawer that I’ve filled over the years. Just this morning I went back to page 12 of the current notebook to check some notes written down during a phone call about the number of buses accessing a middle school. After that, I reviewed some meeting minutes that I’d made last week when discussing with a client their needs for materials submittals. That has been the majority of the flipping back that I’ve done in this notebook. I regularly go back and check to be sure my open tasks are complete (or irrelevant) but that is all. The notebook is a static storage system that serves in case I need to reference something. It does not interface with the internet, nor does it directly populate my Remember The Milk account with errands and tasks. It can’t download to a document so that the meeting minutes I need to type up are 70% complete. ((I don’t care what Ms. Samuel thinks, meeting minutes are never done during the meeting. Unless you’re some crazy writing savant, the first draft will never catch the intended tone of the meeting, especially if you want [ahem] the meeting minutes to reflect factual but leaning statements.)) Ms. Samuel’s points here are valid and I think that I will take her (pointed, hyberbolic) lessons to heart ((In her defense, I probably wouldn’t have thought about it so much if her points hadn’t made me so angry. Good job, Alexandra.))

So here’s what I’m going to try over the next little while:

• Use the Livescribe Pen that Jennifer bought me a while ago. I’d been trying to insert it into my workflow unsuccessfully for a while. The way to do it (I think) is to go cold turkey on the veteran notebook and start using the Livescribe exclusively. This wouldn’t work very well at all ((The basic functionality of the Livescribe is interesting, but ultimately not that useful without some add-ons such as I describe in the later text.)) without…
• Evernote. I’ve had an Evernote account for a while which has sat dormant and unused. I think the only way to use it is to use it, rather than plinking down the occasional note or web snippet. I’m going to try going paperless on my receipts by taking snapshots. I’ll also see what I can do about ditching my other paper notes (index cards, sticky notes) by immediately snapshotting or scanning them into Evernote. This is an experiment, of course, and these don’t handle one of the issues I mentioned way above, that being the transcription of meeting notes to publishable documents. For that I’ll need…
• MyScript. MyScript is a for-pay add on to the Livescribe system which does text conversion. As I learned during some web searches, while the Evernote system produces searchable notes (even from images) it doesn’t do OCR, per se. What it does is create a set of possible matches that each word could be and that becomes searchable. The example I kept seeing was “House” which might be recognized both as “House” and as “Horse” and searchable under both terms. That would make for a rather messy document if printed out. MyScript does the OCR within Livescribe and allows you to export to a small variety of document types. So far it’s been acceptable, but I haven’t really torture tested it. The one time license is $30 and I’ve got a 30 day trial to see how it works.
• Lots of phone-photos of notes and things, which will get uploaded to Evernote.

As this is a bit new, I’m sure there will be some bugs involved in the process. One thing I know will be a problem is off-line connectivity. Evernote is wonderful, so long as you’re connected to the internet. I have the PC program on my laptop, but it takes 5 minutes to boot up and that’s nearly so useful as flipping open my notebook. I have my iPhone, but again, if no internet, no Evernote ((I think. I’ll have to try using it in airplane mode and see what happens.)).

It’s all a grand experiment! The thing I will keep in mind is that this whole process should increase my efficiency and ease of use. If not, it’s back to the paper notebooks.

Update: I’ve discovered that Evernote has an offline mode with a premium subscription. I’ve paid for a month.

The legislation below is what I’ve found interesting and has survived crossover day. There is other stuff out there that didn’t survive, but I’m going to leave that alone. For now, here’s the legislation in chamber and number order (with one exception).

HR 4 – We Want Tennessee!

This one is interesting. If you weren’t aware, the boundary between Tennessee and Georgia was set by Congress as the 35th line of latitude. Unfortunately, a surveyor mismarked the boundary in 1818 and Tennessee got approximately 60 square miles of extra land out of the bargain. Why this is important is:

1. The Tennessee River is just north of the GA/TN line
2. Georgia wants water
3. The law is on Georgia’s side if it were to come to a dispute
4. The 35th parallel hasn’t moved, and a bad survey doesn’t displace Congress’ authority
5. Georgia is willing to settle

All we want is a teeny tiny bit of land and we’ll drop all our problems. It’s just 1.5 square miles. And it happens to include a portion of the Tennessee River.

HB 34 – Geothermal Heat Pumps

This bill was sponsored by my very own state rep. (Don Parsons) and expands the definition of “heat pump” that can receive income tax credits. My understanding is that this would allow for larger commercial systems to receive the tax credit. I have no real opinion on this. Seems like a good idea if it sufficiently encourages renewable heating/cooling systems.

HB 50 – Registered Nurse Fraudulence?

This bill seems entirely devoted to enforcing the rules requiring Nurses to be licensed by the state. I didn’t realize we had an epidemic of un-licensed practitioners here. I am aware that the backlog with the Secretary of State for verifying the immigration or citizenship status of licensed Nurses is rather long. Blame that one on the immigration bill from a few years ago.

HB 60 – Don’t Kill Judges

This bill allows for judges to carry guns whenever and wherever they want.

HB 99 – BEER!

This bill increases the amount of Malt Beverage that you are allowed to brew at home, per year. It does other things regarding home brew and competitions. Basically, this is good for hobbyist brewers. Support!

HB 124 – Sunday Sales

This bill seems to be prohibiting municipalities from calling multiple elections to query the populace about whether they want Sunday Sales. I guess the theory here would be that you could keep calling elections until eventually you got a “No” vote and, POOF, no more Sunday sales. This bill prevents that. It also redefines “retailer”. Exciting, I know.

HB 142 & HB 143 – Lobbyist Gift Ban

I’ll be honest, I haven’t read these but what I’m told is this: There is a complete 100% ban on lobbyist gifts to individual legislators. However there are exceptions. To quote my source: “…[E]ntertaining an entire committee or subcommittee is still allowed, as are receptions open to all members or to the public and tickets to athletic events at University System institutions, [so] long as every legislator is invited.” So you can’t take out Senator Gooch to the Braves, but you could take his entire committee.

HB 146 – Arrest Warrants by Video

This allows for Judges to issue arrest warrants by video conference. The only stipulation is that they have to be within the state. Interesting. I guess this is a move to telecommuting? Seriously, I’m making a guess this is to speed up the warrants process so that a Judge doesn’t have to be physically present to get the thing done. That’s probably a good thing. I am, of course, basing my opinion on my extensive knowledge of jurisprudence gained from watching Law and Order.

HB 150 – Arrest Photograph Removal from Websites

If you read this bill, it seems like it’s the pet bill of a powerful person who got arrested and their mug shot was posted online. Interesting.

SB 11 – Georgia Geospacial Agency

This bill would provide for some centralization and auditing of the geospatial data being produced and managed by the hundreds of different agencies who do so. As someone who fools with GIS and mapping, I can tell you that while there’s a lot of info out there, getting it and using it can be a pain in the butt.

SR 371 – Constitutional Amendment for a Balanced Budget

The Senate passed this. I think they passed it last year too. Here’s the text:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF GEORGIA that this body hereby applies again to Congress, under the provisions of Article V of the Constitution of the United States, for the calling of a convention for proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States and recommends that the convention be limited to consideration and proposal of an amendment requiring that in the absence of a national emergency the total of all federal appropriations made by the Congress for any fiscal year may not exceed the total of all estimated federal revenues for that fiscal year.

Today I finished reading Fitzpatrick’s War by Theodore Judson. I liked this book, and Judson did some things very well, and another thing spectacularly, but I hesitate to recommend it for reasons I’ll get into soon. I wouldn’t recommend this book to a friend without a thorough understanding of what type of fiction they like. All that being said, this was an excellent book.

First off, this is a steampunk-esque novel but instead of being alternative history like a lot of steampunk, the story takes us 400 years into the future after a massive social and technological upheaval. Many billions died in the 21st century and electricity does not operate (for reasons I won’t get into) thereby throwing the society and technology back on steam and diesel equivalents.

Second off, the thing that Mr. Judson does spectacularly is avoid the “we’re in the future but it’s just like today in America” trope. He writes a novel set in the future and populates the backstory of his characters and their society with numerous “historical” occurrences and people who shaped the society. And better yet, instead of infodumping numerous monologues at us about who did what, he does it with footnotes.

“Footnotes?” you cry. “Who wants to read footnotes?” The answer to that question is, “You do.” At least in this novel.

People who know my reading habits know that I do not like footnotes ((Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels almost killed me where the dialogue was bouncing back and forth between the footnotes and the main text)), but this novel is an exception. The novel’s concept was that it is the Autobiography of Sir Robert Bruce, however instead of being the straight memoir of Sir Robert, it’s the annotated version as published 100 years after his initial authorship. The annotations are by a Noted Historian (the capitals are important; read and find out.) who objects to nearly every opinion and factual reference made by Sir Robert (because it disagrees what everyone knows happened, as depicted by the Official History published by the Historian’s own Notable University). The footnotes help to explain to the “contemporary” reader what Sir Robert was referencing in his straight-time recollection of events, however for those of us outside the narrative, reading Judson’s novel about the Historian’s annotations of Sir Robert’s memoir, they serve to flesh out the background without excessive infodumps. The whole thing became rather meta at times.

For pedantic hard scifi nerds, this is not a good book for you because the basic workings of the technology are entirely unexplained and, without some generous handwaving, unexplainable, especially from an energy expenditure standpoint.

For action/adventure nerds, this is also not a good book because the way it’s structured—as an annotated memoir—makes for so much foreshadowing that there are no real plot surprises.

The mystery and the conflict of this novel come from the character interactions between Sir Robert and his contemporaries and while they are archetypical, I still found enough there to keep me going through the 600 pages of the book.

A word of warning: I’ve had this novel sitting on my bedside for over a year (since Christmas 2011) and it took me this long to get through the first two chapters without giving up. You are deluged with names and dates and places in the beginning of the book and it’s daunting to keep straight. Either be ready for that and study as you go, or don’t worry about it and plow straight through. Once you get to chapters four and on, it becomes much less confusing.

Last words are: Good book; Long book. Be aware of it’s difficulties, but I’m not sorry I read it.