Author: Rob
-
Iris, Olympian
Iris took her first gymnastics class today. Next stop: African Games of 2028. Check out how much fun this kid is having!
-
Dyson vaccum fix
Is your Dyson Animal vacuum cleaner sucking, like mine was? There’s a good chance you can fix it cheaply. In my case, the vacuum head — in Dyson speak, it’s the “soleplate” — was not seating down fully on the floor. Because the soleplate wasn’t fully flush with the contact surface, the suction was…
-
OS X Mountain Lion
So I finally got around to updating my iMac from Lion to Mountain Lion last night. Wow, I am pleasantly surprised! For the past year, this was a regular occurrence: systemic memory rot. https://twitter.com/ElectroLund/status/221733275373289474 It was ridiculous. I felt like I was using a Windows machine. No offense, 95% of the world. But seriously, it…
-
Aurora Mass Shootings
There’s an article at The Good Men Project worth reading called “Not a Joke: Why Do Our Boys Keep Up the Mass Shootings?” in light of the mass murder this morning in Colorado. I left a comment there that I wanted to explore some more here. This is a risky comment, because it is perhaps…
-
Firebeard, the Phoenix
A few weeks ago, the worst fire in Colorado’s history broke out. In my town. It was like Armageddon raining fire down upon us. A bunch of people lost their homes, a few people died. It was definitely a scary few days. After the very professional firefighters and city government folks began to gain control,…
-
Sacred Bluegrass
Is this a mashup made in heaven? I think it was. Sarah and Iris and I all went to this concert a few weeks ago titled, “The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass” with text by Marisha Chamberlain and music by Carol Barnett. The Colorado Springs Chorale’s Chamber Singers performed the piece . The idea is…
-
Parody Circuits
I ran across this most excellent xkcd comic the other day: It’s just so funny on so many levels, if you’re a EE. Let’s just go clockwise around the page, starting at the top left. I love that the battery voltage is a square root. Just so obscure and mathematically nerdy. Gluing open the switch? …
-
Pro bono blog development
As my wife can attest, I’ve been lost in the world of code again. It‘s happened before. This time, I was working on a big project for an NPO for which I do part-time admin work. The project involved updating their WordPress theme. I had not selected the previous theme they were using; it was…
-
Cell phone connector fix
My good friend James contacted me with an electronics problem. Seems his daughter’s cell phone was on the fritz. So I agreed to take a look. She has a Pantech P7000 flip phone, but it stopped charging. I asked a few questions first to understand the nature of the problem. For instance: James gave me…
-
Automagically create annual month folders
On my computer, I’m in the habit of using lots of subfolders for my organization of reports and other output I generate from my financial software. I prefer to use a structure of month names inside the for the year, with forced chronological order. For instance: So I wrote an Automator script to […]