“If I speak it life and it flutters weak, I will blow it up from beneath” — Iron Wil

This weekend I spent a lot of time playing with some astronomy software. I didn’t get to see any real-life stars due to cloudy nights, but on my computer screen I saw them all, and even visited a few.
First, I played with Celestia. It’s free and runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The best way [...]

Our rats are getting older, and that means less mobile. A while ago I built a quick and dirty staircase for them to make it easier to get around in their cage. Finally this week we decided that didn’t cut it. So today I built a much nicer set of ramps, so now our rats [...]

DVD content is a lot better than VHS content. The sound and video are higher quality, they can contain interesting extras, and you can easily skip around. But they scratch easily, and once a scratch gets bad enough it’s impossible to play the area of the DVD that’s scratched. I can work around that problem [...]

I use several image manipulation programs on a regular basis (Bibble, Picture Window, Gimp) and none of them have the user interface for rotating that I want. When I rotate a picture it is 98% of the time because I’m trying to get the horizon horizontal. I just want to draw a line where I [...]

My wife had this week off, and she’s been using the past 3 days to cook amazing food. On Tuesday we had “eggplant pasta” (which is eggplant cut into long thin strips) with a cream sauce. On Wednesday it was calzones made from scratch. Yesterday she made lasagna with really good sauce. And today is [...]

Yesterday we spent cooking dinner for my parents-in-law, as their Christmas gift. For my wife’s stepfather we cooked split pea soup, and NY strip steak. At a the Bel Air Meat Market we bought the nicest looking steak I’ve ever seen, and from what I hear it tasted as good as it looked. For her [...]

So we had a pretty stressful time last night. From the beginning: Barbara went in to have 3(!) small tumors removed yesterday. Because the last time she took her surface stitches right out, the vet didn’t put any in this time. She just put stitches inside the wound, and used some kind of glue on [...]

I want to be able to delay e-mail that’s in my inbox. I would use this for
e-mails that I need to deal with later. So I’ll click the delay-1-hour button
and after 1 hour the e-mail’s “New” flag gets set again. That’s much more
efficient than marking it red which is what I do now, because I [...]

This is a very unorganised rant on what I would like what my topo software to
do. Maybe some day I’ll get round to writing something that does this.
I own a copy of National Geographic’s TOPO! for California. It’s nice to have
all the topo maps accessible, to draw routes on it, to get elevation profiles,
and to [...]