03.11.01

Thinking out loud, unfortunately

Posted in General at 1 pm

Original Posting: 2/16/2001 05:02:21 PM

How about an automated refrigerator? What would this really take?

Let’s assume that the box will be the same size as the usual fridge. If we have an alternative entry (like a freezer door) for over sized items, we could make a little door (1ft square?) that could hinge on the bottom. Pulling the hinge would produce a shelf that you would put the item on. The pressure sensor would retract the shelf into the box, and laser scanners would find the UPC symbol. (If it’s not found you can label it by voice command.)

The platform is lifted up and down by a central platform. The platform can rotate. The platform is made up of alternating fixed and moving rods so that the moving rods can rise a couple inches and smoothly move into the particular slot in the fridge, which is made of a shelf with a similar system of alternating fixed and non-exisiting rods.

The platform is in a center empty colum of the fridge, like a glass elevator inside of a building’s atrium.

This could be the first piece of an automated kitchen I suppose.

Back To Blogger

Posted in General at 1 pm

Original Posting: 1/20/2001 11:23:26 PM

Well, after an abortive attempt to use a different service, I’m back to Blogger. I’ve been yearning to use a system, and I’m finally going to stick with Blogger for a while. It’s easy to set up, it’s already set up and I don’t have to worry about it. The only thing I do have to do is get the archives of the last 3 years set up and try to get people to start using the new location. That shouldn’t be to hard once I put a redirector in the old server.

I’ve been collecting tons of stuff to talk about and now it all seems pretty pitiful. Maybe someday I’ll turn off the TV and get back to living life.

Building a Desk

Posted in General at 1 pm

Everything is working pretty well at this point. I cleaned up some code that looked weird in Netscape 4, and I’m now posting this from that browser. I suppose I’ll take a look at it when I get into work tomorrow with Mozilla 0.8. It will be interesting to see what happens then.

I’ve begun taking advantage of the variable that are built-in and the ones that are customizable. Getting the Style sheets into their own ‘macro’ really cleared up the entry boxes for the templates and now I can see how the templates are set up.

I’m still exploring the flexibility of the system. I think I’ve figured out a way to get an RSS file to come out of it, but I’m still working on that.

In many ways, what I’m doing here is building a desk, a work space for writing. each tool is used in an environment, and the environment for my work (in this case writing) includes the physical space around my computer(s) and the virtual space that it’s published in. So I’m constructing. What can I say… I’m a contruction worker. :)

I should also note that Dwelling in it’s first form came online 3 years ago. The first entry I have is from March 6, 1998, back when I was working at OMSI where I had full access to a server with PERL so that I could do lots of debugging and such. Three years of writting is a good start at a journal. It may not be the most revealing on a daily basis, but I’m doing this for two reasons: To improving my writing skills, and to keep a log of thoughts that I can reflect in later years. A link that I want to get set up is the ‘one year ago’ links. I use that quite a bit to remember and recall events.

[This entry would have been lost were it not for a little control panel I have called "SuperSave". It's a simple little utility that captures my keystrokes and saves them to a file. Normally this doesn't do much for standard desktop applications. In BBEdit I'd just make sure that the Auto-Save feature was enabled and type along my merry way.

However, with these Weblications, there's no auto-save, no real saving at all, until you've finished filling in the form. On small forms that's fine, but on these longer ones like a journal entry, or an online application you run the risk of a browser crash eliminating 20, 30, even 60 minutes worth of work at times. SuperSave prevents this situation from taking another 60 minutes to re-write all the stuff I typed.

It's the little things, the tweaks and customizations that really turn a computer from a dull hammer to a fine tool.]

03.10.01

Apple Devotee

Posted in General at 9 pm

Well, this is a new one… photo

Another couple of hours

Posted in General at 7 pm

(I’ve figured out how to force the database to post-date an article. Now I can go back through this year’s entries and add them into the system. Not that I’m in a rush to do so. However I promised some non-journal notes and I’m going to make good on that now.)

It’s become more and more apparent that I’m bringing back important things into my life. I’m back to having a journal I can rely on, a place for me to write. I’ve been listening to music more than I have. And *listening* to the music, not just collecting or sorting MP3 into their perfectly ordered libraries. The flash of creative inspiration I had last night pushed along into the interface you’re seeing now. I took a long, hot bath and didn’t get upset at myself. My class is almost finished and I think we’re going to get something good out of it.

I’m enjoying my relationship more as well. Let’s leave it at that. ;)

This new-found confidence is serving me well. Assuming that it’s sustained, I think we’re going to be looking at a very good summer.

No, really, I mean it this time.

Posted in General at 2 pm

Yes, I’ve just spent another half hour tweaking this thing. I was getting some weird run on stuff in IE with tons of extra space at the bottom of the window for no apparent reason. I figured it was something in the HTML so I started validating it against 4.0 Transitional. Once I got mostly through it (Still have backgrounds set with the BACKGROUND tag rather than the Style tag, gotta get rid of the MARGINX commands in the body) the spacing issue resolved itself.

Good for now. I’ve removed the table borders, but I still want to work on the side bar and the image map, etc. etc. Okay now I’m really stopping.

About 4 Hours Total

Posted in General at 1 pm

It’s taken me about four hours to get this all set up. I’m sure I could spend another 8 just looking through all the templates, and another few hours getting all the navigation and arcives in place. But this will do for now.

Of course there’s a few things I’m already seeing that I’d like to change. It’s little stuff, like popping out an RSS file and a Netscape My Sidebar file. (Still kept the documentation that they sent out to people who were running feeds to the old my.netscape.com portal. That was pretty cool and I’d like to do something similar still. It’s just a matter of getting this GreyMatter to open up and reveal it’s secrets to me, Perl wise.

Oh and a copy of the entries ought to land in my mail box. That was a life saver when I was working on the original script that I used for Notes. Perhaps this system will be robust enough for me to not have to worry about that. Then again, I worry about everything.

Next time I’ll add some more personal notes. After all this is supposed to be a journal about a person, not about the journal.

Quite New

Posted in General at 1 pm

I told you I was changing this thing. Powered with a new engine, and now with a new look, I present Dwelling: Chasing My Own Tale.

This is the latest development in my journaling exercise. I’m not laying any permanent bets on this system, but we’ll see how it works out. So far the system is pretty damn robust. My JPEGs that I’ve used on the template are enormous, The Archives are nowhere near working, and I haven’t event tried the layout in any other browsers yet. Hang in there, we’ll get this ball rolling.

(This entry will stay at the top of this page for a few weeks until my regular visitors have all come on over to the new URL. New entries start below.)

03.08.01

Testing

Posted in General at 1 pm

Test