General

We bought an area rug for the living room and it caused the Roomba to hang up while it was doing the cleaning. Basically it would stop in the middle of the rug because it couldn’t enter areas where there were dark patterns on the rug. After reviewing what might cause this I found out it was due to the “cliff sensors” under the Roomba seeing the dark areas and it was interpreting it as a ledge and to not go over it. Also it could happen if the whole rug is very dark and the roomba would likely not enter it at all.

Scott Hanselman recently published a really great podcast on his always-good Hanselminutes show, “On Empathy with Leon Gersing the Ruby Buddha”.  They discuss how important it is to maintain empathy when dealing with others on the Internet as well as in real life, and the importance of keeping a direct connection to your end customers and colleagues in your community. It is a good listen for anyone in the software industry.

Steve brought a lot of greatness to the world. I remember buying my first Apple computer back in early ‘82.  It was an Apple II-Plus and I remember how cool it was that it did color graphics with a TV output. My brother and I were playing the Swashbuckler game right after we got it out of the box. It was also fun and easy to program in Applesoft Basic. Then along came the Apple IIc which was small and easy to haul around, although it wasn’t a true laptop. I then got distracted by the “Amiga” computer and didn’t buy another Apple product for a while but we bought an iPad last year and have really enjoyed it.

Note: Installer and source code were updated on September 1, 2025 to support the latest versions of .Net

Sometimes you might want to print a small section from an email that has 30-embedded replies or just a snippet of code from that big class file. The Clipboard Printer Windows app makes it easy to do by copying what you want to print into the clipboard (CTL-C or right-mouse “Copy”) and then print it to your printer.

I bought a magic gadget from Best Buy called the LiveScribe smart pen and paper after watching a colleague using it for making notes during a meeting.

Technology

The smart pen is really a small computer with an infrared camera analyzing a series of micro-dots in a matrix pattern on paper (originally invented by Anoto in Sweden). You write as with an ordinary pen on special notebook paper and the pen also optionally records audio. It can record everything you write and say and all of it is synched in time and saved to the pen.  Later you can play back the whole session or just click the pen on the a section of the paper and hear the audio that was being spoken when you wrote the particular entry. You can also synch it back to a computer to save as PDF or put on the Internet as an interactive Flash presentation.

We were visited by the “dirty” (west) side of Tropical Storm Hermine on September 7 which dumped some significant rainfall on us. The main density of rainfall walked right up I-35 in what the weathermen call a “train” effect. Then again on September 8 a second load of rain was pulled up from the gulf by the tail of the storm. Unfortunately the ground was still drenched from the previous rain and it resulted in some flooding in our area. The bad thing about flooding in this area are the low-water crossings that people will sometimes try to drive through. In some subdivisions the flooded crossings also trap people so they can’t leave or get back to their house.

I previously wrote about how much I like wild rides, and my friend Mike was kind enough to take me out for a fun ride in his newly rebuilt ’72 Nova hot rod this morning. And by rebuilt I mean the engine has been transformed to a monster, as in “It’s aliiiiiiive!!“. The engine’s displacement is 496 cubic inches and horsepower has been estimated at 700 BHP. When started it often sets off car alarms and scares any nearby kids and elderly. When being built I nicknamed it “The Big Dig” (from boring out the cylinders), and it is now known as “Brutus Maximus”. It was a lot of fun to ride in, when he put the pedal down it was like a speedboat taking off as it reared up trying to pop a wheely. I noticed there were some hand prints on the dash from previous riders holding on! The prints weren’t from my hands but Mike says I was holding on to the seat pretty tightly ;).

One thing I noticed about the tragedy at Virginia Tech is that the media constantly played the monster’s video and kept mentioning the monster’s name. They were playing right into his hands and should have just left that video with law enforcement agencies. This kind of notoriety only encourages copy-cats and zeros that want to gain a sort of immortality to their name (also see Kennedy’s assassin and the Columbine scumbags for other examples).

This is an update on the XM Satellite Radio that I wrote about earlier. I was able to improve the installation in the Matrix by adding a bracket that mounts it to the right of the radio and angles it toward the driver. Also, I wired the power inside the dash so I wouldn’t have to keep using those bulky power plugs. The Sony dash unit was useful in that it has an Aux input that allows the signal to go straight from the XM Radio into the Sony unit. The direct connection is definitely an improvement over going through the FM receiver. Below is a picture of the XM radio in the cradle and hooked up to the Sony:

There’s been an interesting trend lately to turn any adverse publicity into an opportunity to absolve oneself from responsibility by entering into a rehab program. Historically that was limited to drug or alcohol use, but lately rehab has been a “cure-all” for public relations disasters such as rants about ethnicity (Gibson) or sexual-orientation (the guy from “Grey’s Anatomy”). Of course there is still the usual parade of Hollywood stars going to rehab for the classic reasons. The funny thing is that those rehab centers such as WonderLand look better than the nicest spas and let the stars go out running around during the course of their stay (Lohan). The fix is more directed towards the rehabilitation of the image of the star, evangelist, or sports player rather than fixing the actual problem. Maybe after the next Super Bowl they’ll say “I’m going to Wonderland!” instead of Disneyland.