Smalltalk with James Robertson

I've been slightly irked at my Mac for weeks now, and I finally realized what's been bothering me - the mouse. Awhile ago, I spilled coffee on the mouse. While it recovered, it didn't recover completely - it was missing clicks from time to time, and that just led to ongoing annoyance that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

It came to me last night playing Dragon Age (which I downloaded for the Mac over the weekend). While missing a mouse click while writing code or blogging is annoying, in game play, it just smacks you in the face. So this morning I ran out and bought a new mouse, and wow - I'm not annoyed at the machine anymore.

It's amazing how your state of mind can be affected by small stuff that you don't even consciously register.

Technorati Tags: games

I waited right up to the due date for my latest run at Maryland's emissions check for the Mirage (now 21 years old). When I got there, there was a line, so to prevent any blue smoke from having them wave me off, I just turned the car off while I waited. When I got the car up there, I discovered that the treadmill test was gone - new cars just have their onboard computers read (lots of chances for gaming the system there) - my car, being old, had to idle with a reader stuffed in the tailpipe. It doesn't smoke when I give it gas, so that went fine - and then two awesome things happened:

• Their system was confused, so they didn't charge me for the visit
• The car passed

Which is cool, because now I don't have to pay the "$450 try to get it fixed" workaround :)

Technorati Tags: car, emissions check, Maryland

It's been one of those days. Slate gray skies, "urgent" emails, and then the nearly forgotten orthodontist appointment my daughter had. Blech.

On the amusing side of things, I was looking up the orthodontist's phone number to make a follow up appointment - we forgot to do that while we were there - and ran across this. Yes, we use that same orthodontist :)

Today's event in Paris is going well except for one small thing - it's 37 (f) outside, and there's no heat in the room we are in. Thank goodness for the heat emissions from the laptops :)

Technorati Tags: paris

This is interesting:

According to the National Federation of the Blind, only 10 percent of blind children learn braille today, down from 50 percent in the 1950s, and only 10 percent of blind people in America read braille.

I'm not sure I have any opinion on whether it's good, bad, or indifferent - I'm not blind, and I don't know anyone who is. I do know that listening (podcasts) is different than reading - that's why I'm far more interested in e-readers (like the coming iPad) than I am in audiobooks. Is it the same for blind people? It seems they're "voting with their fingers".

Technorati Tags: braille, audio, reading

I had to drive my daughter somewhere the other day, and we got to talking about the somewhat artificial feeling that surrounds the place we live (Columbia, MD - created out of whole cloth 40 some odd years ago). There' wasn't any real economic driver for this place; there still isn't. Very few people living here are actually from here; it's a bedroom community, with most people commuting down to the DC suburbs where the local jobs are. The fact that I work out of the house makes me something of an outlier here, I guess. Anyway - I often read people talking about the supposedly tighter community feeling in a city, but I don't think that has anything to do with it. What I think matters is what you might call local permanence: how many people have their roots in an area (meaning, their family ties to the immediate region go back more than a generation)? The higher that number is, the more a place is going to feel like home for kids born there. The lower it is, the less they'll feel that way. The famous theories about "suburban alienation" don't really have much to do with the suburbs, IMHO - they have to do with transience. I rather suspect that city neighborhoods with low levels of "permanence" have the same levels of alienation. I don't know whether this actually leads me anywhere; it's just a set of thoughts that grew out of a conversation I had with my daughter. Food for thought though...

Technorati Tags: lifestyle, urban, suburban

Well, this makes the next few weeks exciting. I was setting up my trip to London and Paris (for our next round of conferences), and I couldn't find my passport - it wasn't in the place I normally leave it. Finally, I opened the dryer, and sure enough: there it was.

Damaged beyond use, so I investigated the process. I couldn't find my birth certificate (with a damaged passport, you need proof of citizenship along with the damaged passport) - but fortunately, my mom still has a copy (and for safety, I ordered a new one from the state I was born in).

After that, I just need to run down to the local post office, pay a rather large fee, and wait. I'll have to expedite it, but that's just the way it goes...

Technorati Tags: passport

I found this melding of old pictures into present day locations to be fascinating.

Today's fun problem: the audio for the video we've been showing to kick off these events was having sound cut out problems. That turned out to be simple - the cable was bad. Fortunately, I always carry audio cables with me, so we got that sorted out pretty soon. Should be a good day

Technorati Tags: toronto

This is pretty swesome: Windows 3.1 in a browser