December 31, 2010
Short Updates on New Years Eve
Good morning! Welcome to New Years Eve. Yesterday I heard of valgrind for the first time and I'm trying it out this morning. It's a handy tool for detecting the subtle kinds of bugs that regular debuggers have more trouble with. Soon we'll be heading to the YMCA so Michelle can teach her Hi-Lo class and I can take the boys swimming.
42°F and sunny here in the downtown of the Gate City. On New Years Eve!
Had a busy, fun morning. While Michelle taught her Hi/Lo class, I took the boys to the track, we shot some hoops, I showed them racquetball, we peeked in on Michelle's class, and I took 'em swimming. We made a quick pitstop in Nashua to drop off some forms to the twins' counselors. Then we had lunch at Bentley's in Amherst. Michelle and I enjoyed some gyros. Admittedly they aren't in the same league as Squabs but here in the Souhegan Valley, we take what we can get. On the way home we stopped at DFE for some coffee's. Now that we're home and it's in the mid-40's, the boys are giving the electric scooter another try.
Spent a little time refreshing my memory about using GDB, the Gnu DeBugger, under Emacs. I've been using Microsoft Visual Studio long enough now that my Old School GDB skills were getting rusty. Now I'm doing something I told myself I would do over break: learn about and sign up for Evernote. Now that I'm worried Yahoo may drop/sell Delicious.com I want some place more reliable to store bookmarks, notes, etc. Evernote is that plus a whole lot more. If Yahoo had put just a little effort into Delicious, it could've been so much more.
I've setup an account and installed Evernote clients on my MacBook, my phone, and as a Chrome extension. While it wasn't as ideal as it used to be, I was able to export my Delicious bookmarks as a single HTML file that was imported as just one note. It used to be able to export each item natively but this'll do for now as a workaround. Here are the instructions for importing your old bookmarks as a single note.
While I was tinkering, I watched "Happy New Year, Charlie Brown!" with the boys. I got a kick out of the torture Charlie Brown's teacher had in making him read 'War and Peace' by Leo Tolstoy at the beginning and then 'Crime and Punishment' by Dostoyevsky. This year I considered reading both of those but instead read each author's second best known novel, 'Anna Karenina' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Who knows how I'll "torture" myself with classics next year.
Did a little Googling around and found a recent AppleScript that will read/parse the bookmarks file exported from Delicious and import them as individual notes in Evernote. Score! See the comments here for details of one user's submission. It looks like it successfully imported 1691 bookmarks that I've accumulated over the years. I wonder how many of them even work anymore. URL's tend to go stale after a few years.
Fired up my work laptop so I could VPN in and check my paystub from a couple of days ago. Man! This laptop takes forever and a day to boot. Soo looking forward to getting the new workstation up and running on Monday. 4 processor cores, each running faster (2.8GHz?), with Windows 7. I have to believe it'll do better than this crufted laptop.
Decided that as long as I had my work laptop out and had some free time, I'd boot the Linux partition. It came up quickly by comparison. Doing a System Update on this partition... Meanwhile I'm watching Timothy school Michelle on Kirby techniques.
The Chumby stopped supporting it's Weather.com widget so Timothy and I have been scrambling to find another widget that can provide Doppler radar. So far, while there are plenty of weather widgets, none seem to do Michelle's precious radar maps. That was one of the primary things Michelle liked about it. Argh!
Got the boys tucked into bed with their prayers. Afterwards Michelle and I had a brief campy/hokey-fest and watched the pilot of The Secrets of Isis. Wow! 1975. A few months before Lynda Carter did Wonder Woman and a year after Shazam! I was about Timothy's age at the time. It was a riot watching it and skimming some of the other episode titles: UFO's, Bigfoot, etc. So 1970's! Good night all! We're not staying up 'til midnight. See you in MMXI !