It seems as if school starts earlier each year. Yesterday my kids went back to school. When I was younger, I remember starting the day after Labor day. I remember the school year shifting so that it started the week before Labor day as my own kids became of age. Now they are starting two weeks before.
Last night we headed down to the store to buy new school supplies. We keep a fairly well stocked stationary cabinet in my home office and so there wasn't much we needed. A few spiral-bound notebooks, highlighters, colored pencils and we were set.
It is also time to make sure the computers are set up and ready for the year. I need to update the operating system on the family computer as it is a few releases behind where it should be. I also need to make sure we have enough paper and toner for the two printers (one is color, the other black and white). It will probably be a few weeks before the first papers are due, but it is important to get these things taken care of before you are up into the wee hours of the morning helping your kid get that term paper printed. Running out of printer supplies at 1:00 am can lead to kids learning a whole new vocabulary.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
Language Translation
A friend of mine asked me to help him translate some training material from English to French. Having lived in France and Belgium for several years, I speak French fluently. Unfortunately that is not the same as being able to write fluently. I would guess I have the spelling ability of about a 3rd grader. Luckily computers are really good at spelling and so I agreed to help my friend.
While I could have loaded up the French dictionary in my word processor, I instead opted to use an online translation program called BabelFish. It has been around since 1999 but I first came across it in 2003 when it was taken over by AltaVista, one of the original Internet search engines. Yahoo now hosts the site.
BabelFish is a reference to a fictitious animal in Douglas Adams' book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By putting this fish in your year, it can instantly translate any language into the one you understand. The website works similarly. Just type in your text in English, select the language you want the translation, and click the translate button. Presto, your text is instantly translated in another window. Most of the time, it is pretty close. Sometimes it doesn't get the correct meaning of a particular word, but that is an easy fix if you understand the language. BabelFish was a huge help to my friend's project. Too bad it wasn't completely automatic. If it was, I could copy and paste the text of the training material into the website and be done with it. Oh well, maybe in the next version.
While I could have loaded up the French dictionary in my word processor, I instead opted to use an online translation program called BabelFish. It has been around since 1999 but I first came across it in 2003 when it was taken over by AltaVista, one of the original Internet search engines. Yahoo now hosts the site.
BabelFish is a reference to a fictitious animal in Douglas Adams' book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By putting this fish in your year, it can instantly translate any language into the one you understand. The website works similarly. Just type in your text in English, select the language you want the translation, and click the translate button. Presto, your text is instantly translated in another window. Most of the time, it is pretty close. Sometimes it doesn't get the correct meaning of a particular word, but that is an easy fix if you understand the language. BabelFish was a huge help to my friend's project. Too bad it wasn't completely automatic. If it was, I could copy and paste the text of the training material into the website and be done with it. Oh well, maybe in the next version.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
My Old Boat
I got an e-mail today from an old friend. He is a yacht broker and helped me buy and sell my old boat. They say that the two happiest days of a boat owner are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells it. In my case, I was very sad to have to sell my beloved sailboat. The problem was that I couldn't justify owning it when I no longer worked in San Francisco at the time. The purpose of my buddy's e-mail was letting me know my boat is for sale again.
Looking at the photographs on the Internet brought back a flood of old memories. Most of them were good. I remember sailing her up the coast from Dana Point to San Francisco. We went through the mother of all storms and had to pull into Monterey to make repairs. I remembered how the family used to spend time on the boat and we called it "Camp Sail and Swim" because we would go out sailing or swim off the back of the boat in the marina.
Everyone I have shown the pictures to has asked if I want to buy the boat back. While there is a part of me that loves the idea, there is also a reason I chose a smaller one when I bought my latest boat. It sure was fun to see the old pictures though.
Looking at the photographs on the Internet brought back a flood of old memories. Most of them were good. I remember sailing her up the coast from Dana Point to San Francisco. We went through the mother of all storms and had to pull into Monterey to make repairs. I remembered how the family used to spend time on the boat and we called it "Camp Sail and Swim" because we would go out sailing or swim off the back of the boat in the marina.
Everyone I have shown the pictures to has asked if I want to buy the boat back. While there is a part of me that loves the idea, there is also a reason I chose a smaller one when I bought my latest boat. It sure was fun to see the old pictures though.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Internet Rumors and Lies
Yesterday I had a full day of work and didn't have much time to do anything else. In fact, I didn't get back to my boat until 8pm and then I had a bunch of boat chores before heading to bed. So I was a little annoyed that I had to respond to an e-mail from my mother-in-law where she continued to propagate Internet rumors and lies.
My mother-in-law is one of those people that receives an e-mail with a funny story or cute picture and broadcasts it to everyone in her electronic address book. Mostly I just skim over her messages and get on with my day. However sometimes she will forward stuff that is just wrong. Once she forwarded a message saying not to open any e-mails with a particular heading. Doing so would wipe out my hard drive and destroy my computer. I had to explain to her that what she suggested was impossible, especially since I read e-mail on a Linux computer. However even Windows users were safe as the recipient would have to run an attachment sent with the e-mail to cause damage. Merely looking at an e-mail would have no effect.
Yesterday's e-mail was supposedly a reprint of an article from the Wall Street Journal about what an incompetent moron our current president is. While many in the country may agree with that idea, it is not something you are going to openly read about in the Wall Street Journal. So I did a bit of searching on the Internet. Thirty seconds later I discovered that the article was not written by the alleged author and it only appeared in an online forum of the Wall Street Journal's readers' comments. In other words, in a place where anyone could have posted the message. That doesn't exactly make it a newsworthy story. If the author and place of publication are both lies, how much stock can one put in the content of the article? My guess is that any fact quoted is also a lie and shouldn't be trusted. Yet people do.
As you are reading e-mail from friends and family, please be careful about what you believe. Not everything you read on the Internet is true. If it were, there about a hundred Nigerians I need to get back to about helping them transfer money into my bank account.
My mother-in-law is one of those people that receives an e-mail with a funny story or cute picture and broadcasts it to everyone in her electronic address book. Mostly I just skim over her messages and get on with my day. However sometimes she will forward stuff that is just wrong. Once she forwarded a message saying not to open any e-mails with a particular heading. Doing so would wipe out my hard drive and destroy my computer. I had to explain to her that what she suggested was impossible, especially since I read e-mail on a Linux computer. However even Windows users were safe as the recipient would have to run an attachment sent with the e-mail to cause damage. Merely looking at an e-mail would have no effect.
Yesterday's e-mail was supposedly a reprint of an article from the Wall Street Journal about what an incompetent moron our current president is. While many in the country may agree with that idea, it is not something you are going to openly read about in the Wall Street Journal. So I did a bit of searching on the Internet. Thirty seconds later I discovered that the article was not written by the alleged author and it only appeared in an online forum of the Wall Street Journal's readers' comments. In other words, in a place where anyone could have posted the message. That doesn't exactly make it a newsworthy story. If the author and place of publication are both lies, how much stock can one put in the content of the article? My guess is that any fact quoted is also a lie and shouldn't be trusted. Yet people do.
As you are reading e-mail from friends and family, please be careful about what you believe. Not everything you read on the Internet is true. If it were, there about a hundred Nigerians I need to get back to about helping them transfer money into my bank account.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Writing a Video Game
I currently work for a video game company but don't really do anything to create them. Recently I decided that if I work for such a company, I might want to write a simple game. While some organizations might discourage this, my company encourages it. Furthermore, if the game is any good, they will publish it and let me keep the majority of the proceeds. There are some limitations in that while I can use company equipment and time, I need to make sure I complete the rest of my work first. After all they hired me to look after very important database systems and not to write games.
Normally I head back to Utah on Friday nights. This weekend I am staying in the San Francisco area instead. I have completed my CERT training and needed to spend this morning going through a skills test. It was fun being able to put out a real fire using a fire extinguisher as opposed to just talking about it. There were lots of other things I got to do, but I was done a little after lunch. So what do I do with the rest of my weekend? I figured I would start writing my game.
There is a hard way to write a video game where you create everything from scratch. Then there is an easy way where you use a video game editor like Unity to help you create the game. I like the easy way and so I downloaded Unity and am playing with it today. I don't expect to create a game in a single weekend but I do hope I will have a good idea as to how long it will take. Now I just need a simple idea for a game.
Normally I head back to Utah on Friday nights. This weekend I am staying in the San Francisco area instead. I have completed my CERT training and needed to spend this morning going through a skills test. It was fun being able to put out a real fire using a fire extinguisher as opposed to just talking about it. There were lots of other things I got to do, but I was done a little after lunch. So what do I do with the rest of my weekend? I figured I would start writing my game.
There is a hard way to write a video game where you create everything from scratch. Then there is an easy way where you use a video game editor like Unity to help you create the game. I like the easy way and so I downloaded Unity and am playing with it today. I don't expect to create a game in a single weekend but I do hope I will have a good idea as to how long it will take. Now I just need a simple idea for a game.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Effective E-mail
This morning I got an e-mail that was forwarded from my mom. The message was announcing dates for a family reunion on her side of the family. There was no other information provided, only the dates and that information about hotels would be provided at a later date. The first question I asked myself was, "Where is the family reunion?"
I fired off an e-mail back to my mom asking for the location and she reminded me that it would be in Santa Cruz, California. E-mail is great in that it is almost instant and very close to free (as in no cost to use). The problem is that it also makes us lazy. When you had to send invitations to family reunions using the postal service, you made sure that you answered all of the "W" questions: Who, What, Why, Where, When. With e-mail, you can quickly fire off an invitation and if you forget something, send out a correction. Text messages are worse, but that is a subject for another day.
Taking the time to reread an e-mail and making sure it has all of the important information will help your recipients greatly. If the original sender of the e-mail had simply gone through the "W" questions before sending the message, I would not have had to take extra time to get clarification. After all, my wife's family is also planning a family reunion and I am having a difficult time coming up with ways of avoiding the both of them.
I fired off an e-mail back to my mom asking for the location and she reminded me that it would be in Santa Cruz, California. E-mail is great in that it is almost instant and very close to free (as in no cost to use). The problem is that it also makes us lazy. When you had to send invitations to family reunions using the postal service, you made sure that you answered all of the "W" questions: Who, What, Why, Where, When. With e-mail, you can quickly fire off an invitation and if you forget something, send out a correction. Text messages are worse, but that is a subject for another day.
Taking the time to reread an e-mail and making sure it has all of the important information will help your recipients greatly. If the original sender of the e-mail had simply gone through the "W" questions before sending the message, I would not have had to take extra time to get clarification. After all, my wife's family is also planning a family reunion and I am having a difficult time coming up with ways of avoiding the both of them.
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