Andy's Guy Stuff

2009 Calendar is up and available

2009-01-02T15:52:00.003-05:00

My 2009 calendar is up on the web site with the first circled date, January 1. Of course, 1/1/ is the anniversery of the day the Year 2000 Bug didn't happen.

The design is pretty nice. If you haven't seen it there are both color and black and white PDFs available at http:www.NovickSoftware.com/2009.htm

Happy New Year

Andy

New HP dv9000 laptopnext

2007-11-05T01:29:00.000-05:00

I've purchased a new HP dv 9000 with Vista. My first impressions are pretty mixed. It's pretty. Vista is pretty. The off center keyboard is a bit strange and I'm not use to it. The keys ar just not in the right positions.

Vista is slow. I know there is more security but really. This computer has two processors, 4gb of ram. There's no excuse. I'm running XP Pro in a VMWare virtual machine and it's pretty snappy.

My next gripe is the lack of supporty by VPN vendors for 64 bit Vista. What? This is a year old OS that was available to them starting 3 years ago. Shame on you Sonicwall.

We'll have to see if my opnion get's any happier.

ZoomIT 2.0 - PDF Reader/Editor - Troubles

2007-04-19T09:48:00.000-04:00

Over the past few years I've grown to dislike Acrobat Reader. All those nagging downloads and the heavey slowness. So I've been trying ZoomIT but have had to uninstall it.
The problem came when I tried to print using ZoomIT a tax PDF that had been filled out already. When I opened the PDF it was okay but it asked to download a plugin that allowed it to handle the Javascript in the form. It did a nice job of the download. The first problem is that changes made with ZoomIT and saved didn't save. I'm not sure why not.
The big problem was that when I went to print I got a

BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!

The whole machine crashed and rebooted. I tried the file again with the same result.

Then when I went to their support screen to enter the problem I got stuck and couldn't complete the entry because I had made an invalid choice for the build number.

So much for ZoomIT.

God's Debris

2005-11-27T10:09:00.000-05:00

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has made his book God's Debris (2001) a free download. The price is right and the book is interesting. He calls it a thought experiment around the questions:
What if there was someone who knew everything?
What is God?
What should I be doing?

There's a few choice words about relationships and what each of the genders think about the other.

The follow on "The Religion War" is still a paper book.

I think it cost me about $3 to print the PDF and I think it was well worth the money, effort, and the time spent reading it.

Fish Story of Plain Dumb Luck

2005-11-22T02:41:00.000-05:00

30 minutes out of the dock the first strike came and one of the Scotts got the chance. 30 seconds later I got a chance. There was only one chair so the crew fitted me with a belt to use to anchor the rod as I pulled in this baby. Six feet of sailfish. I was pretty surprised and unprepared so we threw it back into the Caribbean. I’ll just have to go back again.

Walking through the Gates and getting hungry

2005-02-23T22:21:00.000-05:00

With my sons, parent, sister, and her family I went to the Gates in central park this weekend. It was odd. And somewhat impressive. I'm not really sure that I can say that I liked it but it was a small "experience". We did get hungry while walking around in the cold but couldn't find the alternate exhibit, Crackers. http://www.smilinggoat.com/crackers.html

Congratulations to the New England Patriots.

2005-02-08T11:24:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to the New England Patriots.
We had 20 people for our Super Bowl XXXIX party. Tommy, Eric, and I built this red and blue snow football as one of the decorations. Eric is the one kicking off with Tommy holding.

2005-02-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

I started this blog thinking it wouldn't be about technology but I'm already going to let a little slip in. It's not my technology but I've run across two sets of predictions about where Google is going that are though provoking.

The most recent of the posts is John Dvorak's thoughts on the possibility of a Google browser and a Google OS. The browser sounds pretty reasonable and pretty easy to achieve. After all as JD predicts it'll be a version of FireFox. The OS seems a little more far fetched. The problem with new OS's has always been the availability of software, which I'll consider in another post. Here's the link to JD's article:
http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7BCB1AB36C-D097-4451-93C4-A19141400FB5%7D&siteid=google&dist=google

The other interesting posting is EPIC, an 8 minute flash movie about one possible future where GoogleZon takes over the news. I ran into it on Rocky Lhotka's blog. You'll find it at: http://www.broom.org/epic/ . Rocky's seems to be concerned about the possibility of authors earning a living in a world of where so much writing is free. The same holds for programmers in the face of the open source movement. How are we suppose to earn a living if software is free? There are a few models of success but only a few. In any case, the EPIC movie is worth watching.

Dealing with a Frozen Drain Pipe

2005-01-27T17:03:00.000-05:00

I've had a recent success in dealing with a frozen pipe and if you've got the same problem you might be interested. The pipe in question is the PVC drain pipe from our kitchen sink. It also handles the output of the dishwasher. With all that hot dishwasher water you'd think it wouldn't freeze but that just wasn't the case. The pipe runs against the outside wall for a stretch of about two feet.

I tried a manual snake without luck. As I later learned, one of the things to look for to determine that you're dealing with a frozen pipe instead of a routine clog is what comes back when you retrieve the snake. If it's clear, you're probably dealing with a frozen pipe instead of a hair, food, or grease clog.

As you might guess we called a plumber, who tried his power snake. It's pretty much the same as the manual one but with a power drill doing the turning. The snake came back clean so he packed up and went away leaving us to wait for the pipe to break so he could come back and charge a bundle for opening up the wall and replacing it. But he did make two reasonable suggestions:
- Pour hot salt water down the drain.
- Put a space heater under the kitchen sink cabinet.
I had been thinking about the salt water. It would lower the melting point of the water in the drain and might slowly melt the ice. So I tried. And while I was at it I put a small electric space heater under the sink and aimed it at the drain pipe. These suggestions might work in some circumstances but didn't help us. The heater might work much better on copper pipe than on PVC but who has copper anymore?

That evening an idea struck. If you can't heat it up from the inside, why not try and heat it up from the outside. Eureka!

I thought about various forms of insulation that might insulate the outside wall and slow the heat loss. A blanket? Leftover foam insulation? My wife suggested cardboard, which sounded like a pretty good idea so I retrieved the shipping carton from an old DELL server? What else?

I settled on making a tent by leaning a 4x8 sheet of plywood against the exterior wall of the house. Over this I stapled a leftover plastic drop cloth. The idea was to capture the heat from the wall in a sort of tent around the wall. I was even planning to run an extension cord outside and put the space heater in the tent. If I didn't set the house on fire, that was pretty sure to work.

It turned out that I didn't need the heater because there was an exhaust vent for the kitchen counter range that exited the house right near the window over the sink and thus near the drain pipe. I extended the plastic sheet over the vent so that the warm exhaust would be captured in the tent. Then I went inside and turned on the fan so that it would pull warm air from the inside of the house through the vent and heat the wall. I returned to work and hoped for the best.

Forty-five minutes later I went to get some coffee and the water in the sink was gone. The outside thermometer that is inside the plastic tent read 40 degrees (F). The thermometer a few feet way that wasn't in the tent read 21 degrees (F). The tent and the exhaust fan did the job.