Harsh

When I was on the cross country ski team at University of Waterloo, we had our own temperature scale. From warmest to coldest, it was

  • Cold
  • Damn Cold
  • God Damned Cold
  • God Damned Fucking Cold
  • Harsh

Back then, because we spent so much time out in the cold and were pretty damn fit, I think “Harsh” was around -40, which is the temperature we experienced for the entire week of our first Christmas Ski Camp. That’s where future Olympic silver medalist and future several time wearer of the Malliot Jaune and Malliot Blanc in the Tour de France, Steve Bauer, showed me how to put a plastic bag down my shorts to prevent a painful frostbite.

These days in my aged and infirm state, “Harsh” is what we have been experiencing the last couple of days. It was 7°F when I drove home tonight, and in the cold today I broke my new snow brush and my very fancy and expensive sunglasses that I bought in Oshkosh last year. Plus my gas mileage is in the pits because the engine has to run to keep the owner warm.

Tip jar service?

Man this off-line blogging is a blessing and a curse, isn’t it?

Now that Amazon Honor System has gone away, what other options do I have for soliciting donations on my navaid.com website? I get most of my donations through PayPal, but some people preferred to stay away from PayPal for some reason. Amazon has a donation service, but only for registered charities.

We’re only talking about $5 or $10 a month, so it’s not like I need a full ecommerce solution.

Debugging, no molasses

I discovered the secret to getting Eclipse debugging to not be painfully slow. The secret is to reboot (or possibly just log off and on again) and then make sure you don’t start IE or Outlook or anything else except Oracle, jboss and the app. At that point I’m using just a hair over 2Gb of memory and it’s hardly swapping at all.

I’m sure it would be a huge violation of their security policies, but I’d love to bring in my laptop to see how of does at this. Not only does it have a faster processor and twice as much ram, but it also would allow me to have only Oracle, jboss and the app running on the desktop box while Eclipse ran on the laptop, freeing up half a gig of ram on the desktop.

Looking for recommendations for apps

I’m looking for recommendations for the following apps for my iPod Touch:

1. A good aviation logbook. When my flightbag was stolen, my bacon was saved by the fact that every flight I’ve ever made is on my Treo. The ability to import and export to CSV would be a huge plus.

2. I use a spreadsheet on my Treo for two reasons: to track my hours at work and to record the mileage on my car. I’m looking for either a simple cheap spreadsheet or separate apps for each of those. Actually if there were a google gear for iPod so I could use Google Doc even when I’m offline, that would be ideal.

At Mark and Kris’s urging, I’m giving two thumb typing another try. It seems to be getting better and i’m more impressed with the quality of the auto-correct now that I’m purposely making more mistakes. And Andy’s mention of the hold-drag for minor punctuation is a big time saver too.

First day with the Touch at work

I had the Touch at work for the first time yesterday. It was really nice to go out at lunch and do some web browsing with a decent browser for a change. I just wish I could have that all day – oh well, maybe when the Palm Pre comes out. It was also nice to be able to compose a blog entry while off line like I’m doing now.

I’m getting more used to the predictive text. For instance, I don’t bother going to the number and symbol keyboard to find the apostrophe when I’m typing contractions – I just type the letters and hit space. I also like the double space to get a period-space at the end of sentences. I don’t know why, but I’m having far less trouble with the keyboard than I did with Vicki’s, possibly because I’ve given up trying to use two thumbs like I do with my Treo.

Yesterday I was a little perturbed to see the low battery warning when I still had three hours to work. I got through the rest of the day by hitting the off button as soon as I finish interacting with it instead of admiring the album art as I had been before. Maybe I should bring a charger to work so I can continue to look at them.