Day: January 29, 2009

In case you haven’t noticed, this week’s Betty Blonde is about Facebook. For those of you who don’t know, Facebook is a very addicting social-networking site where you post up photos and talk to your friends. People of all ages and backgrounds log on to it, making it a very interesting place to be. I’ve had an account since late August, and let me tell you, it is not easy to drag myself away from the computer when I’m adding more friends or looking at a new photo album. Facebook is not healthy in large doses I am sure, but there is much humor to be found within it’s blue and white pixelized walls.

For example, the ’25 Random Things about me’ craze. Like I said the other day, it’s spread like a wildfire since it requires you to tag 25 other people to do the same thing. They’ve been really fun to read, especially since a few of them are hilarious. Christian’s list being one of them. I may be biased, but I thought that his list was the most underappreciated one in the entire bunch. I just had to share it here. I didn’t understand some of the ‘segments’, but I’m sure that smart people like Troy or Catherine will.

25 Palatable Segments
by Christian

1. Our kitty’s vet told us that one of our cats was 6 pounds overweight, while I read off the scale that she was actually 6.2 pounds off. We’re getting a new vet.
2. I am totally confused by he rune-scape ‘assist’ system.
3. I haven’t snail-mailed a letter to the free software foundation asking for my own copy of the GNU GPL, even though all of the software I install says I should.
4. I am a Google conspiracy theorist only when I want to be. Sometimes. ~(0_o)~
5. I am 1/5th of the way done with this crummy excuse of a post.
6. My real name is not Klaus Fiedler. (Who knew!??)
7. My bedtime is 9:00 but I usually get into bed by 9:30 because it take time to get ready for bed. Setting bedtime earlier is totally out of the question.
8. My favorite color switches between heliotrope and flurple depending on what day of the month it is.
9. The only Apple product I own is a firewire cable. ( Not counting Kelly’s iPod. )
10. I laugh every time I hear the ‘In soviet Russia…’ meme even though I know it’s at least 10 years older than me.
11. Same with Chuck Norris jokes.
12. I can’t think of any more, so I will just stop at half and do the rest later.
13. This is only half a fact, so if I leave this as an incomplete sentence
14. I was the first person to operate the coffee grinder at the ‘Rays Foods’ grocery store in Albany, OR. Unfortunately, it broke down after 15 seconds of normal usage.
15. Every time I drink out of an aluminum pop can I always attempt to drown the small amount of soda trapped inside by the ridge on the mouthpiece. I have never succeeded.
16. I still cringe when I recall an embarrassing incident that happened 8 years ago involving me and some guy who is now long dead.
17. I don’t always get a new toothbrush every 3 months.
18. According to the Runescape community, ‘I died last Tuesday’
19. I once thought that a less than proper word was a substitutable word for ‘the sound scissors make when they are cutting’
20. I got a 99.9 % score on a math test once, but there were only 25 problems.
21. I have only just realized (as of a few months ago) that the words ‘ghetto’ ‘holla’ and ‘chill’ have colloquial English meanings.
22. Contrary to popular belief, I CAN-NOT out-cuss the Mexican on the street corner. Please stop asking me to recite Spanish swear words.
23. I have only one pair of sage-colored pants.
24. When someone IM’s me a texting acronym I am not familiar with, I quickly scamper away to look it up on the urban dictionary, and then go on with the conversation as if I already knew it.
25. I have made several unpublished Betty Blonde comic strips deemed ‘too political to show publicly’
26. When I went to a ball game with Dad once, I heard him use some simple baseball jargon in a conversation. I thought that ‘HR’ stood for ‘Human resources’

Oh, my mom just got a Facebook. If you have an account, then do add her as soon as possible. I don’t know how long it will last seeing that Dad is vehemently opposed to the whole social-networking thing. (And he’s the one with the almost-6 year old blog 😉 ) Everyone says that he should get a Facebook too, but being the Luddite that he is, he refuses. Ah well…

I have not provided an update on my programming projects for quite awhile, so I thought I would use today’s blog post to describe where I am on the things I have started.

The volcano computer:  This project is still in process with a little bit of a diminished sense of urgency because Mount Saint Helens has not been to active lately and there is so much snow in it right now that it would not be possible to helicopter the thing down in there anyway.  Nevertheless, progress continues.  I stole the camera from Evan for another project, so he is working on integration of the GPS time data capture capability until I send him back the camera.  We hope this will be ready by late March or early April.

Bleax (Betty Blonde Accumulator of Comix):  I continue to make a little progress every week with this program.  Lately I have worked on preparation of the GUI to control the scanner.  I found a Python scanner library for both Linux and Windows that will be perfect to both control the scanner and keep the cross platform functionality of the program.  I use this program every day.  We really could not do the Betty Blonde comic without it.  I have cut the amount of time it takes to convert one of Kelly’s drawings from the raw, inked panels to a finished strip up on the website from about a half an hour per strip to less than ten minutes.  The scanner program will cut that down to about a couple of minutes per strip for those strips for which I do not have to make modifications in GIMP.  This is hobby stuff now, so I do not anticipate I will be able to finish this until sometime this summer.

KamVu:  This is my standalone machine vision library.  I have actually been working on this pretty heavily.  The main infrastructure of the program is under the LGPL license, but I have been adding some proprietary, application specific functionality to the program to allow some friends to use the libraries in their commercial applications.  I have actually been working on this pretty heavily.  It is amazing how many opportunities popped up after this got started.  It works great, I have started adding some OpenCV based functionality, as much for the opportunity to learn as for any need.  KamVu can still be found here.

C++/KDevelop:  Christian now has KDevelop loaded on his computer.  I need to get him started back into his C++ Primer Plus book.  He has really started to grasp the theory and it is way over due that he start using the C++/OOD stuff that he has learned.  The reason we just load KDevelop is because Nokia bought the QT libraries and converted their license to the LGPL license.  They are a great set of libraries and now that the license is right, it will be a super way to get programming experience that is valued by industry in a world class Integrated Development Environment.  Still, we cannot let this distract us from our completion of the ham radio.  We will start as soon as we can, but really jump into this hard in the summer.