Life
Life
Please pardon this slightly commercial message, but the auction is a benefit for the Second Chance League, a sleddog rescue organization here in Fairbanks, Alaska. (I’m currently president of SCL, but we have a lot of very talented and enthusiastic volunteers who work with dogs.)
Midnight Mushing has donated 2 beautiful anoraks to SCL for a fundraiser. The first one is now on eBay to be auctioned off.
This anorak is a "2nd" but only because it has a very slight stain (that we could barely make out!!) on the back. Becky of Midnight Mushing apparel is a perfectionist and her clothing is beyond wonderful. This anorak is not only functional but super nice looking. The workmanship is beautiful and these anoraks will last a lifetime of outdoor Alaska--or any cold climate--use!
All of the proceeds go to the Second Chance League in Fairbanks, Alaska, to support its mission of rescuing sleddogs and finding them good, forever homes.
Fall hasn’t just come to Fairbanks, Fall is almost over. Tonight we should get the first frost here in the hills outside town. It’s been a wet, rainy day, so the dog yard is pretty muddy. Snow level is supposed to be about 2,000 feet, still well above us.
Carol and I spent a lot of time this summer building two free-run pens on either side of our main dog yard. We’re gradually building up the number of dogs in each, with the goal that ultimately everyone will be loose, at least when we’re home. (Since I work at home, it is relatively few hours each week that we’re both gone.) I took the picture above from the newest pen, and the photo looks from it through the dog yard and beyond into the other free-run pen. You can just see Crowe’s head at the bottom, with Irish looking toward me. Misty is the white dog looking from the dog yard, along with several other indoor dogs.
Oh Microsoft, please teach me! I want to know and learn!
How, oh how, do I shut down Outlook 2007 so that when I restart it doesn’t have to check the data file?
Is it the red X in the upper right corner of the window? No, grasshopper. Is it File | Exit? No, not even close. Is it Start Task Manager | Kill Process, tempting as that option is? Is it Entourage on the Mac?
What is the secret? I implore thee, let me in on the divine secret!
Heck, I’ll be in nirvana if just occasionally it doesn’t have to check the data file!
Update: Dave Dustin suggested that I undock any synchronization devices before I shut down Outlook. Thanks, but that’s not it. I don’t use any PDAs or smart phones or any other device that I’m sync’g up with Outlook.
It has long bugged me that the Outline View in Microsoft Word is so narrow, that is, that the text is so narrow on the page. There was no obvious way to change the margin sizes, since Outline View ignores the Page Setup margin settings and you can’t turn on the ruler.
Today it finally bugged me enough that I went looking for the solution. Voila! It’s right there in Tools | Options, on the View tab at the bottom: Wrap to Window. It’s unchecked by default.
I’ve no idea how many versions of Word this has been in, and I hope for the sake of my self-esteem to never know. It would be nice to be able to set margins, but that’s a minor nit.
Anyway, I hope that this will ease someone else’s frustration with Word, just a little.
Thanks, Microsoft!
It was a sad occasion, but Melinda and Bill Gates were here in Fairbanks, Alaska today. I couldn’t mention it before, but they came up for the memorial service this afternoon for Susan Butcher at the Davis Concert Hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The Gates have been friends with Susan and David for years, ever since the Gates came up for a dog mushing trip as part of their honeymoon. I was really impressed with Melinda, who gave one of several short reflections about her friendship with Susan and David. She told some nice, warm stories, and is an excellent speaker. Melinda apparently spent a lot of time with Susan when she was being treated at a hospital in Seattle, apparently more than anyone except for Susan’s husband David.
It was an impressive memorial, with a variety of dignitaries, including Alaskan politicians, George Lucas (another friend of the family), and many from the Fairbanks and mushing communities. It is amazing how many lives Susan touched, right through her losing battle with leukemia. It’s nice that people came from so far to pay their respects.
This is a bit commercial, but it is such a great deal on a wonderful resource that I wanted to get the word out.
I do some work with Grantstation.com, a wonderful portal for anyone who writes grants. They are having an incredible special for just eight hours tomorrow, Wednesday, 19 July. If you work with any non-profit agencies, this is a great special. A year of Grantstation for less than one sixth the regular price.
Here is the announcement:
Due to the overwhelming popularity of the GrantStation event we held this past February, TechSoup Stock and GrantStation are pleased to make a very special GrantStation offer available to the nonprofit community. http://www.techsoup.org/stock/grantstation.html
For only eight hours on July 19th, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific Time, specially discounted one-year GrantStation Memberships will be available to eligible nonprofits for only $90. After the special offer ends, our usual administration fee of $499 will apply. The regular retail price is $599. We are only able to offer this special promotion for a limited time due to the substantial discount involved.
GrantStation Membership includes instant access to a searchable database of thousands of pre-screened foundation and corporate grantmakers that are actively accepting proposals from nonprofits. This database provides you with more than 160 areas of interest to help narrow your search and keep your research time to a minimum. GrantStation also lists the latest federal grant announcements as well as access to state agencies offering grants in all 50 states. GrantStation also offers a section dedicated to international grantmakers to help you find grantmakers based in other countries.
Besides helping you identify the most appropriate grantmaker(s) for your program or project, GrantStation also provides comprehensive tutorials for building a successful grant seeking program and powerful grant requests. You will also receive their informative weekly bulletin, the GrantStation Insider.
Visit TechSoup and place your order on July 19 (8 am – 4 pm Pacific Time)!
Learn more about this special offer and GrantStation PRO: http://www.techsoup.org/stock/grantstation.html
ELIGIBILITY: U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofits and Canadian Registered Charities
Carol and I just got back from the live taping of Michael Feldman’s Whaddya Know here in Fairbanks. It was a hoot! Particularly the way he twisted local news and lore.
If you’re a fan, tune in this weekend for a very funny show. A couple of the interviews dragged, but over all it was a cool way to spend an evening.
It is with a great deal of humility yet pride that I announce that I have been selected to recieve the National Leadership Award from the National Republican Congressional Committee. I am deeply honored by this generous award, proud of all my hard work and the support of loving family and friends over the course of my life. I truly feel that this is the pinnacle of my life and career; nothing can top this.
And co-chairmanship of the prestigious Business Advisory Council? Please, I’m not worthy!
Um, huh? What’s that? In order to recieve this generous award I have to be generous to the Republican Party in turn?
Yes, indeed, this is a political fundraising scam (see here, here, and, ooo, this one is really good...) Oh, for Pete’s sake, do this Google Search to join in the fun. I REALLY love the bio pages where people include it as a real honor. Sheesh. The party has apparently doing this for five or six years.
Obviously they don’t even do the most basic research into who they are calling. If they knew even the smallest thing about me they would know that I would prefer to live in modern-day Bhagdad to supporting the Republican Party. Please, no offense if you’re Republican (or Iraqi). It just ain’t my party. Democrat isn’t either.
Anyway, for Google searching’s sake, here are the caller’s details:
- Eileen Phrase (sp?) called on “behalf of Congressman Tom Reynolds” (Bummer. Many of the Google searches were calls on behalf of Tom deLay. Now, being called on behalf of an actual indicted Congressperson would truly be an honor. Is anyone investigating Tom Reynolds?)
- About the National Leadership Award from the national Republican Congressional Committee
- Phone I was asked to call: 866–338–8289
Here is where I might have made some gut-level comment about scumbag Republicans, scumbag political fundraisers, yada yada yada. But the system in Washington is so very broken and pathetic. What good would it do? Sigh.
Please, don’t be taken in by this scam. It’s tantamount to clicking a link in spam, which encourages the scourge.
If you travel much, or at all, this is a good blog post to read. Yu Hu Stewardess is a flight attendant on a major carrier, and often has some great observations about travelling. This one is just gross, but important to know!
Yu Hu Stewardess: Barefoot on the Plane.
I’m in the keynote that was one of my many reasons to be excited about being here at DevConnections in Las Vegas: Bjarne Stroupstrup’s keynote for the C++ Connections conference. (Sorry Matt for missing your coincident SQL Server 2005 keynote, but I’ve had the honor of hearing you speak a ton of times. But I’ve never heard Bjarne.)
Initial superficial observations. He doesn’t look like his pictures, but his is definitely a geek’s haircut. He seems to be using PowerPoint, but I really can’t be sure. He has a dry sense of humor, with some subtle jokes that were quite funny. The audience is about as geek as you can get. I’m sitting with some very intense people, which is giving me a headache!
The topic is about why C++ has succeeded when so many languages fail. He was apparently challenged by Adobe recently to explain to 1,500 non-technical managers to explain why C++ has succeeded, when some 200 new languages are created each year and most or all fail. He started working on C++ in 1980, 25 years ago, and the first commercial compiler shipped in 1985.
Interesting quote: “Inelegance/verbosity is a major source of bugs and inefficiencies.” Hmm. Sounds like he is talking about Visual Basic, but he didn’t mention any language by name. This was in the context of what he was looking for in 1980, and how he loves writing code and wanted something that could be both elegant and efficient.
The original thought was to “combine C’s strengths for systems programming with Simula’s facilities for program organization.” That would be “C with classes.” But why C? It was the best systems programming language available: flexible, efficient, portable, available, know, and the 2nd order flaws were not critical.
Why classes? For program organization, so that you can map concepts to classes and have the benefit of type checking to help write good code and to catch problems. this makes programming as modeling, as understanding. You can create class hierarchies for OOP, but not all important relationships are hierarchical.
Then he went on to explain how and why he added some features to address his needs.
He also paid a bit of homage to his geek heroes, Kernighan and Ritchie that provided so much of the basis of his C++ work, as well as kristen Nygaard, who invented Simula67 and OOP. Alex Stepanov who originated generic programming.
C++ Design Rules of Thumb, the “general principals”
- C++’s evolution must be driven by real problems
- Don’t get involved in a sterile quest for perfection
- Support sound design notions
- support composition of software out of separately developed parts
- C++ is a language, not a complete system
- C++ must be useful NOW, on current machines, by programmers, for problems
- Always provide a transition path
C++ Design Rules of Thumb, the “language principles”
- Provide the same support for user-defined and built-in types
- What you don’t use you don’t pay for
- Use traditional (dumb) linkers
- No gratuitous incompatibilities with C
- No implicit violations of the type system
So, why did C++ succeed? It was good enough for more purposes you might think, a lot of application areas. It wasn’t just superb at one or two things. This is unlike most research/academic pressures to be the very best at something. It has a firmness of general vision with flexibility in all else. It had the benefit of a lot of feedback, from novices and experts in industry and academia. There was luck and tenacity. It was built by listening to feedback with humility. He had patience and tolerance, and used a standards process.
What is C++? It is a general-purpose programming language with a bias towards systems programming that is a better C, supports data abstraction, supports OOP, supports generic programming. It is also a multi-paradigm programming language (if you have to use long words). the most effective techniques use a combination of styles/paradigms. (Hmm. I’m going to have to process these statements more.)
“I’d never design a tool that could only do what I wanted.” Bjarne Stroustrup, 1988 or so. He created a tool that could be used for a lot of tasks on a lot of hardware.
Had to avoid two extremes: academic beauty/perfection/purity and commercial expediency.
Amazingly, in the early years there was precious little funding for promoting C++.
C++ is shockingly misused. “If that’s C++, then I don’t like it either!” Bjarne after surveying a couple of dozen C++ textbooks. (This is reassuring. I found it very hard to learn back in my early C++ days.)
He’s now working on bringing multiparadign programming, what he’s calling C++0x.
Very interesting graphic of the language landscape of 2004, with all the languages that C++ has influenced. He also said that there is so much more to do to improve.
All in all, a fascinating look at the past and what might be coming in the future. He is a comfortable speaker (knowing his stuff is obviously not an issue) who is quite capable of clearly explaining technical concepts. This keynote was (appropriately) relatively light on deep technical content, but I get the sense that he is able to clearly explain complex stuff. Definitely met my expectations.
Updated to soften irrelevant comments about hair. Sorry; I'm still smarting from my last bad haircut, the effects of which I'm still suffering from.
Now that you’ve all remembered to fall back an hour yesterday (well, unless you’re in one of the many nooks and crannies of the earth that don’t observe daylight savings time), you’ll also need to adjust your clock at midnight this 31st December (whether or not you observe DST).
To keep atomic clocks in sync with the slowing earth rotation, there will be a “positive leap second” at the very end of this December.
So if you’re asleep at midnight, you get an extra second’s sleep!
I haven’t been into these kinds of online quizes for a while, but this was a bit fun. And I did one better than Chris Sells!
| You Passed 8th Grade Math |
 Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct! |
I’ve blogged about her before, but the content she’s adding to her blog these days demands another mention. Melanie Spiller is easily the toughest editor I’ve ever faced, and I am a far better writer for it. (Note to critics: I didn’t say a great writer. Or even good writer. Just better.)
She’s had her blog for about a year and half now, with lots of great entries about the craft of writing. She has recently posted two entries (start with this one) about getting into technical writing, with some savvy advice about how to figure out if it’s for you and how to go about it, along with some reality checks. It’s way better than simple advice to not quit your day job yet.
Besides, it’s good to know the enemy. Chances are that if you really take to technical writing you’ll someday get edited by her. Be ready to be humbled and to learn great things.
I just found another reason why Google’s Gmail is just too cool. I’m still not using it as my sole email client, since I’m so very dependant on Outlook, particularly it’s disconnected features. Besides, I don’t like the idea of all my mail on Google because of privacy issues.
But whenever I travel outside of the IP range of my mail account servers, I can’t send email using Outlook since no one—rightly—allows relaying. So I have to reply using Web mail, which I hate using since spam is so nasty, and I end up having to copy stuff from Outlook.
But with the POP and SMTP access to Gmail, I can both read and, most importantly, send email through Outlook.
Very, very cool, and a big relief!
Geez. Once again Congress is monkeying with stupidities. They pass an Energy Bill that is bad for conservation and great for polluting energy sources, doing virtually nothing to encourage the development of clean or energy saving technologies. At least they're not opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in this bill. No, that will wait for the budget nonsense in September.
Okay, that is grating enough. But they pass a bill that encourages more energy development and usage, then includes this section (Section 111):
Amends the Uniform Time Act of 1966 to extend standard daylight time from March to November (currently from April to October). Requires the Secretary to report to Congress on the impact of this extension upon energy consumption in the United States.
Set aside for the moment that it is ridiculous for us to use Daylight Savings Time (DST) here in Alaska, where we have precious little sun in winter and nearly fulltime sun in summer. We're going to put the country through the disruption of changing the months we're in DST. They keep monkeying with this, the first time in my memory back in the 70s during the energy crisis that started it all. People didn't like it then and won't again now, and they'll change it back again in a year or two. History repeats itself.
Oh, and we'd better hope that all the major operating system vendors get their patches done in time, and that everyone installs them. Otherwise a lot of people will be on the wrong schedules for a month or so!
Bah! Congress, quit disrupting our lives just so you can claim to be doing your job. Do something real for a change!
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I moved last week, one of many reasons why TechEd just wasn't going to work for me. I truly hate moving, but this was the right move to make. The new house is a modified A-frame. The buddy that I'm sharing the house with is letting me use the loft as my office. This is my new view from the loft, out over the living room, and out into Alaska:
(Yes, those are penguins silhouetted in the window. This is Alaska, after all!) Below this window is a picture window through which I can see part of the dog yard. With my dogs, we have 26 dogs (of which only four are in the house right now.)
The adventure continues!
I am the admin for a couple of non-profit groups' emailing lists hosted at the local university. We need to move the lists to another host. Does anyone know of any good ones you can recommend? I know about Yahoo Groups, which are great but have ads. That would work but not our first choice. Are there any hosts that provide lists free to non-profits? If we need to, we could pay a little.
The members of these lists are largely non-technical, so the list has to be user-friendly and have the usual features to allow moderation and spam filtering.
Thanks! (I still have comments turned off because of increasing comment spam, but you can use the Contact link on the menu on this page.)
Carol is at work today and I'm home with too much work to do. So the right thing to do was to take the dogs for a walk on a beautiful, unseasonably warm day (+18 F) to clear my head and let me process things. I had my dogs Mardy and Izzi along, as well as one of Carol's, Ivy.
We went up to what we call the Alder Trail or the Alder Chute Trail (deliberate play on words), a very nice stroll through the woods near where we live west of Fairbanks. It is an out and back trail, something like a couple of miles each way, with varying grades of up on the outbound. The trail was packed by light snow machine traffic and at least one skier, so it was soft and punchy. Perfect for getting the cobwebs out and stretch me out for the skijor races I'm doing tomorrow.
The dogs frequently went off the trail, doing a porpoise move through the rather deep, soft snow along the trail. Here Izzi returns to the packed trail:
One of many reasons I love winter in Alaska are days like this, even though today is warm:
I was originally going to take our usual route to the Chute, a rather steep part of the Equinox Marathon trail, but there had been no traffic on that part of the trail. This shot is looking up that part of the trail.
We forged straight ahead, still following the semi-packed trail, a section that I'd never been on. It soon turned south, away from the chute, and began descending steeply. So after another half mile or so, we decided to turn around.
One of the favorite walking activities of some of our dogs is to attempt to explain to lowly squirrels just why they are so lowly (Mardy's the champ at this). Here is a shot of all three dogs as they finish their lesson to the neighborhood squirrel. Ivy is on the left, mugging for the camera. Izzi is showing her butt on the right. And you can just see the triangle of Mardy's nose in the upper center as she looks skyward toward the squirrel, safely out of reach 20 feet above the ground.
I stopped to take this picture on the way home. It is looking northeast from Henderson Road to the Goldstream Valley, which lies north of Fairbanks.
Geez, I love Alaska!
I hate to do this, but until .Text and/or the 'Junkies folks do something to rein in comment spam, I've turned comments off. I love feedback from everyone and some great discussions, but dealing with spam just takes too much time.