Clearing Out The Cobwebs

So it has been months since my last post. It really doesn't feel that long, but I guess time flies whether you're having fun or not. I recently saw the movie Julie and Julia, and it made me want to get back to posting on a more regular basis. I'm also thinking about actually making a webpage beyond the 'Coming Soon' that has been on my domain for years. At the very least I can point it here.

I've had some big changes personally this year, the largest being my slight change in career (again). I am still with the same company, but I have switched roles after more than 7 years of software development to more of an applications engineering position. What does that mean? Well, mostly it means I am doing 100 things at once instead of 2 or 3 - which I think fits better with my personality. It also means I'm dealing more with customers and will be travelling a bit. But the two biggest reasons I made the switch was to learn something completely new, and for a change of pace. I guess only time will tell if it was the right move or not.

Tomorrow we're heading to Mont Tremblant for March Break. I've never been there in the winter before, and I plan to do a lot of skiing, relaxing, eating and drinking. And there will probably be a few games of Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Citadels in there as well with Todd and Paulina. I am really looking forward to it.

I suppose I had better start packing...

Cool Relative Size Visualization

This is very cool (click the image to go to the site):


(URL is http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/)

Now I know how big a water molecule is in relation to a sperm cell!

The image and original link came courtesy of Make: Online.

RichCopy

This little gem of a utility saved me a lot of time (after wasting a good deal of it) the other night.

RichCopy

If you're like me and sometimes just can't be bothered figuring out arcane command lines (I fought with xcopy and robocopy before finding this), you may find this utility handy if you're a Windows user. I was trying to copy a DVD with many corrupted files on it and xcopy was incrementally choking (even with ignore errors turned on it was failing - go figure).

Anyway, two thumbs up on RichCopy.

Moon Shot

Here's hoping they don't set off a chain reaction that sends all spiraling into a black hole.

Has It Been That Long?

Has it really been March since I last posted? Man, this has been a busy spring and summer! I don't actually have time to post right now as there is a break in the clouds and I need to get back to stripping paint off of my garage doors, but I'll post soon. And hey, this counts as a post as well.

New Toy

I am now the proud owner of one of these:



Now to figure it out and set it up...

Testing SyntaxHighlight 2.0

This is a test of my new syntax highlighter.

This should be Python:

class A(object):
    pass

def a_func(arg):
    return A()

This should be some Java code:

/**
 * A doc string
 */
public static Object aMethod(int arg) {
    Object a = new Object();
    return a;
}

And finally XML:

<element attribute="value">
  <nested attribute="value">
  </nested>
</element>

That is all.