Writing code

 I still find it relaxing and rewarding. Today I tweaked some code in the car on my phone using GitHub editor and actions. Had to wait until I got home to confirm it worked but sure enough it works. 

Ubuntu Dual Boot

My adventure of creating a dual-boot machine for my laptop hit a few snags.

• Get Ready
• Mostly followed the Gcore process
• Downloaded Rufus make sure to use SourceForge - if you don't 27 other packages will try to download to your machine, Gcore links to raw rufus site that is a disaster
• Grabbed a new ISO image from Ubuntu
• Inserted a new USB and copied
• Had to play around a bit with how my machine could be told to 'boot from USB' but ultimately it worked
• Get Set
• Tried to install by letting Ubuntu - build beside existing OS
• Forgot to make a partition available
• Ubuntu was very unhappy that BitLocker was on
• Destroyed the BitLocker 
• That caused me to type in a 48 digit code to re-access my Windows
• Got Windows back
• Interestingly enough Windows 11 was able to shrink my 500GB drive into two partitions: 300 and 200 and I was eventually able to coax Ubuntu into building and loading onto the secondary partition
• Annoyance
• When flipping between Ubuntu and Windows
• Windows kept warping me to UTC
• Did some rummaging around and found this reddit thread
• Change the internal clock
• timedatectl set-local-rtc 1
• Apparently windows pushes 'local time' to the hardware clock on the machine and this thoroughly confuses Windows
• Go
• So now the machine boots automatically into Ubuntu if I just let it sit
• I can select to switch to Windows (from which I am writing this entry

Test from phone

Does this work? Could I keep track of things with this?

Does this thing actually work?

Haven't used it in over 10 years. Just a test to see if I can add things to it. Maybe I can use it again once I retire.

Kristie is home!

Kristie has returned from her trek. Back from Alaska, with a newly minted Master's Degree and ready to start whatever comes next. Welcome back, Kris!

New Hawk Camouflage

Was driving out today - stopped at a traffic light. I happened to browse up at the electric wires. I glanced at what appeared to be four standoffs where normally there are only three.

A closer look revealed a hawk hidden amongst the standoffs waiting for prey to appear.

PSAC Winter 2013

We went to Kellie's PSAC Winter 2013 meet yesterday. Here are the videos.

• Jump 1
• Jump 2
• Jump 3
• Jump 4
• Jump 5

Off to the tundra

For those who don't already know my daughter Kristie Bresz is heading to Alaska for the next 5 months.

I am putting this to help her blog get better scores in google search.

Her blog is here:

A Tundra of Fun

Good luck Kris.

F1 and Speed to split

This is upsetting news. I've been an ardent follower of Steve Matchett , David Hobbs and Bob Varsha. Their knowledge of the sport is wonderful, their teamwork is top notch and they have just enough sarcasm and wit sprinkled into the broadcast to keep it interesting without making it silly. I sincerely hope that whatever NBC does with the broadcasts we don't end up with an entire season of time shifted nonsense. Back a few years ago when Fox broadcast a few of the races in time shifted fashion they changed broadcast crews, and they were terrible.

mint.com - Hello and Goodbye in 24 hours - Ads gone wild

Yesterday I tried mint.com. Today I deleted my account. Quicken was asking that I upgrade to the 2013 version for $60, but mint.com was free to try and could be lower ongoing, with a better interface to iPad. My account is now deleted for the following reasons:

1. Unable to set goals - I loaded all my accounts, everything, including mortgage. When setting up the goal to payoff my mortgage the tool was unable to recognize that I had a loan. LOSE
2. Too many ads - Switched to the iPad to see if perhaps it was better. Unfortunately, all that happened was a boatload of ads.
   • I see you paid an ATM fee, here's a bank that doesn't charge those
   • I see you are a good saver, ING has a great rate I have an ING account so that is a pointless ad
   • Quicken loans has great rates on your mortgage, perhaps we can save you money

Goodbye!

Mutant Alien Butterfly

Yesterday we went downtown to eat at Station Square in Pittsburgh. After eating we were walking down the steps and saw what appeared to be an alien mutant butterfly.

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Note when looking from the side those bolts next to it are those heavy duty 1" bolts used to hold buildings together.

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I did some research and it appears to be a Royal Walnut Moth. I think my pictures look better!

F1 Series so far

6 races. 6 winners. Great competition. Alonso atop the leader board. Interesting qualifying. Michael P1 in Monaco, only to be sent back to 6. Can't wait for Austin.

2012 Formula One Season Starts Now

Sitting and watching qualifying for Australia. Since some of my faceboook friends may now know results, I will post my thoughts here.

Should be an exciting season.

Six former world champions in the field.

Qualifying

Q1

Kimi failed to make it out of Q1. Put a wheel on the grass, did not make it to start/finish in time to turn a final flying lap.

Red Bull fairly far back in the pack, hopefully they are waiting for later rounds to turn it up a notch, but they are struggling for down force.

Q2

Alonso beached the F2012 half way through the session. Yellow flag then red flag.

5:00 to play - top of the time sheets looks like last year. Hamilton, Button, Vettel, Webber.

Mercedes seems to be the engine to beat.

Alonso time held for a while, but just as the session ended he was pushed to relegation. No Ferrari in Q3.

Q3

4 former champions still in the hunt: Hamilton, Button, Vettel, Schumacher.

Hamilton P1. All McLaren front row Red Bull pushed to 5, 6.

More tomorrow when the season starts down under.

2011 Canadian Grand Prix

2 plus hours of red flag. Lots and lots of rain. But a great exciting race. Vettel showed a flaw in the last lap and Button took advantage. Last 10 laps were ultra exciting. Always fun when cars switch from full wet to intermediate to dry tyres. Very glad that Fox kept the tried and true broadcast team of Varsha, Matchett, Hobbs, and Buxton. Guess that is the benefit of Fox owning Speed TV. Over to Speed TV for interviews.

Riding the rails

On NJ transit the conductors are much like many metropolitan train conductors I imagine. The one interesting thing is that they have pads of paper and hole punches. They seem to do strange things with these. For instance this morning a young lady was paying for her ticket with cash. I was too distant to hear the interchange with them, however after she handed him a 5 dollar bill he reached into his pockets and produced a pad of pink pages. He took his mighty hole punch and punched 9 very specific holes on the paper before handing it to the young lady, I think he retained a copy of the punches but I cannot be sure. When he came to me I handed him my ticket (a piece of paper with printing on it) and in exchange he handed me another piece of paper with printing on it. This paper had the numbers 2-23 printed on it. At some point further in the journey he came and took this paper from me. Odd.

The Event

So far I have been enjoying this program. It is of course far fetched, talking of aliens, teleportation and other such things. Today however a very stupid thing happened - not stupid in the scientific sense, but rather in the "how stupid can a character that is supposed to be the Chief of Staff for the President" be stupid. For those that haven't yet seen the April 4 episode this is a very minor spoiler. Agent Lee is discovered as a sleeper, upon discovery he searches frantically for a way to escape, only when he is almost out of the white house does the CoS order a lockdown of the building. To quote Bugs Bunny: "what a maroon!"

A few iPad frustrations

Overall the device is handy. Here are just a few frustrating things about the iPad:

• the email search capability only searches header fields and not email body
• iPod and iTunes seem to be lacking a few details like I cannot easily connect to my iTunes server I can't be sure if this is due to the new home server utility or not either way I don't like it this should be simple
• I still hating the autocorrect - the blackberry shortcuts are by far better
• I still can't find a task list manager I like - outlook task list manager is marginal, lotus notes is a disasster, I've tried appigo todo and a few others none seem to be quite what I want
• I don't like that many of the apps are buy now use later, not enough trial versions

Life with the iPad

Have loaded a few handwriting applications. Don't have one that in like yet. I was speaking with a friend today and we were lamenting the fact that Palm Pilot writing capability or similar wasn't included. The auto-correct is a bit dicey. Maybe it's jut my fat fingers but I seem to always be moving the cursor around when typing. While typing this post it disappeared and I had to go looking for it again. Once again the I wasn't capitalized. The shortcuts I have in my blackberry are very cool and I wish I had then here. I like the financial apps but they always seem to be just a little lacking.

New iPad

A few weeks ago I finally picked up an iPad. So far it has been interesting. I've loaded apps to take notes in meetings although the OCR isn't quite there, track my 73932 todo items, read mail and surf. Still experimenting, not sure if I could use it as my only device but it is fun. I notice spending in dribs and drabs has increased as apps and iTunes hit me for $2.99 here $1.99 there. I just loaded a blog reader which fortunately pulled in my google reader rss feeds. The facepad app is a little clunky. I don't really like the auto spell check it frequently guesses wrong and I still cannot quite get the keyboard to work quite right. Overall I'm happy but not ecstatic with it. I do think that this device or ones like it could help turn the bend on *stupid* applications that user cannot possibly understand. The CNBC and Bloomberg apps were great.

Astronomy Pic

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