« February 2005 | Main | April 2005 »

March 30, 2005

Decker Reuion Site

I tweaked the Decker Family Reunion website last night. Take a look if you are a Decker!

Posted by Steven at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2005

NetHack at 1000 FPS

I always wondered if this game could be optimized for high resolution, 3D accelerated video cards. Now I can say (with confidence) it has.

Posted by Steven at 09:26 PM | Comments (0)

One Day Trip to Austin

Coming down on Thursday morning, and returning that afternoon. Gotta make one more visit to Austin this month ..!

Posted by Steven at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

New Piano Arrives Thursday

Anne's new Yamaha U5 upright grand piano will be delivered on Thursday. There will be now shower as the expected is arriving too soon to get out the invitations. ;-).

Posted by Steven at 06:15 PM | Comments (1)

Evolution Through Lego Mindstorms

Check out this website that explains how to build Mindstorms robots that mate and evolve. How long before the Thumpers start burning Legos?

Posted by Steven at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2005

McKinney Becoming "Livable"

This comes as quite a shock to say, but McKinney is becoming a place I can stand to live in.

We have seen (or will see) the addition of the following services/stores in this year:

I'm quite in shock. I can buy ice wine at the local World Market. We're getting retail beyond big-boxers like Home Depot and Mega-Lo Mart. The city is growing up and getting a touch of class. We even have a gaming store and an authentic English pub.

I thought this was a Red County in a Red State?

Addendum

What's missing? A VW dealership. A Barnes and Noble bookstore. A Great Outdoors sub shop. Real liquor stores. A decent Indian restaurant. An alternate route to Dallas (highway-wise). On the "out beyond the edge" are a Fry's and a Benihana's restuarant. And some Democrats. That would be nice.

Posted by Steven at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2005

Anne's New Piano

Today Anne put down 10% on a new Yamaha U5 professional grade upright grand piano. We secured a loan from AT&T Universal at 3.99% (a balance transfer deal -- open ended payments at that rate) that covered the principal cost of the piano (and some more cash to pay down the balance on my business travel debt from last year at a higher interest rate), so we didn't need to use previously acquired financing at Brook Mays Music, where we purchased the unit, which would have been four times the AT&T rate. In other words, we're not paying a lot of interest on this loan, which makes it easier to move on the U5 at this time.

We went down to the Prestonwood Brook Mays to see the actual piano, and I took these photos of it:


A beauty shot revealing just how black and shiny the U5 is.

Anne and the "Sold" sign on her soon to be new piano.

The U5 is a teaching grade upright grand that has impeccable ratings on all the reviews we've found for it. Since we're buying it new, we'll have the full ten year warranty, and the benefit of a U.S. market unit instead of a Japanese market ("gray market") model that costs less, but which Yamaha refuses to service in the U.S.

Anne's thrilled, and I look forward to hearing her playing pieces from The Piano on this marvelous new instrument that will be with us from here on out.

Posted by Steven at 04:49 PM | Comments (1)

March 24, 2005

Another Skype Story

Interesting story in The New York Times about Skype. Give it a read. Then download the software, sign up, and add me to your contacts list so we can talk.

Posted by Steven at 09:39 AM | Comments (1)

March 23, 2005

Einstein and Gödel

Salon reviews a new biography on Gödel.

By now, most readers have learned that when a creative writer becomes enamored of quantum physics, the results are usually bad news for literature. This kind of intellectual infatuation often leads to gassy, shapeless explorations of the uncertainty and unknowability of pretty much everything. Mystery, in one form or another, is what art is about, but when an artist suddenly believes that mystery has been validated by science -- that hardheaded arbiter and high priest of the modern world -- he or she is likely to go nuts with the verbal fog machine. (And anyone who's read Jeanette Winterson's "Gut Symmetries" knows just how dire the consequences of that can be.)

It turns out that these intellectual romances can be disastrous for science, too, as Rebecca Goldstein shows in her masterful new book, "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel." The book is part of the Great Discoveries series, in which each volume is dedicated to a single important scientific breakthrough. The designated breakthrough in this volume is the revolutionary demonstration, by the Viennese logician Kurt Gödel, that in any formal system complex enough to handle numbers, there inevitably exists at least one formula that is both true and unprovable, and that, by extension, no such formal system can prove itself to be consistent or complete.

Gödel, on the other hand, was a Platonist. Like the ancient Greek philosopher, he believed that there exists, in objective reality external to the human mind, an ideal realm. Plato called the objects in this realm "the forms," and described the physical world as we experience it as consisting of mere shadows of the forms of this ideal realm. Where the positivists would argue that mathematics is merely a system of symbols created entirely by human beings, Gödel considered it an apprehension or understanding of some transcendent objective (if not necessarily material) reality. For the positivists, the number "2" was an idea and a symbol; for Gödel it was an actual, and very beautiful, thing.

Joe Bob says "Check it out!".

Posted by Steven at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2005

Fischer Joins Björk

Kudos to Iceland for granting citizenship to Chess Wizard Bobby Fischer. Fischer is being held in prison in Japan awaiting extradition to the U.S. for violating a ban on trading with a former Soviet Republic (he entered a chess tournament for money).

He said Mr. Fischer was likely to make Iceland his home, at least for the time being. "I think he will stay in Iceland a lot, at least for the coming months, and then he will travel feely around the world - although I don't expect he will be going to America."

Fischer is the inspiration for the character called, simply, "the American" in the Tim Rice/ABBA musical Chess. Here's hoping he can find peace and a quiet life in Iceland, where he first came to world fame.

Posted by Steven at 01:16 PM | Comments (3)

March 21, 2005

Working From Home This Week

I'm working from home this week, so don't look for me in Austin or Irving!

Posted by Steven at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2005

Decker Family Reunion DVD

I finished the Reunion DVD and am now shipping them to interested members of the family. I'm asking $7.50 for postage and material cost for each disc, which also comes with a 6" x 11" panorama photo from the reunion (thanks to Stephen Gerard for sharing his negatives from the event).

E-mail me if you want a copy.

Posted by Steven at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2005

Reid's Martial Arts Banquet

We went to the annual Reid's Martial Arts Academy Banquet for the third time tonite. Both Anne and Alanna received awards, and Leo did his level best to break dance, much to the horror of his sister.


Alanna accepting "Outstanding Technique and Attitude" award.

Anne accepting "Early Arrival" gag award.

All the gag award winners.

Posted by Steven at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2005

Lord of the Rings Musical Opens in Toronto

Check out this story about the opening of The Lord of the Rings as a musical in Toronto. The show is opening at the bigger of two theaters owned by Mirvish Productions, which also produced Mamma Mia!, which I saw last year with my family.

Posted by Steven at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

Fiala Visit

Todd, Leigh Anne, Reece and Tanner came to visit on Sunday.

Posted by Steven at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2005

Knuth on NPR

Take a a listen to NPR's story about Donald Knuth.

One of my LHHS friends, Glenn Vanderburg, has one of the famous Knuth checks for finding a flaw in TeX.

Posted by Steven at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

Home For a While

Not going to be back in Austin for a couple of weeks, I think. Certainly not next week, during SXSW.

Posted by Steven at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

Stop Press! Star Wars: Episode III Is PG-13

Lucas has said that the last Star Wars movie will be the 'darkest yet' and will receive a more stringent PG-13 rating.

Apparently, the violence in this chapter of the Star Wars universe is deemed more violent and terrifying than:

Let's not forget Jaba the Hut's brutual murder at the hands of the Skywalkers, or Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's BBQ featuring Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. The original five films are stuffed with violence on a scale that staggers the mind, yet the personal falling of Anakin Skywalker is considered the breaking point for the PG vs. PG-13 rating.

Is this because Amydala shows a nipple?

Posted by Steven at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

Starship Pegasus

On my many trips between Dallas and Austin, I keep passing a peculiarly shaped building near the Monolith Dome Company (in Italy, Texas). The MDC is well known for it's hemisphere poured concrete buildings, and the funny paintings on them to attract kid's and bored adult's attention on the hiddeously dull section of I-35 that runs from Waxahachie to Waco. After Carl's decaying "Tango" Frogs, there's nothing to look at except the Czech Shop in West, TX and the outlet malls in Hillsboro, TX.

That is, until the Starship Pegasus opened.

I first noticed it on a night drive home, because it's lit up like a disco at night. I thought I saw what looked like a beached Starship Enterprise D, but I wrote it off as highway hyponosis. Turns out, I was right all along.

I'm going to have to stop here on one of my trips back from Austin, just to see if it is as silly as it looks. All that's missing is Whitney Streiber hawking his Grey Action Figure ....

Posted by Steven at 02:09 PM | Comments (2)

March 09, 2005

The George W. Bush Singers

I have no idea how funny this is, but it sounds like a hilarious idea.

Posted by Steven at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)

Onion Interviews: Thomas Dolby

You can read it here.

Posted by Steven at 05:14 PM | Comments (1)

Spamalot!

Check out NPR's review of Spamalot. This I gotta see ... David Hyde Pierce as Sir Robin. Possibly the best casting ever.

Posted by Steven at 05:07 PM | Comments (1)

The Python Effect

NPR has a column on a grown-up teenager's obsession with Monty Python and why it matters.

But it hardly matters. It was Python -- early Python, the really off-the-wall BBC stuff -- and soon my high school friends and I were totally hooked.

There were six Pythons and there just happened to be six of us: the band president, the track star, the rock 'n' roll wannabe, the guy voted "Most Intelligent," and Jim and me. I'm not going to describe Jim. Just think of an old friend whose past antics still make you laugh though you haven't run into each other in 25 years. For purposes of this discussion, that's Jim. I'm you.

Python quickly became the constant comic soundtrack to our senior year of high school. And when the big-screen collection of the BBC sketches, And Now for Something Completely Different, came to a Cleveland State University film festival, we drove into the city and got our first taste of a college-style Friday night.

Then Monty Python and the Holy Grail arrived. It is, for my money, the funniest film ever made. It's certainly the most rewarding to share with friends of a like disposition. The combination of lowbrow slapstick silliness and highbrow literary, political and historical satire remains an irresistible combination.

Then somebody bought the screenplay in book form, and within a month or two, we were able to recite most of the lines. (And we also realized that there were acres of hilarious scenes that didn't make the final cut. The shavings from that screenplay are wittier than 95 percent of the material that passes for film comedy today.)

But to teenagers growing up in the Cleveland suburbs, it really was more than entertainment. In some inexplicable way, the Python crew helped us meet the serious business of fast-approaching adulthood with a proper sense of the absurd.

"It's endearingly silly," Eric Idle says of The Holy Grail. "It has a freshness and a simplicity which is rare. I think it has some of the same charm as A Hard Day's Night: young men ignorant of what exactly they are doing but totally confident about it."

I totally understand this obsession. It was like watching Vonnegut Jr. novels come to life. Amen!

Posted by Steven at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2005

A New Hope?

Check out this cheeky alternative teaser for Star Wars: Episode III. It's silly, rude and very well done.

Joe Bob sez check it out.

Posted by Steven at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)

Build a Home PBX for $20

This is way cool. Build a home PBX for twenty dollars.

For those not in the know, a PBX is a mini-phone switch, just like the Bell System used to sell for tens of thousands of dollars. In effect, it takes a small number of plain-old-telephone-service (POTS) lines and connects them to many, many more actual telephone devices. Each telephone has a PBX number that may be a real phone number, or just an extension (hence the phrase, "my extension is ...").

A home PBX sounds like overkill, but here are some fun things it can do:

Joe Bob sez check it out.

Posted by Steven at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

Yes, I'm Paying Attention to This

Just in case anyone was wondering if I worry about blogging about my job, I do. Which is why I try to never say anything that I couldn't say on the street corner with a bullhorn. If I do stray, please let me know.

Posted by Steven at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

Trekkies Just Can't Let Go

The Tornoto Star is offering an article about the phenomena of SciFi fans not being able to let go of shows when they are cancelled.

Genre television has a long history of proactive protest. Following in the fannish footsteps of Bjo Trimble, there have been several similar, if smaller successes since: the restoration of Quantum Leap (soon to be revived yet again as an all-new series); UPN's adoption of Buffy The Vampire Slayer; the feature-film resurrection of creator Joss Whedon's also-cancelled Firefly (the film, Serenity, premieres Sept. 30), the dramatic re-invention of Battlestar Galactica ... though to be fair, in most of these latter cases, fan action was really only partly responsible.

Not so the rebirth of the fan-favourite Farscape, which was axed abruptly in 2002 by the originating Sci Fi Channel, also at the end of its fourth season — and, much to viewers' chagrin, at the point of a very provocative cliff-hanger plot turn.

The series makes a miraculous return (to Canada — it has already aired in the States) two weeks from now, March 25 and 26, on Space. A two-part miniseries, Peacekeeper Wars, will answer all the unanswered questions and give the fans some well-earned closure.

"This special television event would not be a reality were it not for the tireless, unwavering efforts of the Farscape fans," acknowledges director and executive producer Brian Henson. "They believed that the epic story we were telling was something special and deserved a proper ending."

The saddest examples of this are when the series, like Enterprise, just doesn't deserve to be kept on life support.

And for the record, NBC renewed Star Trek because they wanted another color TV show to promote the new product of their owner: RCA and the color TV, not because of a couple of thousand letters sent by fans.

Posted by Steven at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)

Smallest Star Found

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has found the smallest star in our galaxy, a star barely bigger than the planet Jupiter.

Astronomers have found the tiniest full-fledged star known, an object just 16 percent bigger than Jupiter. It is smaller than some known planets that orbit other stars.

The star is a companion to a Sun-like star toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. It was found and measured by observing changes in the light output of the system when the smaller star passes in front of the larger star from our vantagepoint.

The discovery helps astronomers better understand a gray area of definition concerning stars and planets.

Between planets and stars, there exist odd objects called brown dwarfs. They're often referred to as failed stars, because they don't have enough mass to trigger the thermonuclear fusion that powers real stars, like the Sun. A brown dwarf is typically several times the mass of Jupiter, but astronomers haven't determined the exact size or mass cutoffs on either end.

The new discovery, announced Thursday, puts a firm diameter measurement on the smallest star that does in fact shine normally.

The result shows stars less than one-tenth the mass of the Sun can generate thermonuclear fusion while being barely bigger than Jupiter.

"Imagine that you add 95 times its own mass to Jupiter and nevertheless end up with a star that is only slightly larger," suggests Claudio Melo European Southern Observatory (ESO). "The object just shrinks to make room for the additional matter, becoming more and more dense."

The star is more than 50 times as dense as the Sun. It is smaller than some extrasolar planets, including one world that is 30 percent larger than Jupiter.

"This result shows the existence of stars that look strikingly like planets," said Frederic Pont of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, another member of the study team.

Posted by Steven at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2005

In Austin

I'm here until Thursday evening.

Posted by Steven at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2005

Toronto Anniversary

A year ago today, I rolled into Toronto to begin a contract job with ATI Technologies.

Posted by Steven at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)

Happy Birthday Cynthia!

I have no idea what the number is ... and I don't wanna know!.

;-)

Posted by Steven at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2005

Battlestar Galactica Episode Online

The SciFi Channel has made the first episode of BG (titled "33", watch it and you'll understand why) available online, uncut and free.

Joe Bob says check it out.

Posted by Steven at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

Be More Productive, Use the Mac

Check out this essay about how using the Mac OS is more productive than Windows XP, and from a woman's perspective, no less.

Posted by Steven at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

Teens and Cars

USA Today has a comprehensive article about teen driving that all parents of teenagers should read. I hate to sound alarmist, but the statistics are scary. 16 yr. old male SUV drivers have an obscenely high risk of fatal injury due to roll over. The rate of accidents for first year teen drivers is astronomical. No wonder it costs $2500+ to insure a 16 yr. old boy! Girls are 1/3rd less likely to have an accident, but are not out of the picture by any means.

About 3,500 teenagers died in teen-driven vehicles in the USA that year — a death toll that tops that of any disease or injury for teens. The South proved to be the deadliest region.

More than two-thirds of fatal single-vehicle teen crashes involved nighttime driving or at least one passenger age 16 to 19. Nearly three-fourths of the drivers in those crashes were male. And 16-year-old drivers were the riskiest of all. Their rate of involvement in fatal crashes was nearly five times that of drivers ages 20 and older, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Teen brains not developed

New medical research helps explain why. The part of the brain that weighs risks and controls impulsive behavior isn't fully developed until about age 25, according to the National Institutes of Health. Some state legislators and safety activists question whether 16-year-olds should be licensed to drive.

Sixteen-year-olds are far worse drivers than 17-, 18- or 19-year-olds, statistics show. Tellingly, New Jersey, which has long barred 16-year-olds from having unrestricted driver's licenses, for years has had one of the lowest teen fatality rates in the USA.

Other jurisdictions, too, have found the only sure way to cut the teen death toll is to limit unsupervised driving by 16-year-olds. Seven states and the District of Columbia don't give unrestricted licenses to anyone under 18. In Britain and Germany, teens can't drive until ages 17 and 18, respectively.

The saddest thing that pops up in the statistics is how easy it is to fix this problem: no SUVs for teens, and always enforce seat belts. So many kids die because they flew out of the truck. It's looking increasingly likely that teens won't be driving in this nation in the coming years, thanks to changes in the licensing laws.

Check out the interactive graphic.

Posted by Steven at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)

Babylon 5 Movie Cancelled

JMS (the creator of Babylon 5 has announced that the project The Memory of Shadows, a full length motion picture based on the B5 universe, is cancelled. He has not ruled out a future effort to make the film (noting that it will eventually happen, but not until he's satisfied with the outcome), so fans should not despair.

Posted by Steven at 06:53 AM | Comments (0)