Pickle cicles. Not kidding.
May 11th, 2008 by atrommer
Found there in central market and it made me shudder.
Time to Breathe
Apr 12th, 2008 by atrommer
The past month has been so hectic that I’ve neglected this blog. Angela has been keeping things documented so well over on her site that I haven’t been pressured into posting.
Last month we took a short but exciting trip to LA to see friends and family. Angela’s relatives recently moved there and it was really great to see them. We hadn’t really had time to see them since our trip to Taiwan in 2004.
Since then I have been busy at work, and so has Angela. Jabber is as goofy as ever.
I picked up work on a new project in my free time, eXPlainPMT. We use the tool internally at work, and it’s giving me a good codebase to play with Rails again. In fact, I just put up a demo environment for people to explore on.
After getting frustrated with not having proper inputs in my car for my iPod, I finally replaced my stock deck with a new Pioneer. It sounds good and has a dedicated USB input that actually handles my 13000+ song library on my iPod very well. It does, however, rely too much on the remote for navigation, so I’m not looking forward to the inevitable day that I lose it.
In the garage, we finally cleaned out our old crap left over from the move in 2006 and I put some shelving up. I think we gained a good 2′ of extra garage space on each side.
Inside the house, I got around to painting the kitchen nook. It looks much nicer now, and since the paint has set in it no longer looks like the old Kraft Mac and Cheese nuclear waste orange. I quite enjoy it.
I’m rambling, I know, but it’s been so long. Last weekend we had everyone over for the KU-UNC game, and it was a great win for the Jayhawks. On Monday I met up with Ethan, Donald, and Jeromy to watch the championship. Amazing game, and I’m still in shock over Mario’s last second 3.
Alright, it’s time to actually get some work done.
View from office
Mar 6th, 2008 by atrommer
The snow is blowing in!
Still Life
Feb 3rd, 2008 by atrommer
Last night, Eric and I saw Cloverfield. I left the theatre quite indifferent to it, but after letting it all soak in I’m a fan. Yes, the handicam cinematography got old in the middle of the film, but they always stayed true to that POV, which ended up working well towards the end. I didn’t want closure when the title credits ran, but I did want… something.
I haven’t seen the first ep of Lost for this season yet since Angela has been working nights. That means I can’t even sign into Google Reader until then, since most of the feeds I read probably mentioned all sorts of details that I’d rather hear organically.
In the mean time, I found this great short, Still Life. It’s about 8 minutes long, but it’s very worthwhile. Enjoy!
Evolution of note taking
Jan 20th, 2008 by atrommer
I have horrible handwriting as anyone who has worked with or received a note from me can attest. When we are young we are taught how to write uniform characters at about 1″ heights. To this day, this is the only legible writing you’ll find from me. Cursive was worse because my mangled script could be slurred together into unintelligible scribbles with errant dots and crosses thrown in for good measure.
My dad worked for IBM, so all throughout my childhood we had access to a computer and a fancy typewriter. As much as I could, I typed everything.
Fast forward to high school. In-class essays quickly ensured lots of face-time with the teacher as I would be asked to read large portions of my writing. Teachers weren’t amused.
This little bit of background was hopefully a nice segue into what has become an odd circle of note taking.
K-11th grade: Ahh yes, the spiral notebook. These were always impossibly unreadable - including by me
12th grade: My Handspring Visor! I had to really convince my parents that I could spend my money on this at the time. I scratched down notes, made TODO lists, even set due dates for my assignments in the calendar. In the end, all I really did is play Infrared chess and Pong with Kent Thompson.
12th grade - Freshman: The IBM Crosspad was, I believe, meant for fancy pants businessmen and lawyers. Leave it to me to ask for it for Christmas. Handwriting? Really? But it gets better! This device captures the pages and will do magic writing-to-text conversion. The downside, of course, is that it failed on every conversion with my handwriting, even with the laborious 100 page training guide. I made pretty graphs and emailed physics notes to Brandon once. Not too useful. I took this with me to KU and attempted to use it freshman year during the rare moment that I was awake. I ended up setting the alarm off in the libraries more often than actually using it.
College - Freshman and Sophomore years: And I wonder why I wasn’t big with the ladies freshman year! I grabbed my Visor and added the Stowaway keyboard (full size, take that, laptops!) and actually took really good, outline-format notes. This was very handy, required 2 AA batteries, lasted for months, and was 100% reliable. Why change it up, right?
Junior Year: During the summer between sophomore and junior year, I picked up a Toshiba laptop. At the time it was awesome. I ended up using MS Word to do my note taking in class. This worked out fine as all I was doing is taking down outline format notes with the occasional figure that could be recreated on the fly using wonderful Word Art. I also had a few professors that had Powerpoint lectures, so I could save myself the trouble of printing crappy PPTs and use their outlines. This laptop died a horrible death (I hate you, Toshiba, your laptops to this day have the same crappy, heat-damaging designs), which leads to…
Senior Year: I had my internship summer of 2004 and stashed away enough cash to get myself a 12″ Powerbook. I was the only guy with a Mac in any of my CIS courses and was chided daily by several professors, but I didn’t care. I used OmniOutliner to take my notes. It was really intuitive, which is saying something since it is replacing functionality that I had done before in notebooks, PDAs, and the ubiquitous MS Word. It had custom flags you could put on items, categories, fast searching, and a pretty UI.
Today: I eventually entered the working world and migrated my way to a decent job. The fun years of OS X were replaced by the same horrible Windows XP that I left behind in 2002, on an updated but equally troublesome business-grade Toshiba laptop. I had to adapt. That’s when I started using OneNote. I really like it and still use it today. It has it’s quirks and usability issues, but it’s stable enough to document out just about everything. I also put most of my sharable notes back into our team Wiki. Unfortunately, even in a company that is predominantly IT, there is a stigma against laptops in some meetings. I also find myself watching Explorer lock up through good portions of my day, so I need a backup datasource.
Enter my Moleskin. I have the smallish gridpaper one. It has a band to keep it closed, quality paper, a bookmark, and a pocket in the back. I still can’t read my handwriting consistently, but I have an intricate system of checkboxes and symbols to at least have a gist of what I was talking about. I can also scan these notes directly into Onenote for consolidation.
So, I still can’t write, but I’ve gone full circle in my note taking habits.
What does this really mean? Why haven’t we got to the paperless world we have been promised? Even today pulling out a notebook is more reliable and faster than grabbing a laptop. With the new laptops having more instant-on functionality with more impressive battery life, we’re getting closer. The big device that I’m looking for is an ultraportable with a tablet’s screen. 5+ hours of battery and a full-size keyboard would be even better. I guess I can hope that the Air will get an upgrade to make the screen have pen-recognition, right?