I'm home

I mostly just relaxed with YKWIA, we watched three episodes of 'American Housewife', went through some experimental game mechanics, and I went to the store for him. But I had a good time. I did get in a little later than I planned, so I'm going to call it a night soon, and put some things off until tomorrow. I'm going to try to get up early tomorrow and take the trash out, as I think it finally cleared up and my stepfather is coming by tomorrow. I'll try to get the book review in before the end of the day tomorrow. I did check the job list, and apparently, the job that I thought closed tomorrow is already closed. It was with the state, although it would have been a lot of wear and tear on the car, as it required a fair bit of travelling. So maybe it's not so bad that I missed out on it. I definitely have to watch things more closely, though, even if I do seem to have a job lined up now, as I would eventually like to be in a library.

So anyway, it was a good day. I'm basically online to check out an adapter that I got that allows me to link up to an Ethernet cable (my laptop just has USB ports, so this allows me to connect directly, plus has a 3-USB-port hub built in as well. When I move, I'll have to either use my phone hotspot or connect via the Ethernet cable to his modem. He nixed the powerline adapter idea. I think he's afraid it will somehow harm his home's wiring, although I did explain that it wouldn't. Oh, well. This will work. Anyway, the adapter seems to be working pretty well. I also have to go online and look up a manual that I managed to lose within a day of getting. It was in my backpack pocket and I guess it fell out. It was one of those tiny manuals which fold out, so it was really easy to lose. But it may be online. I thin I'll go look for that now. Have a good night, and I hope your Fourth was great if you celebrate.

I can kind of understand this

because it's Vermont, and Vermont winters are not conducive to walking your kid to the bus stop. But it is a little weird, and maybe a little creepy and cool at the same time.

Father builds automated drone to watch son walk to the bus stop

Covered in extensive detail on the IEEE Spectrum magazine site, a father names [sic] Paul Wallich in Vermont decided to build a camera-equipped quadcopter to follow his son from home to the school bus stop. He specifically wanted to build the security device for extremely cold mornings in December and January in order to avoid the quarter-mile walk to and from the bus stop. To get started, he first purchased a basic quadcopter kit and was quickly able to get up in the air due to the simple construction. He also designed a few sets of replacement legs out of foam board to cushion landings.

But it does rather say something about our society that we will go to such lengths to avoid a quarter-mile hike in the snow.

Getting a good start to the day

I've put away dishes, re-potted an orchid, fed the fish, eaten breakfast, chatted with someone from Australia, and I'm about to get ready for work. Apparently where he lives it's almost midnight. :) That has been a challenge we've had in playing the Cthulhu game--figuring out the time differential when gallivanting around the world. It was awful during the Antarctic adventure. I think after awhile the game master was close to rolling a luck roll to see if phone calls woke anyone up in the middle of the night.

Today is rainy and quite a bit cooler than yesterday. I have a lot to do in the latter part of the week (a meeting, a doctor's appointment, a webcast), but today is light for the library gig, although the data entry should be busy because of a large clinic census.

I'm curious to know if my co-workers who pre-ordered Kindle Fire tablets got them yesterday--some people did, and we have an Amazon warehouse in town. One of them was very excited when I told them they were shipping early. :)

I really looked at them to see if they are for me, and I decided that what I would really like is a device coming out tomorrow from T-Mobile called a SpringBoard. Like the Kindle Fire, it is a 7" tablet running a version of Android (in this case, it's Honeycomb). Unlike the Kindle Fire, it has two cameras and has 4G connectivity in addition to wi-fi (meaning it requires a data plan, but also meaning I could watch a Netflix show or be on the Internet on the bus, whereas a Kindle Fire would mean I'd have to put a wireless router in at home, and could only use the streaming and Internet services there or out where there's a public network, which I'm not around much). The exact price hasn't been released; I've seen one subdomain page on T-Mobile's site at $179.99, but I was told by T-Mobile that was a sub-contractor's price and not their official one, which won't be known until it launches.

One good thing I could do with it is use it to finish cataloguing the collection at work and at home, because the cameras are autofocus (my phone's isn't, and so it does well with QR codes but not regular bar codes). But mainly it would be for fun and productivity. But I can't get it until at least the 1st. I'm finally caught up from the book club fiasco, but I have two doctors' appointments and some medicine to get on top of my normal bills, and those are more important. So I'll try to delay gratification for a little while, and thankfully we're not too far away from the time my flexible spending account starts up again, as far as medical bills go. January would be absolutely great for getting it, as a major bill is paid off then, so no more monthly payments of $200, but I'd like to get it before T-Mobile is gobbled up by AT&T so I can get a real unlimited plan for the connection, and I think January is when that is decided. We'll see. But I'm not going to cut out necessities to get a gadget, and there's the trip to Chicago coming up in December as well, so while it's definitely on my wish list, it may or may not materialise soon.

A gadget, but a useful one

I found something at Walgreens yesterday when I was getting my prescriptions, and decided to get it. It's called the Smart Health Wellness Monitor Watch.

It:

1. Tells time.
   
2. Tells date.
   
3. Acts as an alarm.
   
4. Has a dual time feature.
   
5. Has a stopwatch.
   
6. Has a count-down timer.
   
7. Has a pedometer that measures steps towards a goal.
   
8. Calculates the calories burnt during exercise.
   
9. Tests resting heart rate.
   
10. Monitors current heart rate and determines whether it is in the desirable zone for aerobic exercise.
    

Not bad. It was $15.00 off, came with a $5 coupon for merchandise at the store, and was a flexible spending item. I needed a watch anyway, and I wanted to get a pedometer now that my feet are doing better and I can walk more. Of course, I realise that I really got it because it was, indeed, a gadget. But still, it is a useful one, so there you go.

Yay, I got a new cell phone!

I got my cell phone in yesterday. I'm excited. As you probably know, I'm gadget girl. I've had the same cell phone for nine years. It's an old reliable Nokia 'brick' phone with a monochrome display and no real features. I finally decided I wanted something different.

The Nokia 6263 that I got has a lot of interesting features. It is a clamshell phone that has a music player, a camera, an FM radio, text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail (although I don't have a plan to cover that, so I'm not accessing my Gmail account through the phone). It's the first 3G-capable phone T-Mobile bought into.

If you read reviews of the phone, battery life is an issue. I played all day on mine, talked with customer service (I added an text messaging plan for Twitter), and the battery indicator light went down a bit after that. But I'm used to charging my other Nokia nightly or every other night, so I don't think that will be an issue for me. There was a certain tinniness to the call to customer service but that may have been isolated; I don't know yet. Otherwise the phone seems great. I've loaded some music to listen to at work today.

I guess that's all for now. I need to take out the garbage before the exterminator comes, and then stop by the local library branch. Have a great day.

I don't know why

but the gadget on the sidebar for LibraryThing isn't displaying my books, but rather random books from somewhere else. Still, many of them sound interesting. I haven't figured out how to fix it yet--the settings are correct. But I just wanted to include that caveat.

A long but excellent day

A small miracle happened this morning. I was able to get to the gas station without running out of gas despite the fact that I was 10 miles over my normal limit of 26-miles-to-the-gas-light. I was very nervous getting a friend last night because I really didn't think we'd make it and I'd have to call AAA. At least I have AAA. Yay, AAA.

This afternoon my mom came over (along with my stepfather, his mother, and the dog--I'm not entirely sure why) and we went downtown to transfer the car I've been driving for years over to my name. They had already gotten insurance for me from GEICO and paid for six months, so I'm good until September. I have my registration and insurance cards in the glove box just in case I get pulled over (I have a tail light out, so it's a possibility. Unfortunately I don't have the tools to fix it and it's a chronic water-collects-in-the-light-due-to-a-bad-seal-and-kills-the-bulb kind of thing, so fixing it doesn't ensure that it will stay fixed. Next time I go to visit my family I'll try to get my stepfather to help.) I paid for having the title transferred over and I also had to pay some minor back taxes on a car I didn't officially junk and accrued a bill for two years. But it wasn't much, which is good, because although it's payday I have:

1. Gotten gas.
   
2. Bought some health and beauty aids I was nearly out of, like shampoo and toothpaste, to name a couple.
   
3. Had breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then got some groceries tonight on the way home from my friends' house.
   
4. Bought a Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse novel that happens to be the next in the series of the ones I've read.
   
5. Paid my cable Internet bill.
   
6. Found a gadget on clearance at the grocery store that was half off (I have trouble passing up gadgets.) It's an emergency radio/flashlight/signal flasher/cell phone charger/compass/siren all in one. It operates with a hand crank, with 30 seconds giving 60 minutes of charge. This is what a former acquaintance once referred to as a 'non-electric radio', which of course it absurd, because it is electric, it just doesn't run on batteries or wires. What can I say, I thought it might be useful in the car especially and it was less than $12. And it works pretty well, too.
   

Okay, it's after 3 am. I'm going to bed now. I've been painting and dusting tonight and I'm fairly tired. There will be more tomorrow, plus two hours at the store for truck night, work at the hospital, and errands, so I should get some sleep while I can. Good night.

The watch phone gadget is really here

Move over Dick Tracy or James Bond. It's really here, although I think it can be improved, obviously. But here it is in action:



Get more info about it at: LG Watch Phone is for Real from Wired.

I still want those flying cars.

Success, I think

Listening to: 'These Hard Times' by Matchbox 20

I used the recorder for its first game and recorded over six hours of material with the battery just going down one bar out of three (but it's rechargeable) and things are pretty clear even though a fan is blowing in the room. There was some lawnmowing at some point outside the window, so it should be interesting to see how well things were picked up by the recorder. I took notes as usual, though, so this is just supplementing them, although there were a few spots I didn't get down everything, so I'm glad for the backup. Speaking of backups, I put a copy of the file onto the computer since I do actually take the recorder around due to the music player function and listen at my desk at the hospital, etc.

Tomorrow I'm going to Danville to visit my grandmother, mom, and aunts/uncles/cousins who have come into town. Wish me luck. When you have a car with 252,000 miles on it, even an hour-long trip can be a little daunting.

By the way, you may have noticed the 'Twitter' widget on the left side of the screen with postings. Twitter is a type of mini-blogging--you only have 140 characters to eke out your message with, but it's incredibly easy to update. You can tweet from the web, from a phone/text message, through instant message, etc. I use a widget on my iGoogle page called 'BeTwittered', so I don't need to leave my home page if I don't want to. I've found sometimes I'm just too tired to blog here, but I'll put something on Twitter, or maybe I see something silly that isn't worth a post, and make a quick note. (One post was of seeing the first lightning bug of the season the other day, for example).

You can follow other people on Twitter. I started out following the MLA national conference and now I'm following a general MLA one, several librarians, and several Lexingtonians who seemed interesting and update regularly.

Today one of the librarians I follow posted a RIP message for her dog. I couldn't send her a direct message (she has to be following me to do that), and there wasn't a link at her blog, but I was able to send her a message of condolence at Facebook. I think I'm finally getting the hang of these Web 2.0/social networking gizmos.

Well, I guess that's it. That last part may not be comprehensible to non-techie types. Sorry about that. But I should go on to bed. I need to get gas and check my oil in the morning and for some reason it always takes longer to get out of Lexington than it should; when half the family is diabetic they take a dim view on you running late and throwing off lunch. :) Good night.

And this is cool beyond words

YKWIA showed me this, too. This blows Macs out of the water...it's a true virtual lightbox and more. I give you surface computing from Microsoft.



For more information go to Popular Mechanics' article on surface computing.

This is neat

An interactive LED light-up coffee table



Simple, yet fun, and built because they can.

Yesterday's Radioplay: 'The Guileless Gypsy'
Today's Radioplay: 'The Uneasy Easy Chair'