Wow, look what happened when I went on Who Keeps Taking My Letters! Apparently some kid lost his frog and thought people visiting that site might know where it is.
Robin’s Nest
A robin built a nest outside my back door about a week ago. At first she wasn’t there much but then she started spending almost all of her time there.
While I was mowing the lawn I noticed she was gone. So I got the ladder out and I could barely make out the very tops of two beautiful blue eggs in the nest. Nests are amazing pieces of construction and there isn’t just pinestraw but a lot of mud in there holding it all together on top of a light fixture on the corner of the house near the drainpipe.
I wondered how many eggs she really had in there, but I couldn’t get my head under the eave and above the nest since there were only a couple of inches between the two. I needed a mirror. Fortunately Susan gave me a small and very expensive mirror that worked perfectly. 4 eggs!
Optical Illusions
Here are some neat animated optical illusions. You may not have all the plug-ins to run all of these, but you should be able to see most of them. The snake image on about the third page is really neat.
Of course these are ripe for parody by optical realities.
New Computer
I decided to go on a 4-year cycle for replacing my home computer. I bought my first desktop computer (my first computer was a Powerbook 100 in 1991) in 1996. It was replaced in 2000. So I was due for a new computer last year, but I decided it was working pretty well and I could wait (I almost replaced it when Susan gave me the iPod because I didn’t want to pay retail for a Windows upgrade that I needed). But since June last year, I’ve been pricing computers at Dell. I wanted a DVD writer, support for two monitors, 80 gigabyte hard drive, and 512 MB of memory. I also wanted to get another 17-inch monitor, preferably a flat panel, though that wasn’t mandatory.
New Palm Program
A year or two ago I was trying to learn to write programs for the Palm. I tried this when I first got the Palm and quickly realized that the Palm was very difficult for a non-programmer to write for without spending a bunch of money on development software. But they had a free C compiler and other tools which I made almost no progress on.
Later I got a book on the Palm that had a trial version of some development software. This made things a lot easier, but the trial version didn’t let you write anything complex. Later still I downloaded another development package called CASLsoft. With one of those two programs I wrote a Vertical Curve program that I have had ever since (but I lost the source code). That’s a good program for me to write when I’m learning because it has a couple of variables and IF-THEN’s and needs input and output.
Last week I decided to make VCurve 1.0 available on Palm Gear. I already had a developer account from when I wrote MemoParser 1.0, so it was easy to do. So far 47 people have downloaded it.