My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on September 21, 2013

Sleeping Porch: May 1916: A baby porch suspended a hundred feet above ground? What could possibly go wrong? As city populations grew, people grew concerned about raising young children in tight spaces. Inventors suggested the miniature sleeping porch, which could be installed outside any window. The device seemed sturdy enough — an iron brace enabled it to carry 500 pounds of weight, while anchors protected the porch from strong winds. The compartment’s barred windows and netting kept the baby from climbing out (and bugs from flying in), and as the image shows, it was roomy enough to hold a tiny carriage “so that the effort of the mother in taking the baby in and out is reduced to a minimum.”

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2011-03/archive-gallery-popscis-daycare-horrors

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Posted By RichC on September 20, 2013

Taylor left at about 6AM this Friday morning with a U-haul trailer full of belonging to start his new job and make his mark on the world. The drive to Williston, North Dakota will take him to his halfway point in Minneapolis tonight where he will meet-up and stay with his long time friend Alicia Frost. I know he is looking forward to seeing her, but not necessarily leaving the many friends here in Cincinnati … that far northwest corner of North Dakota is a long way away (and a bit chilly already too!)

I’ll be heading up after a previously planned wedding on Saturday in order to help him unload and set up his apartment. I’m not necessarily looking forward to the trip and unloading (thought my days of being a mover were behind me?), but I am glad to be flying rather than driving and taking the Amtrak back … which was my original plan. Still, I had to burn way too many frequent flyer miles to cover a $1000 ticket; no matter which way you look at it, the flights to Williston and connections are not easy or cheap.

Brenda and I are finding it far more emotionally difficult that we expected to send him off by himself. It is surprising to me since he takes trips all the time, been overseas for extended periods as a student ambassador and for mission trips … and we never thought twice about sending him off to college? Maybe it’s the distance or just the remoteness?  I can only imagine what parents must feel to send a “child” on an overseas military deployment.

Taylor says goodbye to Tootsie (our “family” dog, but the two of them are buddies)

I know he’ll do fine and that his new “planning career” will benefit by working in a high growth area like Williams County, North Dakota. One thing is  for sure, he won’t be bored.  Drive safe Taylor … see you in a couple days.

 
As usual, click the photo for larger images

Category: Archive, Personal, Photos | 2 Comments »
Tags: career, nd, taylor, tootsie, williston

Posted By RichC on September 19, 2013

Evening: After struggling to download the over-the-air install of Apple’s new iOS on both iPhone and iPad (should have installed iOS7 with iTunes), the new mobile operating system is finally up and running. My first impression was my usual “oh I miss my old familiar look and feel … and I want it back.”  Now take this with a grain of salt since I’m a guy who still has one Mac desktop computer running Mac OS9 (1999); in other words, this is not unusual for me to resist change. That said, IF Apple was going for a clean, bright, flowing and sliding panel oriented look and feel, they have accomplished it. Personally, I didn’t need the extra space padded around text cells or jumping open and closed menu bars, etc. After the first hour I’m also finding the new message bubbles more difficult to read.

Lunch: Well par for the course … I fell asleep before finishing the post last night and will finalize with just a couple more quick observations. The new “cover-flow” feature (left) might make looking through open tabs on Safari easier for some, but I preferred the tiny tabs displayed all the time even if  they are piled up. As for typing, I complained about the loss of a physical keyboard when switching to an iPhone, but the old virtual one was easier  to look at and use in my opinion (below).

The older style iOS6 keyboard on the left and the newer iOS7 on the right.

As for glitches, well I’ve only stumbled a couple times when opening apps. The WSJ app crashed this morning and the Overdrive app for borrowing and reading library books continues to crash when trying to read books … although will allow me to checkout another (but it won’t download without crashing).

Another one of the continuing and more annoying quirks is the inability to “kill” all the apps that may have been opened at on time. I was hoping for a single “kill all” feature to be added, but instead Apple decided to make it even more difficult than before (use to have a whole line of icons). In iOS6, a double tap on the home button and holding down on one of the open app icons would allow one to rapidly tap of the “x” to kill open apps one at a time, but quickly.  Now, to kill an app, you need to swipe each one away (but up to 3 at a time) with only 3 of the opened apps appearing on the full screen. Something tells me someone at Apple isn’t listening to their users – I’m including a screen shot from the iPad below. (Maybe I’m missing something???)

I’m sure there will be more “learning” to adapt to a new mobile operating system, but my first impression is that I wish they would have kept the good things and given us a few more useful improvements like the handy “Control Center.” Swipe up and there’s a bunch of handy feature including the new flashlight, timer, world clock, calculator and AirDrop, along with quick on-off radio switching and music.

 
The Reminder app has excessing cell spacing (left), but Control Center (right) is nice!

Category: Apple, Cellphone, Computer, Technology | No Comments »
Tags: apple, ios7, ipad, iphone, mobile

Posted By RichC on September 18, 2013

Walgreens WSJ article … but actually playing with the postie plug-in for WordPress early this morning. EDIT: Failed to get a video posted directly by email from my iPhone to the blog.

Category: Financial, Misc, Politics, Video-TV | No Comments »
Tags: cnbc, obamacare, walgreens, wsj

Posted By RichC on September 17, 2013

A little geeky for Monday Night Football, but I watched some of the Bengals vs Steelers game on my iPad2 while streaming from the Slingbox. Obviously a bigger high definition television, like the 51″ Plasma that Taylor and I looked at today, would be a better way to watch. (he is planning to buy a TV for his new apartment in North Dakota) The screen capture also gave me a chance to try the new PS Express for iOS (not sure I like it) and tweak both the color saturation and shrink the photo size.

Final score: Cincinnati Bengals 20 over the Pittsburgh Steelers 10. The Bengals win gives them needed momentum for the season and the Steelers loss a pitifully sad 0 and 2 start … like I’m crying about that. [grin]

Category: Misc, Sports, Tablet, Technology | 1 Comment »
Tags: football, ipad, nfl, slingbox 350

Posted By RichC on September 16, 2013

We are in countdown mode on a couple of fronts: 1) Taylor is wrapping things up for his move to North Dakota in a few days and 2) our family is working to close out Brenda’s mom’s “life in Jamestown, New York.” I am sad on both counts, but know that both changes are for the best.

We made a quick trip to NY this past weekend in order to drive back the Chevy Trailblazer for Taylor to borrow. His VW GTI is not the right car for Williston, ND … and will not pull a U-haul trailer. I was going to have him take my Honda Pilot, but that would leave me without my “occasional” hauling and delivery vehicle going into winter. Grandma offered to let Taylor take her car since it was sitting anyway. A great help. I’m including a couple memory photos from Grandpa’s workshop … as it was left behind.

Category: Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: dadh, jamestown, new york, taylor

Posted By RichC on September 14, 2013

Brenda and her mom are participating in a “sponsored walk” this Saturday morning to benefit the American Heart Association with a few of Brenda’s co-workers. It is a beautiful morning for it and from the temperatures the  first day of fall … brr! I’m still refusing the thought of cooler weather and challenging the temps by wearing shorts and a t-shirt … but am sitting in the garage “with the door close” at the moment.

Besides a little more sanding on the Mercedes rocker panels, it does look like I’m going to have to get into some body colored paint – something I was trying to avoid. This might cue up an air brush attempt in trying to just paint the repaired rust/bubbled paint areas (I’ve never worked much with blending and buffing)  ? We’ll see how that goes?

2013 Middletown Area Heart Walk

Category: Misc, Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: brenda, momh

Posted By RichC on September 13, 2013

After hearing about the Curiyo browser add-on from Walt Mossberg on AllThingsD, I figured I would give the “pop-up window” lookup app a try. My first concern was bloat. In years past, adding plug-in and add-ons has been nothing but problems for those of us wanting to try the latest and greatest widgets, for lack of a better word. I swore off installing anything browser related for the longest time as my notebook computer found its RAM and processor taxed. With even a minimal number of additions to any browser (but particularly for me, Firefox), I could not keep things running smooth. Add to that Microsoft’s Window OS the inability to keep the itself running at a fresh install speed, it made a frown cross my face every time I booted my “old” computer or returned to Firefox, my preferred browser at the time (pretty much adopted Chrome as my default nowadays).

Anyway, back to Curiyo. It’s a browser app that bring information to a pop-up window within whatever page you are reading … be it a dictionary term, Wikipedia article, social comment, etc. I can’t say I’m instinctively using it yet, but clicking on one of the lightly underlined term or holding the mouse button down over a word makes looking something up a breeze. No more opening a new tab or window and then Googling the copied text – its all right in a pop up box with buttons for different websites (using the “Map” was really handy. ie image to the right).

So far I’m only a couple days into using Curiyo and have no plans to uninstall it from Chrome unless it starts to bog things down. That’s sort of an endorsement.

Category: Computer, Technology | No Comments »
Tags: add-on, browser, curiyo, techfriday

Posted By RichC on September 13, 2013

Short and sweet. As one would expect from the 140 character social networking company.

— MT @Twitter We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO.

But here are a few more tweets collected by the Associated Press.

— #FunFact: In the first hour of @Twitter sending that IPO announcement tweet, 7,872 people retweeted the message.

— According to @APStylebook: “The verb is to tweet, tweeted. A Twitter message is known as a tweet.”

— The company was founded 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Their handles: @Jack, @Biz and @Ev

— First tweet by @Jack was “just setting up my twttr” on March 21, 2006, at 3:50 p.m.

— Dorsey went on to create @Square, a system for paying for coffee, goods through phones.

— Twitter soared to popularity in 2007 at the South By Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. #sxswinteractive #Austin #BBQ

— Three years, two months and one day: The time it took from the first tweet to the billionth tweet. #CoolStat

— Users on @Twitter: More than 200 million. @Facebook has 1.16 billion. That’s nearly six times as many. #QuickMath

— A billion tweets are sent every two and a half days. Put another way, that’s three for every man, woman and child in the U.S. via @smfrogers

— The public offering comes at a time of heightened investor interest in the IPO market — 131 IPOs have priced so far this year.

— Is @Twitter trying to avoid @Facebook’s May 2012 IPO #fail? Well, company is keeping details secret for now. #TwitterIPO

— The company hasn’t said if it makes a profit or how much revenue it takes in. #FadOrFuture? Wonder if @WarrenBuffett will buy stock.

— Most of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising. @eMarketer estimates $582.8 million this year, up from $288.3 million in 2012.

— Compare: In latest quarter, Facebook had $1.6 billion in ad revenue. By 2015, Twitter’s annual ad revenue is expected to hit $1.3 billion.

Category: Financial, Social Media | No Comments »
Tags: twit, twitter

Posted By RichC on September 12, 2013

Abby and Brittany live a life that is worth admiring. Kudos to their parents, friends, etc!

Category: Misc, Video | 2 Comments »
Tags: amazing, bbc, life