Scott's Blog

These are some of the important questions in life. The Way Women See It If I didn't have you in my life, I would never have to bring the toilet seat down. If I forget to check that it's down, I'll end up sitting in toilet water. Men could pee sitting down, if they wanted to. You are already getting free sex, it's the least you can do. The Way Men See It If I didn't have you in my life, I would (almost) never have to put the toilet seat down. 9 times out of 10 when I go to the toilet it's to urinate. Having to both lift the seat up and put the seat back down seems like a lot of work. Peeing sitting down takes longer, and doesn't get the last drops (especially when you get a little older). You're being selfish for not put up the seat for me, why shouldn't I be selfish and not put the seat down for you? The Solution Put both the seat and the seat cover (lid) down. If you have to put the seat down, it takes as much work to put one down as two. It can ...

I just finished reading the Tipping Point and started thinking. I realized that a site like Good Reads , is a place for " mavens ", people who love books come there and tell others what books they should read. The whole publishing industry should pay for this site and encourage these mavens to flock there and give their opinions. It also made me realize that Good Reads needs more work on developing their network. Make it easier to find others that have the same interests as you do. Also from my work on orkut I realize that competition is very powerful. You see that your friends have 300 'friends' and you feel inadequate, and work to build up your list of friends. The same could happen to books, you see someone with 100 books that they have reviewed and you start wondering what's wrong with you. You start buying, and reading more books - and giving opinions about these books.

I bought the Canon Rebel XSi (aka EOS 450D) digital SLR and have taken some pictures . After using the typical consumer compact camera (like the Canon Powershot SD ) for a a few years using these modern digital SLRs is like going from a Corolla to a Porshe. The speed a which it can focus and shoot is incredible, I could depress the button for 4 hours and take pictures at 3.5 pictures per second until the battery runs out. I also got a 8 gig memory card (only about $20.00 these days) and am thrilled that I can take more than a 1000 pictures with no problems. I tried my wifes older Canon EOS film SLR lenses and they worked flawlessly. I was surprised that the image I saw in the viewfinder was the same as what came out in the final image as well. Having the large 3" LCD means I can reliably review my image and make decisions about what to delete which I used to always do on the computer. I've been waiting for years to buy a digital SLR but it had hovered around a $1000 for...

I'm fascinated with kinetic typography , especially the work of Lawrence Lessig . If you like to see more of the genre you can go search google. I wanted to do my own. I could always try using open office Impress or PowerPoint, but they are too limited in what they can do and repeating the same fancy effect on two slides takes twice as long. My first attempt was to use the Processing language, but it was a lot of work and the language is less than ideal (sort of old school). My second attempt was with PyGame , which I've been meaning to learn more about. It could work, but I found that the font's weren't anti-aliased (but I think I was doing it wrong) and creating the library was proving to take a long time. The I remembered Bruce , a presentation program written in Python and supposedly using PyGame . When I downloaded the latest source, I found that it was using Pyglet and Cocos2d instead. These two were exactly what I needed, powerful and flexible and I could...

I've been using the Wiring language for doing my Arduino programming and this week I played a little with it's big brother, Processing . I think Processing is a nice tool for beginners and has a great set of libraries, but not my cup of tea for programming. I think what it offers is one tools set (including IDE, libraries and language) so you don't have to waste time figuring out which libraries or IDE you'll need to download as well. I've also just come across Context Free which is a language for making pretty pictures like the one above.

I bought two OLPC (aka XO) laptops and gave one to a needy child through the G1G1 (Give One/Get One) promotion. In fact I gave two laptops since Google matched my donation (thanks Google!). It's already arrived at my Mother's house, it'll be interesting to see how it's changed since the beta machine (which I still have, but I can't upgrade anymore without bricking it). Maybe the dollar will go down in 2009 and the price of materials as well so that they can start selling the laptop at something near $100.00.

My wife, Renata, has been complaining more and more that Windows is getting slower and it's a pain downloading and installing anti-virus software all the time. I occasionally tease that I don't have any of these problems, I don't even have an anti-virus installed on my Ubuntu machine. So finally, this week, she said that she wants to a dual boot machine, like Victor has. Compounding the issue is that over the past few weeks our Internet provider had been getting slower and slower, of course, making Windows appear even slower than normal. I downloaded the DVD version of Ubuntu 8.10 which took a week with this slow connection and, of course, it didn't work (I believe her machine does like booting with a DVD). Luckily, some time on Friday our Internet provider fixed their problems and I was able to download the CD version of 8.10 in about 40 minuts. In the meantime I backed up her machine to my hard drive which was much slower than it should have been (about 8 hours). I...