Random Brain Dump

A few cool Mac downloads I’ve come across this week…

This RDC client enables you to remotely connect to a Windows computer and control its desktop, from your Mac. Awesome!

Wallsaver is a widget that enables screensavers as background. I like how quickly you can switch it on/off to go between screensaver and wallpapers. Unbelievably cool to have the Matrix screensaver running on the background. I do feel like I’m Neo… 🙂

Nortel was among the many companies recently announcing dire economic news. In fact, it filed for chapter 11 earlier this month. Well, there goes my tiny pension… 🙂

It’s sad for me as I started my career at Nortel when I moved to the Bay Area in ’92. Fresh out of college, I joined the company to build software for the company’s Meridian line of PBX‘s. Nortel’s Meridian phones seemed ubiquitous at the time but they were getting replaced by IP-based systems during the late 90’s.

There were a batch of new grads coming in to the Mountain View campus that summer. The place had a lot more older folks, very different from the companies I’ve been a part of since (web companies tend to attract young folks). The newly relocated “rookies” began to hang out together– many remained my good friends to this day. The companies may not have been one of the cooler companies, but I sure have the fondest memories of the folks there.

Good luck to the company.

Ran across an iPhone port of Crayon Physics… I was blown away by the simple but ultra-cool 2D physics puzzle game. The simple goal is to guide a ball to hit a target star by drawing 2D objects that interact with it. Worth every penny of its cost of 99 cents (the deluxe version costs $4.99), check it out here…

We spent two nights at my sister in-law’s on a short trip to LA after Christmas. On the last night, Suzanne was out late seeing an old friend. I was putting the girls to bed when they asked for a story as they often do. At home, sometime instead of reading books I would tell them stories– some true accounts and some I make up. So, I was looking around at the new surrounding for things to work into my story (I usually make things up as I go) when I saw a ceiling fan. That gave me an idea.

So I made up this story of a boy who woke up and discovered himself all sweaty on a sweltering summer day. He got ready for school, but grew increasingly uncomfortable in the hot morning. He kept complaining about the heat to his mother and didn’t want to go to school. His endless whining throughout breakfast gave her an idea. She gave him a shoe box and told him that it was magic! This magical thing in the box will instantly make him cool and comfortable. But there’s one condition: he cannot open it until he gets to class. Otherwise, the magic will not work. The boy got excited, grabbed the box and sprinted out the house. Along the way, he bragged about the magic box that will make him cool to every friend he encountered.

By the time he got to school the entire class knew about the magic box. As the boy sat down in class, anticipation built and all eyes were on him. The boy excitedly put the magic box on his desk, took a deep breath, surveyed the entire class and then calmly removed the cover. His eye bugged out, mouth gasped as he reached in the magic box with his hand and grabed its magical content: a paper fan which his mother made and inscribed with crayons “I love you, mom!” The boy raised the fan to show all his friends in pure delight. The collective excitement of the students exploded in a thunderous applause.

The end…

Katelyn and Allison were cracking up as I finished the story– just the feedback I was looking for. Allison then excitedly jumped out of her bed, made a fist with her hand, put it on the middle of her forehead and excitedly said to me: “Daddy, when you were telling the story I see everything in my head!”

Well… with a response like that, I guess that story was magical to me too.

Around last Thanksgiving, the internal flash on my Canon 40D camera started to act up. I couldn’t get it to pop up. At first I figured that I messed some configuration or something. I kinda ignored it for a few weeks; I tend to avoid using the flash as much as I can anyway.

So finally with some free time last week, I finally looked into the fixing the problem. When I digged into the configuration of the camera, it became clear that it incorrectly detected the attachment of an external flash! This explains why I couldn’t get the internal flash to pop up. Figured it had to be some mechanical issue like a pin getting stuck or something. I used one of those air canisters to blow some air on the horseshoe to clear out any dirt and sand. When that didn’t work, I used a tweezer poking around the horseshoe. Lifting the metal plate on right side revealed this tiny pin. Giving the pin a little wiggle via the tweezer did the trick. The pin popped up and the camera no longer detected an attachment of the external flash– the internal flash popped up just fine, finally…

Don’t know if this is common, but other 40D owners have definitely seen it. Found a useful thread on flickr with very insightful discussions.

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