The battery died, and the alternator committed suicide trying to compensate. Once that was fixed, the starter gave up. Sometimes I think that I am building a new 1994 truck piece by piece. Still, at almost 220,000 miles, much better than dropping 30-50K on a new truck.
Objexions
My views on technology, politics, philosophy, etc.
First Lego League
Spent the day with my nephew’s robotics team. They placed in the 30s but learned a bunch.
Truck down
My truck (94 Mazda B4000) is in the shop with a broken clutch. It turns out that the slave cylinder for the hydraulic clutch is leaking. Unfortunately, this part was not designed for easy service. The slave is located inside the transmission housing, so the whole tranny needs to be removed (including the four wheel drive transfer case). So, what should be a simple repair involves pulling this four foot long assembly off the engine, and if course replacing the main seal.
I was initially feeling guilty for being a wimp, and not fixing it myself, but I can’t imagine being on my back with the tranny on my chest. It has been a long time since I did that sort if thing (I remember doing the transmission on Milton’s 51 Buick back when we were kids).
National health care
British police use the NHS database to look up info on people of interest. That fact raises the hair on my neck when thinking about government-run healthcare. Insurance companies are highly regulated around privacy of information, but the government rarely follows the rules that it makes for others.
My Facebook Experience
Update: After much waiting and gnashing of teeth, Facebook staff has reset my password (Thanks, Kimmie!). Apparently, two email messages per hour is the pain threshold that gets action 
I have long resisted the lure of social networking sites, as they appeared to be little more than time-wasting toys. Recently, though, my thinking has been evolving. In addition, two of my nephews are in the military, and these sites are the primary way that they keep in touch with family and friends; posting pictures and status so that we can see how they are doing, and what is going on with them, and the rest of my family has done the same, so that they can stay connected to our (freakishly close) family.
So, late into the night a couple of days ago, I joined Facebook. At first, I used my ACM email address (The Association for Computing Machinery is a professional organization for computer hardware and software practitioners and researchers), which is automatically forwarded to my personal address, after filtering by Postini. I never received the confirmation email that Facebook sends to establish the identity associated with the FB account. SO, I assumed that Postini had filtered the message, and so proceeded to change the email address on the FB account to my personal address. I received the confirmation immediately, clicked the link, and I was good to go; or so I thought. Get the whole story
Arts Council Event Application
I am working on a prototype for an application that will allow members of the Arts & Culture Collaborative to submit information about upcoming events. The data will be used to populate brochures, etc.; and to support an online application (and eventually an iPhone app) to display events on a map, based on a starting point, and a date/timeframe.
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Online and/or shared whiteboards
For the new WRACC web site design, we want some ways to attract visitors; with an arts theme. One of the ideas is to use an online whiteboard app as a kind of coloring book, and graffiti surface that could be submitted, shared, or even collaboratively created online. Get the whole story
Prototyping in Smalltalk
Working in a language like Smalltalk is very different from working in a compiled language. Most important, the code-time and run-time environments are the same thing; you are working in the running system. Usually, when confronting a new problem, I start by looking for the basic elements, and playing with what they can do, then encapsulate what I learn into classes, build whatever user interface that I need, and then it’s done, for now.
Metamodeling
I went looking for some information on modeling standards and found a few interesting sites:
- metamodel.com
A community site dedicated to metamodeling discussion, articles, etc. I have yet to join up, but it looks promising. - UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology
UN/CEFACT project to develop a modeling methodology, primarily at the B2B/e-commerce level. There is a lot of information packed into this site, all related to a B2B modeling methodology based on UML, and associated specifications, processes, case studies, academic papers, and examples/tutorials (even tutorial videos).
Tags: modeling