12 February 2012
Theodolite Jubilee
12/02/12 06:55
This week Marsha has been working late at Block so I’m getting home, dealing with the cats, doing dinner, all the usual things by myself. Several times I’ve even been asleep before she walked through the door. Well, one day this week I got home and the cats seemed clingier and spookier than usual. I took care of them and was working on dinner. After a while I walked into the living room and noticed it. One of the front windows was smashed. Apparently at some point during the day a bird had either tried to attack Geiger or fly through the house and out the back. Either way it hadn’t made it. The outer sheet of glass had a hole four inches across broken out and cracks radiating in all directions out to the edge of the frame. The inner pane of glass (thank goodness for double pane windows) had some ‘schmutz’ on it where the bird’s beak had hit the glass but it was intact. I didn’t find a carcass in the flower bed outside but whether than was due to it surviving, or having been devoured by one of the neighbourhood cats, I don’t know. We found a company that will fix the window and as long as the inner pane is intact the house is air tight. The trouble is that it will be a week or more before it gets fixed. This was a surprise to me. When we cracked a window in the Sherwood House in Minnesota the guy came out within a day, cut and replaced the glass right there, and it was all done. With these windows they have to order a ‘cartridge’ from the factory that included two panes, the frame between them, all sealed up with low-E gas between them. As a result it will take a week or more to get here and will cost a couple hundred not the fifty or so the one in Minnesota set us back. Ah technology.
So The big event this week was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. She’s been on the throne for sixty years now. There were events in Great Britain and around the Commonwealth. There was an official address (which I had always assumed was Buckingham Palace, London England, but apparently there's more to it than that). We even go into the spirit by having a round of Tim Tam Slams. Tim Tam’s are an Australian cookie. They are rectangular, have a chocolate coating and inside is a cookie made of an open cell foam so fluid can flow freely through it. A TimTam Slam is when you bite the ends off the cookie and use it like a straw. The fluid flowing through the cookie softens it and the trick is to finish off the cookie while it’s still chewy but no longer crunchy but before it completely collapses into a gooey mass in the bottom of your glass. Usually the fluid is milk though coffee or tea are equally common. A few died in the wool Australians will do Fosters but beer and chocolate don’t strike me as appealing. The question you’re probably asking is why did we celebrate the Queens Diamond Jubilee with an Australian cookie? Because Australia is in the Commonwealth and anything from there beats English food.
Friday, Marsha called me a total geek. Now this may not surprise you and I took this as a compliment, but I’m not sure that was how it was intended. What prompted this outburst was an App I purchased for my iPod Touch. You see already I use the device all day. It’s a clock that gets me up. I check e-mail on it. I have a sniffer App to test the computer network. Weather radar and forecast apps, news apps, and other apps to keep me informed. I listen to the CBC on it. In the evening I play games on it to unwind. It’s literally in my hand all day long. Well, this week I bought another app called Theodolite. It uses ALL the sensors. The gyroscopes, the attitude sensors, the location finder, and it displays it all on the information on the screen. I can use the device as a compass, a level, a position finder, an altimeter, a range finder, a telescope, a surveying transit, all sorts of things. I can even use it as a distress beacon. If I get lost in the wilderness I can send an e-mail with a picture with my exact position on it so they can rescue me.
Mind you I need to be lost in a wilderness that has a WiFi network but nonetheless it’s cool. Marsha did point out that I have tools already that will do all of these things, but that’s not the point. Now I can do them all with the single handheld device which is cool. It may not be more accurate than what I have but it’s digital which makes it cool. Best of all I can do all of these things on the single handheld computer device that dies if I don’t recharge it every single day. That’s what makes it cool
And Marsha has the audacity to call me a geek.
Doug & Marsha
Pix; Sunrise
So The big event this week was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. She’s been on the throne for sixty years now. There were events in Great Britain and around the Commonwealth. There was an official address (which I had always assumed was Buckingham Palace, London England, but apparently there's more to it than that). We even go into the spirit by having a round of Tim Tam Slams. Tim Tam’s are an Australian cookie. They are rectangular, have a chocolate coating and inside is a cookie made of an open cell foam so fluid can flow freely through it. A TimTam Slam is when you bite the ends off the cookie and use it like a straw. The fluid flowing through the cookie softens it and the trick is to finish off the cookie while it’s still chewy but no longer crunchy but before it completely collapses into a gooey mass in the bottom of your glass. Usually the fluid is milk though coffee or tea are equally common. A few died in the wool Australians will do Fosters but beer and chocolate don’t strike me as appealing. The question you’re probably asking is why did we celebrate the Queens Diamond Jubilee with an Australian cookie? Because Australia is in the Commonwealth and anything from there beats English food.
Friday, Marsha called me a total geek. Now this may not surprise you and I took this as a compliment, but I’m not sure that was how it was intended. What prompted this outburst was an App I purchased for my iPod Touch. You see already I use the device all day. It’s a clock that gets me up. I check e-mail on it. I have a sniffer App to test the computer network. Weather radar and forecast apps, news apps, and other apps to keep me informed. I listen to the CBC on it. In the evening I play games on it to unwind. It’s literally in my hand all day long. Well, this week I bought another app called Theodolite. It uses ALL the sensors. The gyroscopes, the attitude sensors, the location finder, and it displays it all on the information on the screen. I can use the device as a compass, a level, a position finder, an altimeter, a range finder, a telescope, a surveying transit, all sorts of things. I can even use it as a distress beacon. If I get lost in the wilderness I can send an e-mail with a picture with my exact position on it so they can rescue me.
Mind you I need to be lost in a wilderness that has a WiFi network but nonetheless it’s cool. Marsha did point out that I have tools already that will do all of these things, but that’s not the point. Now I can do them all with the single handheld device which is cool. It may not be more accurate than what I have but it’s digital which makes it cool. Best of all I can do all of these things on the single handheld computer device that dies if I don’t recharge it every single day. That’s what makes it cool
And Marsha has the audacity to call me a geek.
Doug & Marsha
Pix; Sunrise