I've lived in Alaska on and off for almost a year now, and still haven't seen the Northern Lights, so when I checked the University of Alaska-Fairbanks aurora page and it said the aurora was going to be active the next few nights, well, let's just say that I'm throwing some food, water, and clothes in the car at 8:30 p.m., and heading farther north, in search of clear skies.
Adios, amigos ...
I've created a new diet that helps you lose 40 pounds in eight weeks. It's very simple, only two steps. Step 1: Get gallstones to develop in your gallbladder. They help create a lot of pain and problems in your digestive system, including liver, pancreas, and more. Step 2: Quit eating. Not eating gets rid of most of the pain, and amazingly, is preferable to eating.
Like a lot of other people, I've had a problem with my 2006 Toyota RAV4 which can best be described as a throttle lag, hesitation, low power, acceleration, or stalling problem. In short, you press on the gas, and nothing happens, and in fact, the car seems to lose power or "bog down."
A second problem that may be related is that when I turn left or right through a large intersection, the RAV4 has the same lag/hesitation/stall/low-power problem.
Summary: Sun's former CEO starts a Ruby/Postgres company. Larry Ellison (Oracle) slams Sun management. James Gosling slams Oracle.
Wow, there are all sorts of fun things going on in the Java (or former-Java) world. First, former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz talks a lot about patents, including Sun's history with Microsoft, presumably because Oracle is suing Google over some Java patents that Sun would never sue for.
I'm getting closer to releasing my "programming language independent" CRUD generator application. I'm now calling it Cato. My previous code names for it were Db2App and SideKick, but when I thought about the name SideKick, I couldn't help but think about Inspector Clousseau's trusty sidekick Cato Fong, and thus the application name was born. :)
Yikes, with all the earthquakes we've had in Alaska this year I thought I'd start doing some research on the big one -- the 1964 Alaska earthquake. Here's a link to 1964 Alaska earthquake facts I've uncovered on my One Man's Alaska website.
2011 Update: Late February, 2011, and the earthquakes have started again in this part of Alaska. Yesterday there was a small earthquake near Wasilla and Palmer, and this morning there was an earthquake in Fairbanks, Alaska.
As I was working with MailChimp this weekend, I stumbled across a blog article they shared about the success of their new Freemium business model approach. They took the "freemium" route a little more than a year ago, and their numbers look like this:
I want to apologize to a few people who have written lately that I haven't been able to take the time to help. I'm trying to get my new book/website online, and it's taking a lot of time. The website is a story I've titled "How I Sold My Business", and I was fortunate to be able to get the domain name HowISoldMyBusiness.com.
Every once in a while technology leads to something pretty funny. For me today it was the Google News page, showing a story about a California mayor being arrested after a "wild-ride purse snatching." The funny thing was that Google News had the story under the category "Data Storage", which I can only assume was a reference to the storage capabilities of the woman's purse. Here's a partial snapshot of the Google News page:
In my other life (living in Alaska), I'm wondering if 84% of Alaska write-in voters can spell "Murkowski" right? In my Alaska Murkowski write-in story, I calculate that with the current vote totals, Lisa Murkowski will need a little less than 84% of voters to spell her name correctly to avoid any sort of legal challenge by Joe Miller.
This announcement is a little premature, but ... for at least ten years I've thought about creating a search engine to make it easier to find source code examples, and while Google and thousands of writers have pretty much eliminated the need for such a search engine, I decided to create one anyway. The approach I'm working on is to create a source code search engine that is driven by "tags", in much the same way that del.icio.us and other tag concepts work.
I've been playing with Drupal 7 lately on the Drupal Gardens website, and in the process I decided to create another blog about living in Alaska. If you're interested in Drupal and/or Alaska, here's a link to this new blog about living in Alaska, which currently includes information about Wasilla and Talkeetna, Alaska.
After I posted on Twitter that the Google Chrome OS reminded me of the Tektronix X-Terminals we used at NASA around 1990, a friend tweeted the reply, "The network is the computer."
If you know anything about Unix history, you know "The network is the computer" was the slogan of Sun (nee Sun Microsystems) for many years. I remember reading an article one time where Sun executive said something like, "We don't really know what it means, but we like it", in regards to this slogan.
With 2011 barreling around the corner, I've been busy putting things together to start a new web design, web hosting, and computer programming consulting business here in Alaska.
While my current website is as ugly as it gets, here's a link to my "coming soon" Mat-Su Valley Programming website. As you can tell, I've been giving myself a few minutes every night to get the website set up, as I have plenty more important things to do at the moment.
Taking a break from my regularly scheduled technical writing, if you ever wondered what the weather was like in Alaska in the winter, I just wrote a short post about an 80-mph winter wind storm that hit Wasilla, Alaska yesterday.
A brief commercial interruption that you might actually like: ThinkGeek is having a clearance sale, including giving away a free Rubik's Mirror Block Cube with a $40 purchase. Here's a collection of clearance sale ads they just sent me. Happy geeky shopping.
Just a quick note that if you're interested in seeing photos of last night's lunar eclipse from Wasilla, Alaska, I just posted these Alaska lunar eclipse photos. My camera gear isn't great yet (a very good Pentax K-x, but no good lenses) but the large 4.4 MB image shows how clear the sky was here last night, as you can clearly see not only the orange-red moon, but many stars in the background as well.
Summary: A quick look at Seward, Alaska lodging information, including resources on my One Man's Alaska website, and other Seward, Alaska lodging resources.
Alaska programming and website design: Nothing too exciting here for the devdaily world, but just a quick announcement that I am finally launching my new computer consulting business in Alaska. My new company is named Mat-Su Valley Programming (or MVP, for short), and we'll provide Alaska with website design and programming services.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but the old devdaily.com "directory", formerly available as URLs like these:
/Dir/...
has been removed. With terrific search engines like Google, there wasn't much need for the directory any more.
I'm sorry for the inconvenience. If I can help you find what you're looking for, just send me an email.
Thanks,
Alvin Alexander
devdaily.com
