Unspent Thoughts

Bluetooth keyboards can be nice: you eliminate a bunch of wires. Or you can connect to devices you couldn't connect to otherwise, such as my iPod Touch. The keyboard I use with my Mac Mini uses Bluetooth, but it is a full-sized keyboard. I wanted something portable.

I got a Zippy keyboard through Amazon. It works, for the most part. But connecting anything Bluetooth to the iPod Touch can be a problem because the Touch lets other machines steal its peripherals.

The initial connection involves turning on both the computer and the keyboard, pressing the reset button on the keyboard and then entering the four-digit number that displays on the computer. The trouble is that the Mac Mini remembers the connection and the Touch forgets it as soon as it is turned off.

I have the Mini set up at the rear of the house, towards the east. I want to use the iPod Touch in the living room, at the west end of the house. This is close enough for Bluetooth signals, so, as soon as I turn on the keyboard, the Mini takes it over even though the Mini has its own Bluetooth keyboard.

I have told the Mini to forget the Zippy, which works for a while ... until I receive a software update for the Mini. Then the Mini discovers the Zippy and takes it over again. I have to turn it off at the Mini.

I have a similar problem with my Bluetooth headphones, the Touch and my ASUS Transformer Android computer: I would have to tell the Touch to connect to the headphones but the ASUS grabs it as soon as I turn it on. I have to tell the Transformer to forget the headphones before I can use them with the Touch. This is annoying because I like to listen to music on my Android and either watch movies or listen to music on the Touch.

Today I had an additional problem with the Zippy: two keys stuck. The F8 and F9 keys stuck (I never use them anyway), causing any key I did press to repeat continuously until the keyboard was shut down. The problem went away when I used a knife blade to pry the stuck keys up.

I can almost touch type on the Zippy: I have to watch what I'm doing to hit the right keys. Mostly, I'm happy with it, despite its minor problems.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

A local family visited San Onofre State Beach, where the kids collected seven interesting-looking rocks. Some were green with orange inclusions. After the family returned home, the kids were playing with the rocks. Their mother confiscated the rocks and put them in the large pocked of her cargo shorts.

Three hours later, one or more of the rocks exploded, sending flames out of the shorts. The woman suffered second and third degree burns.

Preliminary analysis showed that two of the rocks contain phosphorus, the mineral from which matches are made. It wasn't mentioned, but I wonder if they might also have contained sulfur.

The beach was inspected by authorities, who found no obvious dangers. Of course, the exploding rocks weren't obvious dangers or the kids wouldn't have been allowed to play with them. One fireman commented that phosphorus burns very hotly, as in highway flares. I have also heard that phosphorus from weapons tends to stick to flesh and continue burning, one of the reasons its use in weapons has been banned.

You may think I'm referring to today, Cinco de Mayo, a holiday borrowed from our neighbors to the south who aren't using it, an excuse to consume margaritas and guacamole and listen to loud, harsh music played by bands of roving musicians. No, actually I refer to yesterday, Star Wars Day.

Cinco de Mayo at least is based on real events in the real world, although very few of those who celebrate it could tell you what those events were or who was involved.

Star Wars Day is based on a pun derived from events portrayed in a cinematic work of fiction: "May the Fourth be with you".

I had an appointment tomorrow with the podiatrist I've been seeing for the past couple of decades. We just got a phone call from his office cancelling the appointment. His wife, Lydia, who was also the office manager, died about six weeks ago, apparently from complications of diabetes, and he has retired. He has hired temporary staff to contact patients and has closed the office.

Dr. Dan Tarango has been a good doctor. He is also an intelligent man. He does suffer from the stress of running a business, but so does anybody who wants to do a good job.

He has recommended a podiatrist in El Cajon to me. I intend to give her a call some time today.

I haven't been keeping score, but that's one more doctor I've lost to retirement or death. At a recent Insulin Pumpers meeting I suggested we should start things off right with any doctor by mentioning at our first appointment, "I'm here because I've outlived yet another doctor". I wonder if I should give it a try.

That's probably not a good idea. Amusing, yes, but not practical.

But, thinking back, I have outlived a lot of doctors.

Sunday we celebrated the century-past sinking of the Titanic with ice cubes in our drinks. Or we could have: it was a cool enough day it felt like the ice was forming on top of our glasses anyway.

Today, however, the temperature was high. Very warm, almost hot. Over 80.

Delia had a business meeting; she departed the house alone. I immediately locked things up and went out to sit on the porch until Cathy arrived, a matter of seconds. We went to Fashion Valley and walked around the Container Store until my leg started to hurt, then I walked to P.F. Chang's to await the others. My wait was short; Cathy moved her car and Delia finished her business very quickly. We ordered from the Gluten-Free menu.

Cathy immediately noticed that I hadn't ordered the soup, which I always order. I told her I had considered it but wanted to get the fried rice instead. She likes the fried rice. I got a pot of hot Oolong tea, which Delia decided to share. I initially wanted to get the GF Garlic Sugar Snaps but switched to the GF Brussels Sprouts instead. We had the fried rice, GF Shrimp with Lobster Sauce and GF Chicken with Broccoli. I mentioned that it was our anniversary, so the restaurant supplied dessert.

The names are the same, but they've changed how they make some of the dishes. Everything was flavorful but the flavors were different than expected. I have no real complaints apart from the loud music that made conversation nearly impossible. I really liked the Brussels Sprouts.

Afterwards, Delia and Cathy decided that we would go to a place Cathy had discovered, a place called YogurtLand. When we entered, the guy at the register gave us some thimble-sized cups and told us to sample their wares. I only tried four: Dutch chocolate, Poi (Taro), Pistachio and Coconut. I left the chocolate out of my final selection. laying down a base of Pistachio and a layer of Poi topped with a thin layer of Coconut, all with Kiwi Fruit, Coconut and Lychees on top. And I had planned only to watch the two of them eat! I had fun.

So the fortieth anniversary of our marriage has been suitably celebrated.

And I noticed something funny. Where we ate supposedly healthy Oriental fare, most of the customers were fat but where we consumed supposedly unhealthy dessert fare I saw that most of the customers were thin.

One hundred years ago, the supposedly unsinkable Titanic sunk. It struck an iceberg that it couldn't see, lacking radar and satellite cameras, and, in just a few short hours, made its terminal descent below the waves. That was on April 15, 1912, in the very early hours of morning. Sixty years later, on April 15, 1972, a far more important event to me personally took place: I took the plunge into the rough seas of matrimony.

In 1912, the world was preparing for war, although many claim nobody could foresee it. The Titanic was full of rich people celebrating their richness and poor people trying to escape their poverty. Many of both classes went down with the ship. The news said just a few days ago that the last survivor of the Titanic died before reaching the Centennial of the great event. The seas of matrimony have smoothed for me. What began as an encounter between strangers who were totally different in many ways -- culture, language, religion, family background, attitude towards technology -- have come together as one, ignoring the differences. The differences continue to exist but serve to bring us closer instead of tearing us apart.

I spoke with my son this morning. He is in the United Kingdom and was in the house of his intended, a lovely Irish girl. He was dressed in a blue shirt and was sitting in front of his laptop computer. I was dressed in a Chargers sweat shirt, the morning being cold and the furnace not having been long enough to even suggest not freezing. Delia and I were speaking in front of my ASUS Transformer Android tablet. Forty years ago, the technology didn't exist for our conversation to take place as it did. Most remarkably, it cost us nothing at either end to take advantage of our technological wonders: the call was free.

I woke this morning when the furnace turned itself on, as it does when the temperature in the living room goes below 55 degrees. Passing by the kitchen on my way to waking the furnace more fully to its task, I noticed that our coffee maker was missing from the kitchen. Reaching the living room to don my glasses, I promptly noticed a giant purple garbage bag on the dining room table. It was tied with a giant purple bow. It occupied the spaces that Delia and I use to eat or conduct our businesses. I immediately hastened back to the bedroom to tell Delia of my findings. A few minutes later, after a pause along the way, Delia and I pulled on the ribbon and opened the purple bag to reveal ... a machine designed to brew both drip coffee and espresso coffee. It is a monster. There were also bags of coffee in the big purple bag.

I immediately fired off a Thank You note to both Derek and Cathy. Derek responded with an invitation to talk via Skype, which we subsequently did. Cathy also responded to my note immediately. I used my iPod Touch, which I always carry with me, and Cathy used her Android cell phone.

The Titanic was the technological wonder of its time, one of the largest and most luxurious ships of its time. Its departure a few days previous was eagerly covered in the newspapers and over the radio. There was no television coverage, that technology not having been devised at that time. The behemoth, believed to be impervious to misfortune, was brought to its watery grave by a big ice cube. Or you might say, as so many have said, that the floating palace was brought to ruin by the hubrus of its designers and owners, those who defied the forces of nature and crowed about it.

Returning to the present, the coffee maker is a giant technological wonder that will occupy more space than we have available for it. It is more than twice as big as the coffee maker it will replace. We have a microwave, a convection oven, a toaster oven and a small grill on our counter tops already. Things will be even more cramped. But this silver and black symbol of our unity must be given a place. Which of our other technological wonders can we live without? None, of course. Space will have to be warped to include the new monolith.

And the real wonder is having a marriage that has lasted so long already. Delia and I had almost nothing in common, apart from both being human. She is half Italian, the other half being divided between Spanish and Irish; I am mostly Scottish but with bits and pieces of other peoples accumulated along the way. She spoke Spanish and I spoke English; I once had studied both Latin and French but had acquired neither to any extent. She is a devout Catholic and I am not a devout anything, though I was raised in the Episcopal church. I am a geek and a technophile and she isn't. I write things to share my thoughts with others while she performs more immediate mind sharing by means of the telephone, without which she would be lost. We were married in the Catholic church by a priest who strongly urged us to reconsider because of our extreme differences. Delia has moved from a non-technological tropical environment to the strange culture of Southern California and has thrived in the process.

Our differences persist but have lost meaning. We are united by forces that should have torn us apart long ago. Today we celebrate forty years of our unity. Delia said this morning that she would like it to last at least another ten years.

That sounds like a good goal to me.

A warm storm, with temperatures mostly between 50 and 70 but varying wildly, was predicted to arrive at about 13:00. At 15:00, when the rain had still not arrived and the wind was trying to fill in for it, I kept hearing a squeaking noise. I looked out the front door and saw a bloodied gopher frantically clinging to a rose bush for dear life as he was flailed up and down into the thorns. He finally let go and was still climbing as he flew out of sight.

Then I noticed there were no birds in sight. It used to be that the sea birds would come ashore just before a big storm to hunt for food at the dump ... er, sorry, the land fill. No birds of any kind were visible.

Let's assume at least some birds can fly 40 miles per hour. That means that headed west they could only go about 5 miles per hour but eastbound birds could go 75 miles per hour. They could cover a lot of ground that way but landing could have been painful; upon impact they would spread out like soft butter on hot toast. All of the birds were probably hiding behind bushes or in recently vacated gopher holes.

A bit later, I was seated in my recliner, looking northwards. What I normally see in the distance is the eucalyptus trees around Chollas Lake, then, progressively closer, the freeway, the silk oaks in our back yard and our macadamia tree. The wind eased up for a bit. What I could actually see for a moment was pure white, like a blank sheet of paper. The rain had arrived. Pretty soon I could see the macadamia, then the silk oaks, eventually the freeway and, somewhat later, the eucalyptus trees.

At 17:00 I turned on the television to see the news. The weather person reported that some fringe effects were being felt and the main storm was about to come ashore. As it was a warm storm and highly unstable we could expect more high winds and heavy rain, perhaps accompanied by hail, snow, lightning and thunder, and small flying animals (including fish). People were being encouraged to remain indoors, dry and safe, rather than driving anywhere.

As she was leaving, driving to a friend's husband's funeral, Delia called me on her cellular phone to report that our trash bins had been trashed. I went out to collect the garbage and recyclables, now indistinguishable from one another, and place them in the bins I had stood up. I expect to have to repeat that performance again later. After supervising my efforts, Delia drove off into the west. She called me again when she reached her destination safely.

This is unusually violent weather for San Diego. Here, even a light rainfall tends to make people forget how to drive. This weather, though, may have scared some of them into slowing down.

☺

The ancient Roman calendar was badly messed up. The month began with the first sighting of a sliver of moon in the glare of sunrise. Of course, different observers would get different results, depending on their skills and the weather. Then notes of years of observations were consulted to estimate how long it would be until the end of the month. Months had different lengths at different times of the year. Once the end of the month was determined, they would count backwards to number each day of the month. Then a priest would decide on what date the moon would be full, the Ides. It's hard to tell by looking at the moon exactly when it is full. It looks full enough a day before or after it is actually full. That is why they depended on observation of the first moment of the new moon and centuries of records, often flawed. The Ides of March fell on the fifteenth day before the predicted last day of the current moon.

The year was divided into quarters by the two equinoxes and the two solstices. An equinox is when the day and night ore the same length, when the length of the day is the same as the length of the night. It is hard to determine without accurate clocks, so the ancients built giant circles of stones to tell them when the sun was in the proper position in the sky for day and night to be equal. Some of the stones in the circle also indicated the position of the sun in the sky when it stopped moving either north or south and stood, however briefly, in one place, the solstices, the shortest and longest days of the year, midwinter and midsummer. Sometimes there would be four full moons in a quarter, the extra full moon being called a Blue moon.

All of the observations and calculations were error-prone and confusing. Priests were going blind staring into the sunrise to spot a thin crescent of new moon. The months were determined by observations of the moon and the year was determined by observations of the sun, both requiring the keeping of good records for a long period and lots of calculations. Finally they got fed up with all of the complicated nonsense and dictated that a year of twelve months would begin at the shortest day of the year and that the days of the month would be numbered in the order they came rather than backwards from the last day of the month. The Ides of March was dictated to fall on March 15 even though that date was rarely when the moon was full.

A sun-based year took over and the moon-based months fell into disuse and disrepair. People no longer know what the Ides represents or what a Blue moon signifies. People are perfectly happy losing that extra month during the year in order to have an orderly calendar system.

And today, when our calendar and traditions tell us it is the Ides of March, the moon is just past a quarter full.

I got my $10 mouse in the mail today.

I guess it's a generic El Cheapo Bluetooth mouse. It is long and low, the top is white, and, most of all, I plugged it in and it worked immediately with no driver and no fuss.

Okay, it's too long. I keep going off the edge of the mouse pad. It has four buttons: left, right, wheel and speed, five if you include the on/off button. The left click and right click behave as expected. The speed button allows the cursor to move twice (or half) as far for the same physical movement. I'm not sure what the wheel button is supposed to do but clicking it brings up part of a page with some ESPN stuff.

But the computer seems to run faster and hasn't been hanging up the system.

No instructions were included. None were needed. All I had to do in the way of set-up was to install two AAA batteries.

It's just what I needed.

A few months back I was having problems with my keyboard and mouse. I decided to replace both, getting a Bluetooth keyboard and Bluetooth mouse from Logitech. Both of them seemed to be working fine although the mouse seemed to have some quirks: it had too many features and I had no use for the extra stuff.

Then my preferred browser, Camino, started acting up. Well, I share the computer with my wife, Delia, who has the power to make computers misbehave in strange ways. I figured that the Camino glitches were due to something Delia had done by accident. Still, I stopped using Camino and started using Google Chrome instead.

Suddenly, a few days ago, Chrome stopped being able to render my LiveJournal page correctly. I switched to FireFox and the problem seemed to go away. Then my entire system got sluggish from time to time, forcing me to restart the computer frequently. I tried to find out why the rendering was screwed up with the help of the LiveJournal support staff. Nobody else had reported similar problems. My other browsers on the Mac rendered my pages correctly and browsers on my Android tablet rendered the pages correctly.

Then a light came on. A red light on top of the mouse near a button on top of the mouse that I have never used. I pressed the button and a new, transparent display overlaid my screen. If I pressed the button enough times, the red light stopped coming on and the transparent screen went away. The mouse still has two additional buttons I've never used, both on the left side of the mouse. But all of the problems seem to come from the additional features on the mouse, features I never wanted and would probably never use and would gladly disable permanently.

My old mouse is gone, given away or trashed like so many mice that have gone before. I dug out my Wacom graphic tablet, which has a simple mouse and pen associated with it, but my system went bananas when I connected it. It won't co-exist with the new mouse or perhaps with the keyboard (or perhaps some other Bluetooth devise). I didn't pay for the Bluetooth mouse or the Bluetooth keyboard, so I'm not out any cash.

I guess I'm in the market for a new mouse.