I will steep her in the western tradition with stories of Greece, and the duality of the western civilization.  This is all selfish projection of my own world view, but that is one of the joys of children isn’t it?  She’ll figure it out for herself and rebel anyway, so I’m going to lay the groundwork for her to rebel against.  This is the role of the father.

At this point I suppose I am getting ahead of schedule a bit.  For the immediate future, I’ll be happy to keep her fed and keep her diaper clean.  Sleep will be optional.

This is a terrific looking apartment in an amazing 344 sqft.  Imagine applying these techniques to a ~2000 sqft. American home.  This young architect should have a long future ahead of him.  It’s easy to spot great work when you see it, and this is certainly it.

Since it has gone to the #2 spot in the news cycle as of late, one would assume it’s ready to forget.  I’ve found http://mitnse.com to be a good source of educated opinion.  There are radioactive isotopes entering the environment at levels far above normal.  In the ecosystem these could accumulate into something that is dangerous.  The half lives of most of the debris are anywhere between a few days and a few years.  Assuming the remaining reactor is cooled and potentially buried in concrete, this disaster doesn’t appear that it will leave a stain behind on the earth as heavy as Chernobyl.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Jon Stewart has a very convenient shield being a satire show.  He claims that he’s a comedy show and not the news.  Technically that shield sticks.  However anyone who’s watched the show knows that Jon Stewart takes on contemporary political issues head on.  He does so in a way that speaks to the details of the issue as well.  Cable news only has 120 seconds to cover each topic of the day, so you’re only able to get a kindergarten level of understanding of the issue.  Popular panel formats offer more depth, but usually degrade into name calling and shouting matches on prime time networks.  The reason most young people willingly admit they get their news from the Daily Show is that it’s the spoon full of sugar that helps the news go down.  It’s entertaining, educational, and usually contains a moment of realization that something in our government is wrong and needs to be changed.  This leaves the viewer entertained and angry at the same time.

That is a powerful combination that no one else does well, except for the Colbert Report.

I am inspired by what Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert have been able to accomplish.  Speaking truth to power behind the veil of comedy is an age-old Western tradition, and it gives me hope and joy to see it alive and well in these two.  They will be able to pass the 85 test with flying colors.

However I do find two escape clauses for this line of thinking, and I only search for them because the previous conclusion makes me feel guilty.

1. The fact that our mortality as a person and as a planet makes what we do even more meaningful because there is an end.  Without an ending there is always an escape, more to do, an extension, no deadline for your final assignment.  So without that final sense of accountability, there is no pressure to achieve, contribute, or make the impact that you want to make in the world.

2. Conventional interplanetary travel.  If humanity is able to escape the gravity well of the Earth and colonize other planets outside of our solar system, then we extend #1 by several orders of magnitude, as now we are limited by the lifetime of our galaxy and perhaps universe instead of just our solar system.  This is reassuring but still the same problem eventually shows up, just on a longer timeline.  Assuming our understanding of the universe is correct, heat death awaits us as the universe cools.  Still our understanding is young and there is much to explore.  I have no doubt that this will evolve over the coming years and new ideas will emerge.

Now the real kicker about number two is the concept that conventional interplanetary travel is simply not possible.  What if the physics of our universe are such that a living being as we know it cannot move between the islands of life, like our planet, without consuming more resources than are available.  It would be as if whatever made the universe made it such that life may evolve and exist throughout it, but those solitary habitats will never have the capability to reach one another.  If this is actually the case it’s somewhat reassuring as we don’t have to worry about meeting aliens of vastly different technology levels which rarely go well for the receiver.  It’s somewhat depressing as the lifetime of our species does have a measurable end, and it’s the short version.  However if this is the case we get back to number one which gives us meaning and purpose because our time is limited and there is no escape from our blue oasis in space.

This brings me back to what am I doing to lead an examined life?  What is my contribution?  Why do I get up and occupy myself with work?  I’d like to think I am making a difference with my wind farm project in an attempt to create a future of renewable energy.  I do get sidetracked keeping the bills paid which is a valid use of energy, but doesn’t make the kind of impact for me spiritually that the renewable energy project does.  It does take care of my family which is a critical contribution.  Aligning your work with what satifies you I believe is the key to happiness.  So I will continue seeking, and try to remember to examine if what I’m doing day-to-day makes the impact that I want.

Ultimately we trade money for value, and in this case that value is expected to be music.  For me the value lies elsewhere but music is still at the heart of it.  I am self-proclaimed anal.  I love keeping a neat desk, a neat room, well swept floors and all the other annoying habits that go with the title.  Part of that is a neat file system.  Like many other geeks, even the shabbier variety I think like to keep their computer files in some semblance of order.  This leads me to the real value proposition for buying music which is the meta data.

Buying music means I don’t have to rip it, fix the track numbers, put it in its own directory under the right category and make sure all of my players pick up that location, not to mention backing the files up.  Buying online gives me all of that easily.  Plus it’s easy to find new music that you buy.  Pirating requires trolling bit-torrent sites for files of dubious quality and mis-tagged data.  There is also the old school method of assembling files from newsgroup posts, how arcane.

Buying music is simply the path of least resistance.  Given the cost is so low now, the small contribution of which more goes to the artist, is well worth satisfying my anal nature when it comes to my file system.

I ended up not using that exact variation but came close.  This part is what gave me the most trouble, although it wasn’t that much.

SendMessage(hwndPB, PBM_SETRANGE, 0, MAKELPARAM(0, cb / 2048));
SendMessage(hwndPB, PBM_SETSTEP, (WPARAM) 1, 0);

The above code assumes you call the following which increments the bar by the 3rd parameter of the PBM_SETSTEP call.

SendMessage(hwndPB, PBM_STEPIT,  0, 0);

However this didn’t appear to work for me.  My bar didn’t move at all when I called SendMessage with a PBM_STEPIT, so I used PBM_ without calling the SendMessage with PBM_SETRANGE.  This is easy because without that cal the progress bar defaults to min/max of 0 to 100.  This way I had just a handful of places in my code where I wanted to advance the bar to specific intervals because the code inbetween was not equal in it’s progressness.  So using the following I was able to explicitly set my progress bar where the 3rd argument is a value from 0 to 100.

SendMessage(hwndPB, PBM_SETPOS, 10, 0);

This is a pretty simple implementation and I would probably use a variable in place of the 10 if it were more complex, but I only made 5 calls, so this works for now.  The MSDN article covers the rest pretty well including styles and dialog options.

AT&T
1) HTC Surround – slide out speaker , mm ok.
2) Samsung Focus – lightest, best looking screen in my opinion
3) LG Quantum – slide out keyboard

T-Mobile
1) HTC HD7 – largest screen
2) Dell Venue Pro – slide out keyboard, nicest physical form factor in my opinion

I am currently on the AT&T network with you guessed it… my iPhone.  I love my iPhone, but I’m ready to give the Windows phone a shake.  I’ve seen several of the models hands on and it looks great!  The one I’ve been most impressed with is the Samsung.  At first I actually didn’t like it’s weight.  It felt too light, cheap even.  However that is a consequence of my age.  I associate heft with quality.  The Samsung phone on the AT&T network is very stiff and although it’s light it performs really well.  The screen was by far the clearest and brightest of the 5 phones I looked at.  Responsiveness is very crisp as well, faster than my iPhone 3GS.  I can’t speak for the iPhone 4, I don’t have one.

Still what I’m really looking forward to is the Windows Phone app store.  This is something Apple has had via iTunes for a while, but I have lived inside Visual Studio most of my programming life, so I will be much more likely to write my own applications for the Windows Phone and the developer pool out there is huge.  There are going to be some really good apps for the Windows phone in the coming months.

All of that being said, I’m still going to wait until January to see what Sprint’s offering is.  Their network is faster and cheaper than AT&Ts assuming you are in a 4G area, which I am.  My contract is up, so I can jump ship without penalty.  That will give the app store some time to fill out too.  I hate not being able to buy a new phone now, but delayed gratification is supposed to be a sign of maturity, or so I’m told.

1) A High Res Screen (>= 1400×900)
2) SSD Option
3) Class 2 GPU or better – NVIDIA FX 880M (1GB)
4) A 15” Screen Format

This whole package with a 160GB SSD, I mention that because it is the priciest upgrade, is about $2100.  The Macbook Pro with similar specs is $2600.  So I think I’ve found my machine.  Thank you Lenovo!