Staying in contact

I started blogging because a friend of mine started, and it seemed like an interesting thing to do. I didn’t really expect it to take too long for me to get bored and let it drop.

It’s taking longer than I thought though…..

What I have realized is that blogging is a way of staying in touch, and I’m beginning to think that it does have some advantages over e-mail.

When I write someone an e-mail, I hope for a reply. The recipient feels obliged to send a reply, and when he does, I feel obliged to reply to his/her e-mail and so it goes on…

When I write a blog, I don’t expect a reply, but I am contacting people who know me and who read the blog. I know that when I read a friends blog’s it’s almost like receiving an e-mail, but with no obligations. Of course if something in the blog raises a question or comment, I am still free to send an e-mail or call them (preferable), just as they are.

So there you have it, I will probably be blogging for a little longer than I thought….

Glass Ankles

Well it looks like the World Cup is over, it must be, there are markedly fewer cars around sporting German flags. Someone somewhere must be making a quilt.

As you have probably gussed, I am not a great football fan.

I did start to watch the Germany Italy match, but after 10 minutes of nothing really happening, I grew bored and went back to NASA TV and watched the shuttle perform its first orbital correction.

What I did see though was that a new rule has been added to the game since I played it in school. I haven’t seen the wording yet, but it must be something like:
“If you are tackled and loose the ball, throw yourself to the ground in the most spectacular way you can manage.” It seems that if the fall is spectacular enough, the referee will give you the ball back.

I was very impressed with some of the falls, being really convinced that the player had at least a complex fracture of the fibula, only to see the player get up totally unhurt. Really amazing….. This really must be suggested as an Olympic discipline. Points could be awarded for air time, number of ground rolls, and how convincing the expression of pain was…

So the World Cup? As far as I can tell the situation is a follows

• England (My home country) Out…
• Germany (My country of residence) Out…
• Portugal (Age old allies…) Out…

That leaves me with the choice of France or Italy to support in the final.

mmmm Maybe NASA can launch something on Sunday?

mmm…

We I have just posted my first blog, and spell checked it, and guess what…

The built in spell checker chokes on the word blog!

Oh well, nobodies perfect, and its not exactly the end of the world… Funny though dont you think…

I guess I will go look for a way to add to the spell check dictionary….

Hello world!

A friend of mine has started to blog, and it seems like a nice idea so here I am in blogging space..

OK, so what do I have to say that is generally interesting? um, er, probably not a lot…. So why am I wasting Internet bandwidth and free server space? well to be completely honest, I really don’t know… I guess I find things that are new (at least to me) interesting and want to try them out…

Here are a few details about me:

I am an Electronics engineer and programmer…

I have been programming now for over 30 years…

I have experience in the Unix kernel, control systems, RF engineering, digital electronics and much more. I have programmed in most programming languages at some time or other. I don’t like Java (Much too bloated) or Perl (A real mess of a language). I do like “C”, “C++” and “Ruby” , but my language of choice is “Python”.

Why do I like “Python”? Well it is really cross platform, It is maintainable, and you can do allmost anything with it. It is good for quick 2 liners as well as large projects. You can do the most amazing things with its introspection and run time object building features and so on… If you have not yet tried it, you are missing out….

Well that’s all for now… Lets see if blogging holds my attention..

Don’t hold your breath though..