Twinkle, twinkle, little star...

While on FaceBook, I had encountered the following take on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and it didn't seem to flow right for me and didn't feel adequate, scientifically.

So I came up with the following variant:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
how I admire what you are!
Giant ball of incandescent gas,
Compressed under its own mass.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
how I admire what you are!

Glowing bright, nuclear fusion:
Hydrogen to helium, C-N-O!
Billions of years of fuel to burn
until the iron cools the core.
Red dwarf, white dwarf, Supernova!
Infinite universe, full of awe.

Twinkling star, far away:
Distorted by our own atmosphere.
Scientists with their adaptive optics,
study the night sky, beauty abound.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
Science tells us what you are.

I give it to the world under the following license:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Modern electronics...

Modern electronics is so tedious to solder by hand. Here is a successful attempt to solder an extension to a microphone.

Recording ideas

Being conscious of the weird ways that our minds work is a useful thing. One if the more interesting studies in recent years revealed that our minds scrub some information when passing through doorways. Recently, I have adopted the policy of not passing through a doorway if I am incubating a new idea and will try to record the idea before I leave the room. For this, I have found that the Google Keep app is really quite useful.

Apple Yawn.

Apple iButt Yawn! Didn't their old Dot-mac, MobileMe do this years ago?

A tale of two Pis

Since I have two different Raspberry Pis, both model B but one is made in China, the other is made in the UK, I may as well post a picture of them side by side.

HTC One charging oddity

This is mostly just a post for my personal reference:
After mucking around with the phone, plugging in and unplugging things from its USB port, the port may suddenly stop working and the phone won't even initiate charging when the charger is plugged in. Soft reboots or soft power-down/power-up doesn't appear to fix it and the phone won't appear when plugged into a computer's USB port.
The solution is somewhat simple: Force a hard reboot by holding down the power button for 10 seconds. The following reboot, it appears to work again.

Goodbye 2012. Hello 2013.

It's that time of year again: Reflect on the year's successes and flubs... Of which some were "resolutions" and some were merely wish-list items.

Notable flubs:

• Practically all work-related items were flubs but there again, I didn't seriously expect Blizzard to give me the "pink slip".
• Most FOSS project items were flubs but there again, changing job and relocating puts a serious crimp on one's free time.
• Failed to maintain the fitness improvement - Finished 2010 at 235lbs, 2011 at 198lbs and I'm finishing 2012 at 206lbs. Could be worse, I suppose.

Hard pressed to think of any real successes which were on the 2012 list. There are a few work successes at my job at +LinkedIn but they don't count because this time last year, I was only a user of their site.

Anyways, on to non-work wish-list for 2013... Not solid resolutions because, meh.

• Would be nice to get back to under 200lbs again.
• I am going to make time for Free and Open Source projects:
• OQGraph for MariaDB
• Cleanup the v3 work
• Get it merged into trunk.
• External Stored Procedures for MariaDB
• Cleanup the current work.
• Include the proof-of-concept work to split the parser so that the stored procedure parser is plugable.
• Get it merged into trunk.
• Playing with Raspberry Pi
• I plan to outfit my Pi with more IO using cheap PIC16 parts and make all the source and schematics open.
• I want to make a small bipedal robot, powered by a Pi or two.
• Is it possible to use I2C as a Transport for NDBCluster?
• Just for fun:
• Participate in more get togethers with other Blizzard alumni who are now in the SF Bay area.
• Personal development:
• I'm planning to relearn the piano.
• Read more books. I have a backlog of books, including fiction books, that I want to read.
• Eventually get my home office organised.

I'll see where it leads...

What my Nexus One phone looks like right now.

Test post

Testing posting from Google's Blogger app while waiting at allergist's