Category: miscellaneous

• 57 Chevy Bel Air – Not very cool, it was a four door. But it did take me all the way to Laguna Beach and back when I was seventeen.
• 67 MGB GT – I blame Chris for this car. It was a rust bucket unfortunately. But it, along with Chris’ MGB gave me my taste for British cars. I didn´t keep it very long.
• 1978 Volkswagon Scirocco – This was a great car. Virtually indestructible, until I ran a red light and got T-boned right at the driver side door. Car was totaled but I walked away without a scratch.
• 1957 MGA – Saw this for sale on the road by Beaverton High School in 1985, and in a moment of weakness bought it. I still think that this is one of the most beautiful sports cars to look at. Only a four cylinder, but it handles nice. It was in pretty rough shape mechanically and although I did drive it for a while, it ended up sitting in my garage for a good number of years before I got it mechanically rebuilt.
• 1988 Honda Prelude – This car was almost as fun to drive as the Scirocco. It had four wheel steering, where the rear wheels actually turned slightly as well as the front wheels.
• 1999 Accura Integra – A nice solid car, sporty, but not really a sports car.
• 1960 Austin Healey 3000 – Now this is the car that people drool over when I drive it, at least if they are old enough to remember wanting one, or if they had one and regret getting rid of it. Same size as the MGA, but with an engine twice as large (roughly 3000cc compared to 1500cc). It also weighs 1000 pounds more. Under the bonnet is a straight 6 and it does feel like it.
• 2011 Mitsubishi Eclipse – This car feels somewhat between my Prelude and my Integra. It drives much more like a sports car than did the Integra.

I have had a “smart” home for probably over thirty years.  So I get amused by the “new” trends in home automation such as Philips Hue, and Wink, etc.  The new technology is great, definitely better than what I have been using, but when I look at replacing what I have I find the costs to be prohibitive.  Re-doing my house would cost about $1000 and in some ways not be as good as what I currently have.

Continue reading “Home Automation (smart home)”

I enjoy playing Word with Friends.  I play often with my sister.  I developed a training aid which you can use.  To access it go to https://robertjwallace.com///wordgame

I am planning (actually have retired now) on retiring before or on my 65th birthday, so when a client wanted a countdown timer I checked one out.  Since I am now retired it shows the time since I stopped working.

8 years, 4 months, 7 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes ago

I am attempting to learn French once again.  It was many years ago that I took a first term college class.  it is amazing how many more resources we have today thanks to the internet.  I am using the following tools:

Rosettastone software – While the product comes with CD’s, once you are registered you can access the on-line courses.

Babbel.com – Wow.  For the money this is hard to beat.  Six months for $40.  Similar methodology to Rosettastone.  I especially like the vocabuary review.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/

This site is not as good as babbel.com but it is free.  It has learning games and some good lessons including “Basic French in 12 Weeks”

Google Translate.  French to English and English to French

French verb conjugater test – very good. Both regular and irregular verbs.

French radio streamed from the internet.  I listen to France Bleu Azur

I recently bought a Barnes and Nobel Color Nook e-book reader and promptly hacked it into an Android tablet (http://www.cyanogenmod.com/).  One of the games I then download to the tablet was “Word Game” by Craig Hart.  It is basicly a Scrabble(tm) like game, single player, played against the clock. It is a fun game, but in playing it I realized I needed a practice tool to help me learn longer words and to help me get better at anagraming.  So I wrote one in JavaScript.  It randomly shows seven tiles (from the standard Scrabble letter tiles).  You try to find the longest word you can. You can play it at https://robertjwallace.com///wordgame

This is what I deal with on a daily basis.  Below is a simple two line JavaScript program:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1250">
<meta name="generator" content="PSPad editor, www.pspad.com">
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var status = "Uncached,Idle,Checking,Downloading,UpdateReady,Obsolete".split(/,/);
    alert(status[1])
</script>

</body>
</html>

It simply splits a string on comma’s into an array.

Firefox, Opera and IE8 output an alert with "Idle"

Safari and Chrome output "n"

 

Arggghhhhh.  To get it to work in Safari and Chrome the code needs to be changed to

    var status = "Uncached,Idle,Checking,Downloading,UpdateReady,Obsolete";
    statusArray = status.split(/,/);
    alert(statusArray[1])

 

Finished coding and launching Eternity Celtic, a site featuring celtic wedding bands designed by my friend Chris Foleen.  Check it out and tell your friends if they are looking for unique celtic wedding rings.

Just finished launching a web site for a friend.  www.westportlandneurology.com   A pretty simple five page site.  Behind the scenes it is using a CMS system I designed that has no database, it used the file system as the database.

I coded a small web tool for generating xhtml tables.  It is a work in progress.  It features building a table with user specified number of rows and columns and head and footer areas.  Cells can then be edit, adding colspan or rowspans.  I’m currently working on an undo and redo feature. You can play with it at https://robertjwallace.com///tablegen/