Hawaii – Day 5 – Kayaking and Hiking

Today started with a timeshare pitch at Shell Vacation Club just down the road. The saleswoman didn’t appreciate having gotten the two young couples who definitely weren’t going to buy a timeshare today. She was pretty condescending to us, but we got out of there unscathed and with a $100 discount per couple for our… Continue reading Hawaii – Day 5 – Kayaking and Hiking

Hawaii – Days 3 and 4 – Fun in the Sun and on the Water

Yesterday was a full day of fun! We started at the highly-recommended Poipu Beach on the south side of the island. We started out with snorkels, but ours didn’t work very well, so we ended up just resting and sunning in the sand. After a couple of hours of hanging out and smelling cigarette smoke… Continue reading Hawaii – Days 3 and 4 – Fun in the Sun and on the Water

Hawaii – Day 2 – Church and Getting Oriented

This morning, the resort held what they called an orientation for new guests, but seemed to us more like a meat market for companies to come in and pitch their services. They held a raffle for each company, and Debbie won a 5-hour boat trip that we were already interested in anyway, so we decided… Continue reading Hawaii – Day 2 – Church and Getting Oriented

Fun with Markov chains and Book of Mormon names

So a guy posted on Reddit yesterday about the Markov text generator that he wrote to generate pseudo-Greek names.   If you don’t know what a Markov chain is, Wikipedia explains that “Markov processes can also be used to generate superficially ‘real-looking’ text given a sample document”.   In his case, he put in all… Continue reading Fun with Markov chains and Book of Mormon names

My own font

I’m a sucker for freebies, and I’ve always liked to personalize things I do online and on the computer, so when I saw this link on OurSignal.com the other day, I was intrigued: Create a font from your own handwriting – fontcapture.com. This free web site provides four simple steps to get a font in… Continue reading My own font

Automatically back up your Facebook Status Updates

[update below about Facebook app that shows old status updates] I like the idea of using my Facebook Status Updates as a miniature journal, but unless you want to copy and paste them out, it’s tough to archive them. Until now! You can now automatically get every status update emailed to you for easy backup… Continue reading Automatically back up your Facebook Status Updates

UPS WorldShip crashes caused by new version of MySQL ODBC driver

At work, I’m in charge of getting information into and out of a big database of orders.   That includes linking the shipping information to the UPS WorldShip program that our fulfillment team uses to automatically buy UPS service. When the computer they’d been using out there for years just got too terribly slow, we… Continue reading UPS WorldShip crashes caused by new version of MySQL ODBC driver