Bussoli

Recently the world lost a good man, John Van Dyck.

He was my Grandfather and he passed away at the age of 88 Years old. Johnny, as my Grandmother would refer to him, led a life filled with change. One thing that he did which was crazy in my mind was that at the age of 57 he sold his house and left the city to go back to farming which were in his roots. Anyways his life was filled with changes such as this.

For his funeral we prepared a video tribute for everyone to watch. It was very difficult selecting a few pictures to summarize an entire life but we tried our best.

For those of you who were not able to attend, here is the video we showed at the service in quicktime format.

or you can watch the video via Youtube.

The following is a summary of the Obama vistory speech via Wordle

I'm bristling with anticipation over the next 8 months of US foreign policy.

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a really interesting read for me. Learning about the ebb and flow of both the Democratic and Republican parties since the end of the Gilded Age (Roaring 1920's) was very interesting and new to me as a Canadian. I'm not sure how much of this is taught in American schools but for this alone it is a great read.

Understanding the difference between the Republicans of Eisenhower's time and the Democrats of FDR and Truman certainly illustrate the differences in the politics of today and the rise in Neo-Conservatism and "Movement Republicans" from the sixties.

Additionally, Krugman does an excellent job of highlighting how some elements of a social safety net were established as a result of the depression, World War 2 and government policy in the 1930's and 1940's resulting in "The Great Compression".

Krugman closes with an appeal to establish some form of universal medicare similar to what is found in every other western democracy. As a Canadian I find it difficult to understand how the US people have lasted this long without some sort of universal health care.

All in all a very accessible read worth your valuable time.


View all my reviews.

Tod over at ThingM has just released a sketchup model of their product the BlinkM on the Todbot Blog.

Check it out, hopefully more people post their electronics projects via sketchup to help those people out there who need to fit those electronics in cases accurately.

I have been casually using Google docs since it first came out. When it was first released it had a very limited feature set when compared to Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. It was really "neat" that one could edit documents online via a web browser and also collaborate with others quite easily. Additionally one could rely on the autosave feature and the excellent revision management system that Google deployed.

All of these feature were good but none of them pushed me to move anything except personal documents into Google Docs.

That was until the new forms feature was released. Suddenly, I saw new possibilities that would help me in many critical situations at my workplace.

For instance, as the Product Manger of a line of products being developed overseas with a remote remote sales staff, it would routinely fall on me to act as the "bridge" between Sales Inquiries and quotes from the manufacturing facility. This workload has been a burden as it usually involved simply passing email requests and responses from sales to manufacturing and then back to sales. I tried creating a "master" excel document but each of these solutions always seemed to fail due to the act of passing of the document back and forth.

I needed to automate as much of my tasks as possible and forms would allow me to do so. So I created a Workflow around a master Google spreadsheet.

Through Google Forms I'm able to have the Sales team submit quote requests which are immediately imported into the spreadsheet without allowing them any access to the quotation spreadsheet. As each quote request is submitted, Manufacturing is automatically notified and able to quote quickly which is ultimately back to sales within a 24 hour time period.

This has reduced the number of transactions that I have been required to do for each sales request. Keep it up Google Docs. I'm now exploring migrating other processes your way!

Solution: Google Forms. With the ability for anyone to sub

I was excited after Yesterday's announcement regarding the launch of Gmail Labs as I saw the techcrunch link posted posted by Michael Arrington on FriendFeed. Wow something new to check out in my favorite email client, I thought to myself.

So I installed snakey and random signatures. I applied the changes and played a game of snakey. It was great, I was in early adoption glory! Except when I tried to uninstall the two applications. This Video (which is also embedded in this article) shows what I was confronted with.

I realized just how much I needed my gmail account in its full javascript (No stars, multiple select, etc) glory now that it had been taken away. Google, please end "let the people realize just how great Gmail is by taking it away from them" portion of Gmail Labs launch.
;)

Seriously, I need Help!

(Edit: I used the new annotate feature in youtube and if you watch the Video on youtube you can see that it works quite nicely when explaining things like this. -JP)

Apologetic Update. This is resolved by going to the Google known issues page and logging into the SSL version of Gmail. http://tiny.cc/tXUzZ.

Lately I have been spending alot of my free time playing with electronics now that I don't do it regularly in my career. As a result of this renewed interest I have stumbled across a number of communities such as Make Magazine, The Todbot Blog, The Arduino Project and The Freeduino Project.

From the above resources you can find an abundance of microcontroller projects for your arduino/freeduino. What I haven't been able to find were any physical representations of the board itself that I could use for things like case modding or fabrication. So I decided to model the board in Google Sketchup myself and post it for everyone to use.

Arduino.skp | arduino-3D.dwg | arduino.3ds | arduino.dxf

If you are interested in Electronics, whether it is part of your job or you are a hobbyist or "maker". I would highly recommend that you look into Octopart a great new electronics cross distributor search engine. This summer Sam Wurzel, one of the co-founders of Octopart sent out some Doublet Amplifier for those who were interested. I received mine and populated the board up and used a hole punch to allow the board to fit in an altoids tin. Ultimately, I found that I was not terribly mechanically inclined when figuring out where to place the holes on the tin.

So because of this, I created a 3D sketch of an altoids mint tin so that people could easily fit their project components into it and determine where the holes would need to be drilled.

Thanks Sam for the doublet amplifier, I continue to enjoy seeing the new features that Octopart is beginning to implement. I have told all of my corporate purchasers about the Octopart site.

Altoids-Mints.skp | Altoids-Mints-3D.dwg | Altoids_Mints-3D.3ds | Altoids-Mints-3D.dxf | Altoids-Mints-top.dxf

Pretty amazing video that I saw reading the Ben Hammersley Blog

Here is Alice enjoying the mountaintops!