Cycle Quark

I have tried to use VNC to access my Windows desktop box from my MacBook Pro. My main use case so far is controlling my iTunes running on Windows, since I have a much larger collection of music on my desktop and it is connected to my stereo. I had previously tried Chicken of the VNC as the VNC client on my MacBook Pro and TightVNC server on the Windows box and using Wifi for the connection. It was painfully slow. It seemed to take minutes for the cursor to follow the mouse. It was too painful to even try a pick a playlist in iTunes.

I just heard about JollyFastVNC a new OS X VNC client and I tried it today. It is jolly fast. It certainly is more than fast enough for my major use case. I saw the occasional lag of the cursor following mouse. I may try to use for a few other uses.

There is a nice article in the New York Times about creating new habits. It discusses the advantage to the brain of stretching yourself to keep your mind sharp. I taught myself to use the vi editor a couple of years back just to prove to myself that I could. It was clear to me that my older colleagues were loath to learn a new editor as we switched to using Unix when I was a postdoc. I wanted to prove that I was still capable of picking up something new. It looks like this type of exercise is useful as are lots of other ones that are less technical.

“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will… .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

Normally I would not mention xkcd again since my last post is about it. However, the Large Hadron Collider gets mentioned on xkcd, so I had to link to it. If he mentioned blackholes, it would have been really topical.

Mythbusters, Zombie Feynman and a meditation on the meaning of science. What more can you ask for?

I took Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Islip recently. It was my time in the relatively new Southwest terminal at BWI. Most of the gates had a power bar set up where you could plug in your laptop and work while you waited. I had seen something similar at O’Hare, but there were many more of these and they were right at the gate.

I have a Boingo on the Go account and Boingo wireless was available, so I was able to get about an hour’s worth of work done.  I was there quite early since I was worried about rush hour traffic and I left early. However, traffic was just fine.

I also had a good experience at the Madison, WI airport. I had a long delay, so I waited outside the security area, where they had a vary comfortable waiting area with comfortable leather chairs and plenty of power. Wireless was available, but I was surprised that there was a charge. I had seen lists of free wireless at airports and most of them were smaller like Madison.

Paul Thurrott recommended Windows Live Write recently for blog editing, so of course I had to test. I have used ScribeFire for Firefox, Flock’s built in blog editor, MarsEdit on the Mac, as well as wordpress.com web-based editor. I am obviously not completely happy with any of my choices since I keep trying new ones.

I am writing this post using Windows Live Writer and it seems fine.  It seems to have all of the features that I would expect. Sometimes I discover problems after the post goes up, and it does not look like I expected.

Live Writer is supposed to work with a variety of blogging platforms. Setting it up to work on my wordpress.com blog was straight forward. I supplied the URL of my blog, my username and password. After a few moments, I was ready to go.

I work mostly on my Macbook Pro so I have to run Live Writer in Parallels, so I see a little bit of a performance issue, but it is not major.

Mahalo Daily is a short video podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont that covers a different topic everyday. One day it is hangover cures and another it is the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. Well I checked on the recent ones today and I saw that there was a podcast about SLAC. It is not as good as a real visit, but you should check it out anyway.

Flock is a web browser based on Firefox with built in integration with a large number of interactive websites. I have tested it with gmail, yahoo mail, wordpress.com, del.icio.us, and picasa web albums. So far it works ok. There is an integrated blog editor that I am using to publish this.

I used Time Machine today to restore a file I mistakenly overwrote. I have a laptop so my backups are not every hour, but more typically just one or twice a day when I connect my external disk after I get home. Nevertheless, I found a copy that was more up to date than the one I accidently copied over my good version.

I saw this quiz on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. He got 83% correct. I got 100%, and I don’t even like Jackson Pollack. The quiz asks you identify whether pictures were painted by a famous artist or an ape.