My optometrist, after performing several tests involving mirrors and lights, pupil dilation, and eye numbing drops declared that I don’t complete my blink. When I think I’m blinking, my eyelid makes it maybe 80% of the way there, but doesn’t commit to the last 20%.

It’s discouraging because I always thought I knew my body pretty well. Granted, I can’t see my innards, so they’re still a big mystery, but my eyes, I thought I knew them well. Discovering at the age of 30 that your eyelids just aren’t doing their jobs and probably never have been is unsettling and confidence shaking.

According to clinical studies you can’t really train yourself to blink fully either, and so I’m essentially doomed to never really blink fully ever again.

But I have a plan. I’m going to build a device that mists my eyes with refreshing eye drops every time I do an incomplete blink (which is every time). It can be one of those hats that hold beer cans, except I’ll have bottles of eye drops instead of beer, and the mister can be triggered by my blinks.

A simpler, interim solution might be to just load up a squirt gun with eye drops and squirt myself in the eyes from time to time, maybe every time I get an email or something.

That’s all.

Judith lost her camera in Hawaii while on vacation and managed to track it down – a couple from Canada had reported it found and a Hawaiian park ranger gave Judith their details. In short, when Judith called the couple, they said this:

“we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he’s been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can’t bear to take it from him.”</p>

</em>I’m still shaking my head in stupifaction. But it gets worse. Judith, wanting at the very least to have her photographs back, strikes a deal with the couple – they agree to send her the memory cards. Judith ends up getting a CD in the mail with her images on it and a note that says:

I’d love to give this thing a try, though I’d never spend $399 on it. When the simulation costs more than the actual experience (about $99 for a complete skateboard) something isn’t exactly right. And seriously, how can a piece of plastic that pivots on a base come any where near improving your “core balance and coordination skills”? My guess is a wobbly rock would do about the same.

If you’re wanting to gain balance skills that benefit you for board related activities, I’d suggest actually just riding a board. A plastic, motorized “board simulator” can’t begin to come close to the actual thing, and anything it teaches you won’t apply anyhow. And there’s no greater motivator than trying to avoid the pain of falling on your hind parts, and I’m guessing the non slip stationary base of the iJoy|board won’t deliver that any time soon.

I’ll be more than happy to give an honest review though if InterHealth is willing to ship one out. I’ve been wrong before.

So the Ruby on Rails gathering I wanted to throw together for SXSW quickly became an event that looks like will see a hundred plus people. Damon Clinkscales (cofounder of the Austin Rails User Group) and Rob Jones (an interaction designer at frog) have helped immensely by narrowing down a venue and time.

We’ll be meeting on Saturday, March 11th at 6:00PM at Buffalo Billiards. The venue looks pretty cool with billiard tables and shuffle board and food. As if meeting with a ton of Rails enthusiasts from around the Austin area (and from around the world) weren’t enough, the first 100 drinks are on the house. See myself, Damon, or Rob on the night of the event for drink tickets. Expect us to ask what you’re up to with Rails and heed our challenge to meet at least five new people at the event.

The event can be found on Upcoming. I’m really looking forward to it!

Note that this won’t be a typical user group meeting. Just a social event where we can meet the people who work and play within our community.

Measure Map, the product I worked on last year for Adaptive Path, has been acquired by Google. It’s exciting news for the team there, and I can only speculate as to what kind of new opportunities it provides. And yes, part of me feels like I’m watching an ex marry Matthew McConaughey, but mostly I’m happy. People who I consider to be good and worthy people are being rewarded for some very hard work.

So I’m trying to tidy up a few things with llor.nu, and one of them is my square distribution/balancer called the Square doler. It doles out new squares when needed, and it’s never been right. I’ve spent many many hours trying to figure out how to do it right, and I’ve essentially given up. I present to you, humble and mathematically smarter, humans a problem.

First, here’s what you have, for those unfamiliar with the game.

The game “board” is an infinite loop of distinct squares that needs to grow based on some kind of trigger. The trigger may not be relevant, but right now, new squares are added (if needed) when a player buys a building. Building buying happens somewhat frequently, so this is a good way of keeping things in check. But this isn’t the problem.

You also have several different square types. You have buyable squares, squares that have a building on them, convenience store squares, bank squares, and completely empty squares. A game will be setup so that at any given time, a specific percentage of each square type will exist.

So you might get a break down like 75% buyable, 15% stores, 5% empty, 5% banks. And this is where the problem begins. When a player buys a building, it changes the total square count. So, given the right amount of total squares, 75% buyable squares might turn into 74% buyable squares, which would trigger the doler to create a new buyable square or two, enough to meet the desired 75% of total squares.

So, here’s what you know at any given moment:

• Total number of squares


• Total number of buyable squares


• Total number of empty squares


• Total number of stores


• Total number of banks


• Total number of built squares


• Desired percentage of buyable squares


• Desired percentage of empty squares


• Desired percentage of stores


• Desired percentage of banks
</p>

</ul>


What’s not known:



• Number of buyable squares to build, if any


• Number of empty squares to build, if any


• Number of stores to build, if any


• Number of banks to build, if any
</p>

</ul>


Hopefully I’m just numb to the solution and it’s easy. Ask me question through AIM at elbowdonkey if needed.


Update

This is but one of the things I’m thinking about on Valentine’s day, thank you very much.


Clarifications



• A buyable square can only be converted to a built square. A buyable square never becomes a store, a bank, or an empty square.


• At least one new, buyable square, should be built when a square is converted from buyable to built.


• Percentages can be rough, obviously, since you can’t really make 0.23 of a square.


• The growth of the board should remain constant. No snowballing.
</p>

</ul>


Ultimately the idea is to make sure that when a person rolls the dice, their odds of landing on any particular type of square remain generally equal to the desired percentages of each type. I say generally, because I understand that getting the two to align isn’t easy. But it’s fine if it sways a few percentage points from roll to roll.

I’ve been considering trading in both my 12" iBook and Dual G5 for a single MacBook Pro in the hopes that the single laptop would be able to replace the two machines. And when I say trade in, I mean sell on eBay, where I’m happy to see that both machines would sell for pretty well, more than enough to cover a new machine with some extras.

At the same time I’ve been thinking about wireless USB pretty heavily. It’d be really neat to be able to have my external hard drives sit on a shelf in my office. The laptop itself could be out of the way as well. With a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, the machine could hide somewhere behind the monitor.

Today I ran across something that I think I could really go for: wireless DVI. With wireless DVI I can have every single computer component, including the computer, sit on a shelf in my office. I’d have a wireless keyboard and mouse on my desk along with my display. The display itself would have a single wire going to going to the power outlet. Getting rid of all but a single wire is pretty enticing, but the availability of the wireless DVI adapter seems a bit foggy.

I got excited when I saw this phone that runs Linux that could potentially run Ruby on Rails* until I realized it’s not a phone at all. It’s just a mini computer. The idea is sort of lost on me without there being a phone. I guess it’s a PDA, but seriously, why couldn’t they just give the thing the ability to be a traditional phone as well? I’d be totally happy using a Bluetooth headset and having a full software phone interface**.

• It can already run Ruby and Webrick – I doubt it’d be difficult to get Rails to run at all. Why you’d run Rails on it would likely be more novelty than anything, as doesn’t exactly have the guts to be either a server or a development computer (though I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to pull off the latter if you were left with little else).
  </p>
  • Technically you could do this, using a software Internet phone over a service like Vonage, but it would require a strong WiFi connection.
    </p>
  </li> </ul>

Not exactly the multi touch screen I linked to last week, but this screen called the Lemur does detect multiple fingers at once. Primarily directed at musicians and sound techs I’m not even sure if it’s a real display or not or if it hooks up to a computer.

I think just about every UI feature shown in this new Linux windows manager is pretty hot. The video is worth watching through to the end.