rob"o*rant, n. A roborant drug; a restorative or tonic.
The keyword matched 232 entries.
The Java Posse Roundup was great this year, just like every year.
Lots of folks are part of the "one percent" for good reasons and we don't want to screw that up.
Apple's new OS, Mac OS X 10.7, Lion clearly shows where Apple is headed in the future.
There's more to Gunsmoke than I thought. The radio show, at least, was a noir western.
Sometimes it really isn't you, it's the jerk who wrote the book
Porting my web application to Google's cloud was surprisingly easy. They've made it easy.
I've had a long and bizarre career in computers, but I've managed to be around for most of the really fun stuff.
This report absolutely destroys the idea that the US educational system needs more resources to do its job properly.
Judge John Hancock's Diary is an interesting window into the Civil War, if only we can see through the terrible handwriting.
Storytelling is an old art that is undergoing a startling transformation.
Cap Metro gets more laughable every day.
August 2009 saw 25 days with temperatures at or over 100°. That makes things tough on a gardener!
In December, I almost dropped the ball and screwed up the whole project.
In July, the going gets tough.
September was cooler and weter and lots of things really took off blooming.
October 2009 was cool and wet and things continued to bloom in profusion.
By November, the blooms were slowing down.
Eeyore's birthday party: all the freedom you can shake a stick at
Capital Metro is just as bad as I always suspected.
Changing the world is hard. You don't do it by going shopping.
There's still one hill that political correctness has not stormed.
The iPad is a really nice tool today, but its possibilities are what intrigue me.
Apple's iPad is a game changer. It opens up several new niches that neither notebooks nor netbooks are serving now. I predict it will become as ubiquitous as the iPhone in a few years.
I've watched Apple for a long time, and I think you can be sure that the new "tablet" device they are poised to release will not be merely a desktop computer in a new, smaller form factor. That's not how Apple works.
I came to the subject of Hannibal almost by accident, but it grabbed me and held me for some months.
Star Beast is Heinlein's first attempt at a humor novel in the juvenile series. The whole novel leads up to a punch line that is actually pretty funny.
Finally, I get around to posting the June flowers!
The Meggy Jr kit is fun! Easy to put together and easy to program.
Is free health care a "right"? Well, let's think about it a little bit.
In about 1961, GE was trying to talk America's youth into studying math, science and engineering. The resulting pamphlet was pretty well done.
Finally, the May flowers are here.
Just a little bit of landscaping and another load of decomposed granite and we're done.
The April flowers were great this year. Take a look.
Once again, the Statesman disappoints. This time, it's the editorial section.
AT&T's U-Verse service is a winner for me.
Zecharia Sitchin has made a lifelong living from a series of pretty crazy books. Here we take a look at the origin of the craziness.
Here are the February blooms.
Capital Metro: how does it measure up?
The January crop of flowers in the yard.
A couple of easy projects for the tinkerer.
The Maker Faire is quite a kick, you should go if it comes to your town.
Elegant design is celebrated today, but it wasn't always uncommon.
This is a simple, fun way to convert almost any regular lamp to use a low-voltage LED instead. You won't get as much light, but you won't use much electricity, either.
My grandmother's papers reveal some surprising facts.
Gaia again makes it clear that she it mankind's sworn, eternal enemy.
Some Earth Day predictions for you to savor
Amazon does a great job, but sometimes what arrives on the doorstep is a little crazy.
I found something interesting while walking the dog at Bull Creek. But what is it?
My predictions for 2008, such as they are.
Twenty five years ago, the city of Austin played a cruel joke on neighborhoods split by the new Mopac freeway. It's time to fix it.
There are lots of good ways to pick secure passwords. Here are a couple you probably haven't seen before.
Here's a message for you folks living in the future: we had it hard back in the olden days
I had terrible penmanship as a kid. These days I can't even write cursive any more. I don't think I've missed anything, though.
What essays attract hits here? Well, it's an amazingly mixed bag.
All conflict now is an information war, but we don't act like we've figured this out yet.
There's another crisis going on the the US. It's not going unnoticed, but nothing is really being done about it, either.
This is the final essays and a series that has spanned six months. I'm going to declare victory now, and wind it up.
This novel is, in its own way, the ultimate of the juveniles. It provides a sort of closure to the series.
I give you an alternate ending for an episode of Quiet, Please.
My grandfather served as a civilian at Camp Swift during WWII, so I couldn't resist this picture book
Our next Heinlein juvenile is considered by many to be his best work.
Red Bud Isle is a great spot near downtown Austin, but few know that it has a unique history.
This is one of Heinlein's best juveniles. The plot moves briskly along and the characters are memorable.
This isn't Heinlein's best effort. In fact, it's the weakest of the juveniles, in my opinion.
This time around, Heinlein gives us a tale of pioneering and survival.
This is another in the series about the Heinlein Juveniles. What do we get this time? This time we get a discussion about fairness and breaking rules.
For the first time in fifty years, the Highland Lakes are all at flood stage at the same time. We decided to go and see what that looked like.
This Heinlein Juvenile tackles a whole new set of life lessons. It's also one of his most fun to read.
Heinlein actually wrote one juvenile novel that contains no lectures on science and a protagonist who isn't particularly smart or competent.
Even average people in the US are richer than King Soloman himself. Do we appreciate it? And what debts do we owe to it?
Farmer in the Sky is my favorite of the Heinlein Junveniles. It's also a perfect example of my thesis that Heinlein was intentionally crafting a generation of youngsters.
"Support your local businesses" sounds like a great slogan, until you try it.
Red Planet is Heinlein's third juvenile novel and he shows us that he has already mastered the form.
Heinlein sets a new standard for the juvenile novel. With complex themes and rich characters, he shows that kids aren't the idiots the publishing industry always thought they were.
This book is Heinlein's first juvenile novel. It fits in perfectly with the concept of a "boys book", except for one thing.
The Heinlein juvenile novels were the inspriation for generations of engineers. I think, however, that Heinlein had a big plan behind the whole thing.
SBC's DSL promises to be fast, cheap and easy to install. The reality is not exactly the same as the promise.
Johnnie's Place was a fun place to hang out in the 1930's.
Every construction job has its "finish work" and this project is no exception.
I decided to go with concrete block for the walls. This would work out, but take a lot longer than I had planned.
We pour the three interconnected slabs that will support the fountain and planter boxes.
The fountain finally starts to take shape after we pour the "tall part" at the back.
Sometimes, you start a project with no clue about what you're getting yourself into. This was one of those times.
Being a kid was great in the 1960's, we had more freedom and fun than any kid has now.
The lilies of the field spectacularly marked the end of a hard summer this year.
Noah Smithwick lived a full and rich life during Texas' formative years. Somehow, he lived to write about it.
Bluetooth is cool networking technology for short-range communications. Here, I implement a small program that does network discovery.
I wanted to learn J2ME programming, Bluetooth, MIDlets and all of that sort of thing. And I wanted to do it on my Mac, where I do all of my development. This is how to get started.
It's a mess, but that's mostly a product of politics. If you think about it practically, there are only a few conclusions you can reach.
Predicting the future is fun, easy and informative. Unless you want to be accurate...
Spell checkers are no substitute for good editors.
Apple turns thirty this week. Like a lot of people, I have some nostalgia for a company that I've been associated with for more than twenty years.
How this site has evolved and what I think it's about.
I needed a tool that would let me create the kind of website I wanted — not exactly a blog, not exactly a wiki. So, I wrote one from scratch in Java, using Tomcat, Struts, and Tiles and the rest of the usual tools of a J2EE programmer.
You never know what's going to drive traffic your way...
Eminent domain was abused here in Austin as far back as the 1970's.
My answers to a book meme that is going around...
You never know what will fly in and land in the yard.
There are a lot of ways to educate yourself.
Classifying all of human learning is a daunting task, but what they heck, we'll give it a go.
Adventures of Superman: where are they now?
There are only three ways to think about God and none of them is good news, in my opinion.
You hear a lot of strange things at night. You even start to wonder how it can be that you can hear it all.
How surveying used to be done back in the olden days.
Women in engineering. I'm all for more of them, but you can't just force them...
