Recycled Electrons - Blog of Keith Horowitz

 I had a few movies downloaded on my Chromebook, for trips or other situations. Last night was another situation: m router was down as there was no power in the neighborhood. However, every time I tired to play one of my offline movies, the player would run for 9 seconds and stop. I'd see a little spinny circle, but no progress. Try to jump ahead: spinny circle. I tired rebooting. I tried removing all extensions. I tried stopping things with task manager. I tried using my phone as a hot spot, to get past the 9 seconds. None of those fixed the offline movies. I could play one of the titles by using a browser instead of the google play movies app, using my hot spot. It was interesting that the movie would stall for almost a second at the 9 second mark. This suggests to me that 9 seconds must be the point were some extra authorization check is happening. The last step: reload the google play movie extension. Would I lose the offline movies? Maybe, but they weren't doing anything f...

Late 1970s - fascinated by the teletype and accounting computer at my father's office.   The computer was a big special formed metal desk, with an electric typewriter and a printing calculator built in. Below the calculator was a magnetic card reader/writer. Where the drawers on the side would have been was a big metal box.  It ran simple accounting programs and simple mail-merge processing, and had a coil of wire for the main memory storage. My favorite thing was to do powers of 2 on the calculator - having no idea that those were natural binary values. My Uncle worked for IBM, and one time when he was visiting NYC, we visited him at one of the offices. This was my first time seeing green-screen terminals connected to bigger systems. 1975 - my father buys an SR-52 programmable calculator - which had a tiny magnetic card reader for storing programs. I learned an early version of machine code programming using the calculator. My favorite game was the lunar lander simulator...

How many of you have gone to a hotel, and then suddenly, your card-key no longer works? I am about to share a secret about these card-keys. You know the keys - the size and shape of a credit-card, along with that magnetic strip. After years of having these keys go bad on me, I wondered why I seemed to have bad luck with them. Yet, I didn't have bad luck every time - just occasionally - and I wasn't sure why. Is there anything worse than finally getting back to your hotel room, late in evening - figure you have enough time to get to the room to go to the bathroom. Your hands are full of the stuff you don't want to leave in the car. You manage to re-balance your stuff to get out your card key. Slide - red light. Slide again a little faster - red light. Or maybe your card-key doesn't show any lights at all. You have to trudge back downstairs to the front desk. Wait in line for a clerk to help. Or maybe you had to ring the bell to get the lone clerk to come out...

When I moved to Colorado Springs, things were booming. The city was a significant technology hub. Compaq, HP, MCI, and a number of technology manufacturers including Intel. MCI was the largest employer in the region by a giant margin. It was one of the factors that lead me out to Colorado Springs. Even after MCI took the major financial hit and shrank to the point where it was not even in the top 10 of employees in town, Intel was still doing well. So well in fact, that they were in the process of securing land near the airport to build a second very large manufacturing facility. Yet, those plans fizzled, and a couple of years later, Intel decided to close the doors to their large plant, right along a major avenue named for, and giving access from the highway to the famous park: Garden of the Gods. This large space stood off the road, majestically idle, waiting for some use. Eventually, there were some takers for the space: Everest College added a call center; the County combine...

Random song come up from my playlist: "Steal My Sunshine". Not the first time it has come up, but it does seem to come up rarely.  When it was playing on the radio in 2001-2002 time frame,  during my drive to-and-from Denver Tech Center, it was one of the newer songs that stuck with me. It stuck with me enough that I decided to order the whole album CD from which the song was featured. It turns out there are a number of songs of a style I do not prefer on the CD, but it is interesting to gamble on other songs on an album by a group. This song also fits into a category for me: songs that spell a word. I was thinking a while back, I should make a list of them - for some reason some of them stick out. (Ex: B-A-N-A-N-A-S) However, it turns out that the song isn't all new. Perhaps there was some subliminal influencing going on with this song. In a very ADD ("SQUIRREL") moment while listening to the song today, I decided I needed to view the lyrics. It ha...

Love the new TV series: "2 Broke Girls"! We've been wondering what the song behind the intro was for a few weeks now. I tried googling it the other day, without success. Tonight, we were watching How I met Your Mother from a couple of weeks ago on DirecTV DVR. And the end of the recording was the beginning of a 2 broke girls we had already seen - but it was still fun to watch again. The recording went through the intro and into the first commercial, just about to end and say delete, when I had an inspiration. I decided to try seeing if the song-identification app (V-Cast) would be able to identify it. Tried it once, no luck. Second time, BINGO!! It is a song called 'Second Chance' by 'Peter Bjorn And John'. I was able to confirm it by doing a search and found it on Youtube

There is a brand new online group for people interested in hiking in the Colorado Springs area: Awesome Hikes and Adventures Hosted on Meetup.com And I offered my help, and I am proud to be an Assistant Organizer!

Wednesday was sunny and in the 50s. But there was talk of a blizzard. It seems it was a rare case of a large amount of moisture coming up from the south at the same time as a cold from coming down from the North. Around 12" were expected in my area. But it was also supposed to be very windy - making that unusual amount of snow even more troublesome. Work sent out a note during the day that we should check the weather line before attempting to go into work. Well, about 11pm, the wind started picking up, but no snow. In the morning, I got up before 7. There was a lot of snow on the ground. The wind was blowing. It was still snowing. I called work's weather line. It said, work at 10, call again to be sure. Called later, the message said work at 12, call again to be sure. I called again - work was closed for the day. I had slept a lot of the morning. Boy did I need it. I went out for a short walk during lunchtime, to take some pictures (see below). I was well chilled...

So about 3 or 4 weeks ago, I got a call on my cell phone. It was about a timeshare place up near Vail. It turns out some geocache friends had given them my name and number. As first I was going to be upset at the friends for giving out my cell phone number and just tell the timeshare people not to bother me. But I decided to listen to the pitch. They were willing to let me bring the boys. So I thought, what the heck? It would be a change of pace for a weekend. So I let them come tell me about the setup and the deal. I talked about going through a divorce. It did not seem to phase the person giving me the details. So the plan was for this past weekend. An overnight Oct 21-22. I figured we might get to see some bright fall colors up in the mounts and maybe even get a bunch of geocaches. Friday - the highway to Vail got a lot of snow. That didn't bode too well - but I didn't fret it too much. Saturday morning, I checked the web-cams. Snow along the road - but the roa...

I went to the balloon festival again this year. I got up early Saturday - it was too wet to even set up the balloons - much less launch them. I got up early Sunday - it wasn't as wet - but the cloud cover was too low to launch. I did get a bunch of pictures of the balloons set up on the ground. Then I had to run off to meet up with another geocacher to do an group hunt. It was nice, as he had a 4x4, so we got to do some mountain ones that I wouldn't normally try. Monday I wasn't sure if I would get up early. I was tired. Yet, I managed to get up pretty early anyhow - but not quite as early as the 2 previous days. I headed down to the balloon festival. I was still a couple of miles away when I could see about a dozen balloons already in the sky! They were launching! I got down there and managed to take a whole lot of pictures. A whole lot! I'm going to post one now. I'll see about posting more later.

Well, I'm all moved in. a little more than 2 weeks ago, I got the keys. The first weekend I started moving in. It was also my first official weekend with the boys. And it was my birthday weekend. And it was hot - Sunday broke a record. Well I decided to not work the whole weekend. I did work most of the weekend. But I took the boys out to eat most of the meals - as a birthday/moving treat. We also went to the movies. And there were a couple of shopping trips - I got a futon (bed/couch) at WalMart. And we went in the pool at my new apartment complex. The good news is that the pool is really close to my apartment. The bad news is that the people on the first floor like to smoke outside :( The boys slept over Saturday night, and pretty much seemed to enjoy it. I have a 2 bedroom, 2 bath apartment. I got the 3rd floor so I have a vaulted ceiling from the dining room, going up in the living room. It even had a wood-burning fireplace! It is at the bottom of a hill, along a st...

I have not done much blogging lately - and I've really let this one go for a long time. Part of that is that I've been spending a lot of free time and energy on geocaching. And to that end, I've done some blogging on a sub-blog about geocaching. But the other issue that was most worth talking about, I did not feel it was appropriate to air on this forum. That issue was that my marriage was going through some difficult times. The conclusion was finally reached a number of weeks back, but the official things are starting to happen now. I have filed for divorce. I am going to be moving into my own apartment about 2 miles away, probably this week. It is in the same zip-code and school district. Being a child of divorce, the decision was extremely difficult for me to make. But my wife and I have grown apart, and just can't seem to find enough common ground on some important issues. Yes, there are a lot of issues. I am sure we both could point out how everything is the...

I ran my second geocaching event yesterday. The last one was just a general get-together. This one was a special clean-up event. The main geocache site, geocaching.com, promotes both regular clean-up whenever caching and a special day once a year for a major international clean-up on Earth day. They call the clean-up a CITO, for Cache-In, Trash-Out. During my first event, a number of people in the area indicated they would prefer a clean-up event that did not occur on the Earth-day on Saturday. Many people can't make Saturday events. Also by having it on a different day, it would allow Geocachers to do the Earth-day/Saturday event up in Denver on Saturday and then do another one on Sunday. It took me a few tries - but I got in touch with the parks department. They asked where I would like to clean up. I figured with all the different places that I knew people would be coming from, that somewhere around downtown Colorado Springs heading West towards Manatou Springs would be p...

I've been living without sound on my Toshiba laptop since last summer. When I opened it up, I found the sound card was this tiny board, maybe 2 inches by a half inch. And it has this plug-in to the motherboard. The connector on the motherboard had come loose. Considering that plugging in earphones would cause mechanical stress on this top board, it almost seems inevitable that this connector would break on the motherboard or sound card. This should have been right on the motherboard or connected with a ribbon connector. There are a number of other ribbon connectors in the laptop, so it is already a workable solution. At first it just worked oddly - sometimes the sound would work, sometimes it would make odd noises - sometimes it didn't work. And of course this happened after the unit was out of warranty. I can only imagine that if I took it in to be fixed, the answer would be to replace the motherboard. A motherboard and labor - I can only imagine this would cost nearly...

For a change we got our taxes done early. Early being 2 weeks before the deadline. The last 2 years, things were crazy enough that we wound up filing extensions. But this year we did our taxes on the most appropriate day of the year: April Fools Day - April 1st. Somehow it seems appropriate to me. I'm just not sure who is being made a bigger fool. Trying to read tax code, I think it is me! I'm not big on April Fools. It seems way too easy for people to be unnecessarily mean - and it seems like meanness can only escalate until someone gets upset. The one little joke I played was I told my son he didn't have to clear the table. When he asked 'really', I replied 'April Fools'. That is about as far as I like to go. No long suspense. No elaborate lies. No major emotional plays. Just a tiny bit of quick teasing once.

I was musing about 'The Who' Music used on CSI and on the reference to the guy on the show who was collection famous dead people's picture, saying that he was going to put it next to his Entwistle. I laughed at the connection between the musician from the group that does their theme music. And it reminded me of the morbid joke about getting the Beatles back together, when there were still 3 of them. The joke went it would take 3 more bullets. Ouch :) Then I realize both The Beatles and The Who are down 2 members. So between the 2 groups they have just the right number to make a new fab-four group. :) Then the topic became what would the new group be called? I think the best that came up was The Weavels. A little hard - a little soft - introducing those new old guys from the UK: The Weavels! :)

I started a new blog for my geocaching adventures. My first real entry on this blog was describing geocacing in some detail for those who want to understand it a bit better. Today I wrote up about a geocaching adventure that started with trying to figure out a puzzle a few weeks ago - comparing notes with other geocachers last week - then trying to find it Sunday - and going back again Thursday afternoon to try again: GCC276 Away Team Mission

Had to take my big guy to a Jewish-youth group activity this afternoon. Went down to the skating place. They said - we don't know about that activity. Could it be at our other location [5 minutes back they way we came]? They called - it was. I didn't even know they had a second location. It is laid out almost identically. They play the music very loud at both places. Too loud for my little guys. My big guy asked what they called it - I said slow-ear-drum-damaging level. I took the little guys out for some geocaching. I didn't have all my notes with me - but I did have a lot loaded into my GPS. The first one I couldn't find - but as it was just a fake coordinate for a puzzle cache, it is not suprising we couldn't find it. I had my laptop along with a number of the geocache sites pre-loaded on my drive. So I was able to find another couple to try right nearby. We parked near a dog-run, and headed for a micro first. I don't like this smallest size geo...

So this past week's episode of Numb3rs seemed to be designed specifically to refute my previous log entry where I said GPS is not part of cell phones. It seems I was wrong. I am sorry Numb3rs for my misunderstanding. According to the show, it seems that when the decided that for emergency purposes, that cell phones should be trackable, the didn't use triangulation from cell towers. The actually put a tiny GPS chip inside all modern cell phones. Wow. So I guess they were right when they said they used GPS with the phone. Of course, in the episode, the person was in a library. Inside buildings is a very poor place for GPS reception, so I still have some doubts. Then a very short while later it hit me. There is a GPS inside most everyone cell phone. And they don't let you use it! It would be so simple to show locations and do some simple coordinates on a cell phone. The data is already there. It would only take a simple program! Man - think of all the people who coul...

I opened my Dish (satellite TV) bill last night. In the last year it has jumped $10.00. First it went from $21.99 for the low-end channel package to $23.99. Suddenly the package has a new name, and costs $31.99. This is the same crap the cable companies pulled, and why we wound up going with Dish. One of Dish's major selling strategies was to point out how the cable companies were treating people badly. Now they are doing the exact same thing. We will have to talk to them and let them know that we are not pleased. If they cannot drop the cost way back down, I think it is time to get rid of dish. I don't watch much broadcast TV. I am pretty sure I can get most of what I watch with an antenna. I'll miss MythBusters. But I could buy the season DVD for MythBusters and have a whole lot of money left over after canceling Dish. And MythBusters is neat to watch. But they have so many repeats. And spend a bunch of new episodes filled with old material. It is like they onl...