And yet now, I’m more subdued.  I don’t always remember to bring it to work, and even when I do there are days that it doesn’t come out of its case!

I need to get into a workflow with it.

Do you find any of the 10 Epic Andriod Apps more helpful than what comes standard with Andriod?

Yesterday at work a coworker who is working with some map APIs and census data found an interesting anomaly.  It turns out that if your GPS location is on the Tappan Zee Bridge you don’t have a zip code.  This is important if you’re trying to give physical address locations to GPS coordinates.

While he went off to figure out what he was going to do with this discovery, I went on my merry way, not thinking about it until later that night—while sleeping.

Last night, I had a dream that I was called before Congress to testify about why, when a person has a phone that gives a GPS reading of location, the person was shown to be inside the building they were standing next to, instead of outside of it.  The discussion went on for some time when I said, “Well, if you don’t like using Google Maps, why don’t you use Bing Maps, Yahoo Maps and even Mapquest is still around.

The legislators were surprised, and asked me to hook up to their projector so I could show them these weird, “new” technologies.

I can only assume that this is because of the discussion of maps and how mapping works with my coworker earlier in the day.  Strange!

So, this is the second time that I’ve had to rebuild my gTablet.  Fortunately, I have a backup from back when it was stock before I installed TnT 4.4, so I’m always able to go back there, but what’s my problem with not doing more frequent backups?

I mean, seriously!

I write software, and it’s happened before.  Grr…

What happens when you have a branch that you’re working in that has stuff in it that really doesn’t belong with the name.  I mean, naming is one of things that can be the most tricky.

Is renaming a branch hard?  Nope.

1. Fire up the repo-browser.
2. Right click on the branch you want to rename.
3. Specify the name you want it to have.
4. Specify a note for why you changed.

Bingo!

Ahh, but now the fun beings.  If you have a local folder on your file system, it probably points to the old repository folder.  That means that you’ll have to do a SVN Checkout to get the new folder and merge any outstanding changes (you did check in everything before you did this, right?)

After doing this, you should be ready to go.  Again, that wasn’t so difficult and you have all of your checkin history preserved.

One of the problems with managing and writing for multiple blogs in advance of the current date is that I can never really remember what I have written in advance of today, what needs more written and what I’m good with.

There are some neat plugins for managing a single blog.

For instance, I currently use Future Posts Calendar, which works good for showing which dates are covered on a single blog.  I’m looking at implementing Editorial Calendar which give me more power as far as moving posts around.  But neither of these solve my main problem.  And none of the plugins on the 7 WordPress Calendar Plugins page seemed like it would fit.

So, I’ve come up with a solution that should work.

I’m going to take the XML-RPC.NET solution and use it to get all the posts from my blogs and then turn around and use Google’s calendar API to put it into Google Calendar.

This means that I’ll my post schedule readily available on my gTablet or anywhere I want—I’ll see every post, when it’s been published or will be published, etc.

Eventually, I could see this thing allowing me to move post dates/times around via Google Calendar—if it gets interesting enough.

What do you think of my plan?

Speaking of my gTablet, the best thing you can do for it is to “root” it.  The hardest part of this isn’t the actual process—it’s making sure you find something that’s up to date.

You see, when the gTablet first came out there was a lot of trouble with performance—and many people returned theirs.  So there are a lot of posts out there talking about it, how much is stinks, and even some of the instructions on how to make it better are out of date.

Other than the fact that some of the links are out of date, this was probably the best place to start:

Viewsonic G Tablet, From Rags To Riches – An Owner’s Guide To Making The Best Of A Great Tablet

Some of the things you won’t need to do (like the question about the market—the market works fine for me).

So, if you have a gTablet, and want help taking it to TNT 4.x, I can be of assistance, or you can start at this page.

Woot had a deal on a ViewSonic gTablet, so at ~ $280 I couldn’t pass it up.  For some time I’ve wanted to try out tablet technology, and I’m definitely liking how intuitive it is to do some things.

That being said, there are hiccups, and I did root the thing.

One thing I like is how many apps there are for it, and yet I still think there are applications that I could build—should I ever get the time.

If I wanted to do that, I would definitely need something like Android Development 101: Preparing your Windows Environment—looks like there are other steps as well (part 2 is mentioned in the post).

Any other suggestions?

So, up until now I’ve not quite known what to do with this blog.  I mean, I know that I should use it to take advantage of my software engineering knowledge-base, but the blogger in me knows that I should have regular content, and as I’ve been trying to keep Is This Modest and MInTheGap at least functioning, I haven’t had the time to devote to this blog.

But what if this blog were to capture my thoughts and links as part of a service to myself.  If I made it handy to me, perhaps it would be handy to a reader as well—at least one reader is better than none, right?

So here’s what I’m going to try to do.  I’m going to try to explain some of the things that I’m doing on the blogs—the processes and my thoughts—as well as share some links that I think I’ll need to do certain things.  I may actually try to explain complex problems I’m working on as well.

It can’t be any worse than what I have been doing here—right?

Every time you get a friend request—someone adds you to Facebook, you get a notification.

Now, wouldn’t it be nice to know when someone unfriends you?

One way is to follow the instructions at this post: Catch who removed you from Facebook…!

But for those of you that would prefer not to run a script, you can try a Grease Monkey Script and you should be good to go!

When I was 8, my dad tried to teach me what he did.  He was a “Computer Programmer” and did a lot of work in BASIC.

Needless to say, I didn’t grasp a lot, and I really didn’t understand all the GOTOs and line numbers, but I was able to take a program that he made and modify it, and a few short years later I built the voting program for my public high school’s Student Government Election.

Called “Small Basic”, Microsoft has created a friendly environment that kids can use basic instructions to make programs and games.  It uses the VB style coding and the .NET framework as a basis, and gives a panel that tells all about what commands you can use.

What I also like, as a dad, is that they’ve even include a curriculum with power point slides—6 Lessons, most of which are broken up into subparts.

I would see this as a great introduction to programming for kids and teens as well.  I think I’m going to try this with my kids—at least the oldest—and I’ll let you know my experience with it.

Want to try it?  Click on the image above to go to the Small Basic site.  It’s a free download, and away you go!