Posts from October 2011

I am so tired of having to go all the freaking way around to around Dug's dive to get to the outer harbor. Sure, if you are in a car, the way over the skyway is convenient and quick, but for pedestrians and bicyclists, the path all the way around is long, industrial at best, and grueling. Especially for pedestrians.

It so annoying when you finally arrive at the outer harbor and you can see the inner harbor and downtown buffalo are about 200 ft away but about an hours walk back. I understand that building a chicago street auto bridge would be expensive but why not a tiny pedestrian draw bridge.

After extensive searching I found a place with a similar project in Duisberg, Germany and they did build a pedestrian draw bridge

The sign starts out saying, "When you want to open up a once industrial harbor for the people, you need to build a bridge..." I think that sums up exactly what we need here in the Buffalo harbor. I wonder what it would take to get such a project started.

The sign continues on to say that bridge was the idea of Stuttgart Professor Jörg Schlaich and that he worked with the Duisburger Firm Stahlbau Raulf.

Missing Image ;(

Here are some more pictures from the wikipedia article.

I am also willing to settle for an even less expensive zip line, lol.

@mike's phone broke last march or somewhere thereabouts right after he got it. The screen was totally shattered and he has used it with a piece of tape across it ever since, making it so difficult to read. For his birthday in August I ordered a new screen from China with the hopes of repairing it.

It was super smashed up.


Finally, tonight we had some time together and I repaired it.




The only real tricky part was removing the old glass which was glued down really well. Many of the videos I saw online involved lots of cracking and scraping but one guy mentioned heating the screen up with a hairdryer to soften the adhesive and it totally worked. It got super hot and just melted right out. It also left the adhesive in a sticky reusable state. The phone which costs $500 to replace according to verizon ended up only costing $20 for the new glass and $400 in shipping and my labor, saving @mike a full $80.



There is one tiny little spec of black I left under the screen but mike didn't want me to take more time, so he left it that way.

As we arrived there cops and news crews were in there way out because someone had died. Its a kind of ominous start to a climbing trip. The person had a heart attack kayaking.

The day was nice and warm. Next time we need to start earlier though. We did end up making it up to the top if the section we were trying to get to but once we were up three we didn't gave much tine yo hike around.

I am giving this a try. Brush with neem, scrape tongue with scraper, chew gum. Its seems less orange. Next step is accupuncture if this does not work.

We took @hodown to Lloyd's Taco truck on Friday. The line was like 15 minutes long. It was delicious as always especially the crunchy fish taco, although I was not a fan of the spicy brownie.

@hodown brought the craziest Japanese candy sushi making kit. I was so fascinated by the way the salmon roe candy popped the same way real salmon roe pops in your mouth. The rice actually tasted like and was the consistency of rice. The only thing that could have improved it was fish flavoring. The instructions are actually quite elaborate.

I am either going to die or conquer this tomorrow. I honestly don't care either way.

I was excited to see that my new Samsung Galaxy S2 from AT&T works as good with the Android SDK (ADK) on eclipse as my Nexus One did. This tutorial is assuming you already have the ADK environment setup and are just changing phones like I did.

Step One is to enable debugging on the device under settings -> applications -> Development. Check the box that says USB debugging.



When you first plug the device into the computer and type: adb devices: at the command prompt, it will show up as a bunch of question marks, meaning that it won't work with the ADK.

In order to get it working you need to first get the usb device identifier. You can do this by typing lsusb into the fedora terminal application.

This will give you a list of usb devices plugged into the computer. You need to look for the one that matches your phone.

[paolo@svelt15 ~]$ lsusb

Bus 002 Device 006: ID 04e8:685e Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd

Next step is to create a new udev rule for the device using your favorite text editor. You can use vi or nano.

sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

then add the following rule:
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="04e8", ATTRS{idProduct}=="685e", MODE="0666"

Notice the produce and vendor ID come directly from the lsusb info above. You could use these instructions with other phones, in fact it worked perfect with my Nexus One when I was first developing on that.

After this is done you can either reboot or restart udev. Almost all of the instructions you find are for ubuntu but on fedora you restart udev rules with
sudo /sbin/start_udev Then just unplug and plugin the phone. It should now work with the ADK.

When you type: adb devices: You should now see the device listed instead of a bunch of question marks.

I wish so bad I lived in a place where we could just have a large tortoise farm and they could stay out side all year long.

I was reading the wikipedia article and they had this picture of the cutest baby sulcata named Isaac

He is just a person. Get on with your lives everyone. People act as if technology died. Its not even a surprise death, he had been dying for a long time. I kind of like that he died because it proved you cannot buy health. Even with billions. Each of us is just a person, just an animal, and we all are mortal.

I was so surprised that google and motorola postponed the launch of their new android phone out of respect for Steve Jobs. His own company didn't even do the same thing with their own iPhone 4gs as he was dying. Now that's a commitment to capitalism that I think Steve would be proud of.

AllThingsD now reports that Samsung and Google did indeed cancel the event due to Jobs' death, feeling that the launch would be inappropriate given the mourning process still going on throughout the tech industry and the world.

The decision to postpone things was made late last night at the top levels of both companies, sources said, with Jobs’ death being the reason. There are no delays with the product itself, sources insisted.