About 15 years ago, a colleague asked me, “Have you ever had the dream?” When he explained what “the dream” was, my jaw dropped because I had indeed had it many times. Now, “the dream” has been put to paper, and it’s even more widespread than I’d imagined. Normally, I find xkcd to be stupid or annoying, but this time they hit it spot on.

I eat at Subway at least a few times per week, so it’s always fun when they run some kind of game or promotion. I end up winning the occasional free sub or cookie.

They just started a new Scrabble game that will be running into October. I was poking around their web site and happened to look at the FAQ entry for the odds of winning. Your odds of winning the $100,000 prize is a whopping 1 in 42,492,348,847! That’s right—billion…with a B! The odds of being killed by lightning are only 1 in 2,320,000. The only event with less likelihood of happening, according to this web site, is your house getting struck by a meteor.

So I guess it’s OK to run a promotion even when you have no intention of having to pay out. Very nice.

I really love eBay. I’ve been watching for months for a deal on Magellan’s MapSend DirectRoute software that would enable my SporTrak Pro GPS receiver to give turn-by-turn directions similar to those expensive dash-mounted GPS units that are all the rage these days. The software goes for well over $100 new, but I didn’t want to pay much more than $30 for it. Then last week, I found an auction for not just the DirectRoute software, but a complete SporTrak Color GPS receiver along with car power cable. The GPSr is worth over $350 new and the cable around $25, so the package when new was worth over $475. Granted, it’s a few years old now, but the description stated that the unit was barely used. I bid $62, not expecting it to last very long.

Imagine my surprise when, with just an hour to go, I still had the high bid at $52. I watched as it went up to $57, and the next thing I knew, it was over. I had just gotten $475 worth of stuff for $57! I’ve always wanted one of these units, and it’s going to get plenty of use. Persistence pays off.

Woo hoo! We’re getting closer. A week or two ago, this box was installed at the AT&T pad down the road. I’ve been able to confirm that it’s a U-verse VRAD. I pass it every day, so I’m now watching for signs that it’s being brought to life. Unfortunately, this pad doesn’t directly serve our house, but things are looking promising. Now I’m watching the pad that does serve our house with eagle eyes. I can’t wait to get rid of Comcast.

I continue to be blown away by the free software available from Microsoft as part of their Windows Live suite. One of the things I like to do when I’m somewhere that offers a stunning view is to take a series of photos that, when stitched together, makes a very nice panorama. It results in a photo that is much more striking than you could take with a single exposure.

After I took several such photo series at the Atlanta FRC championship a few weeks ago, I started looking around for current photo stitching software. "Free" was my goal, and after looking at a few hosted on SourceForge, I was starting to get disappointed. That’s when I saw someone mention a feature of Windows Live Photo Gallery that does photo stitching.

I quickly downloaded and installed it and started poking around. With most stitching software, you have to manually assign some common points in two adjacent photos to give the software something to work with. With Photo Gallery, all you do is give it a list of photos and, bam, out pops a nearly perfect panorama. If you know where the edges are, you can find a few artifacts, but the results are better than I’ve ever seen, especially for software that requires no user tweaking. I haven’t even looked at the other features of the program. Go download it and take a took. You may also find my photo set from the championship here.

The 2008 FIRST FRC competition season has begun. Our team, RAGE 173, competed in Hartford this past weekend in a field of 62 teams and made it into the semifinals. The Hartford Courant had a nice writeup about it. Note that the team referenced in the first three paragraphs of the article is ours. Next is Boston in two weeks followed by the international championship in Atlanta in April. As all the FIRST e-mails end, Go Teams!

As most people with busy families, I rely on my calendar to try to make sense of all of our daily activities. I used to keep everything in a single Outlook calendar on my work laptop, but if I wanted to quickly check a date while at home and the computer was off, it was most inconvenient, to say the least.

Then I changed jobs and the laptop went away. That’s when I started using Google Calendar in a big way. Now I use it for everything, and create separate calendars for different types of activities. For example, I’ve created public calendars for the UConn men’s and women’s basketball schedules, the upcoming Stafford Motor Speedway racing season, and even my son’s Boy Scout troop and daughter’s Venturing crew. Since they are public, others can benefit by including them in their own calendar display.

So it was with mixed feelings that I saw the announcement that Google Calendar could finally be synced with Outlook. It’s something I would have killed for about six months ago, but now that I’ve weaned off Outlook, it’s something I’m not particularly excited about. I toyed around with using Plaxo to sync Google Calendar, Outlook, and Thunderbird, but as the various pieces have evolved over the past few months, Plaxo has been getting more and more broken.

I’ll probably give it a shot, because I’m now using Outlook 2007 on my new laptop, but I’m not straying far from the basic Google Calendar interface. What I really want is two-way syncing between Thunderbird and Gmail contacts. Oh well…

You have to check out this video. Lots of fun when you have nothing better to do. Down the program (it’s free) from here.

It’s safe to say that the Digi-Comp was my first real computer. I used to love sticking bits of straws on the “programming” pegs, cycling the “clock,” and watching the results. I first learned binary on this thing. Now, version 2 of Digi-Comp is available. Rather than delicate plastic, this one is made from laser-cut paperboard. The reviews I’ve seen are glowing. I may just have to get one so my kids (who are now the same age that I was when I had one) can get a feel for what really goes on inside the box.

Last night, we happened to catch a show called “The Blitz: London’s Longest Night” on PBS. It was fascinating. I had never seen all the details surrounding this horrendous night in British history, and the show was extremely well done. Lindsey and Emily (12 and 11) were transfixed, and I just couldn’t bring myself to send them to bed with how interested they were in learning about history. Locally, it’s scheduled to be on again on Sunday, February 19, and I plan to record it. Well worth the time to watch.