The first Fair commute went pretty well. I managed to remember to avoid Como/Snelling and all was well.

While having dinner with Bret the other day I mentioned that a mutual friend of ours had a weblog. I looked it up again (with monstersocks' help) and found pictures from that mutual friend's recent graduation.

Yesterday I started playing around with Konfabulator. I remember checking it out when it was first released and not really seeing a need for it, but I was thinking about it for a project I'd been considering recently. With a little tinkering and modification of an existing widget I had a functional widget that did exactly what I wanted pretty quickly. (It actually seemed like it took longer than I would have liked, partially because I made some incorrect assumptions about how the original widget was written.) Basically, I saw digital binary clocks for sale and thought they were interesting but flawed. Replacing the individual digits of a digital clock with 2-4 bits just seemed wrong. I wanted one that had eight bits for the hours, eight for the minute and eight for the second. I looked at the Konfabulator site and saw that there were several binary clocks but all of them were structured like the physical one, four bits for the ones digit of the seconds, three for the tens digit, etc. I played around (and investigated Javascript some) and made a three byte binary clock that works just like I wanted it to. I still need to tweak the images a bit more but I was impressed with how easy it is to get something working (or modify something that already works to do what you want) with Konfabulator. I may also add three bytes for a calendar portion although that will require some consideration (the year can't really fit into a byte unless I just use the last three digits of the year.)

Last night was monstersocks' father's birthday. We went out to Red Lobster for dinner then back to the house for presents. We ended up sticking around for a while to help get his new TiVo working. There was a minor configuration problem early on that caused it to be more difficult than it should have been (combined with a lack of a phone jack in the living room) but we finally got everything working before we left.