With a hat tip to the Beatles for the title, I am proud to announce a couple of uncommon astronomical events scheduled for later this spring. No, I am not talking about the apocalypse scheduled by the science-illiterate for the end of the year. (Make sure you wear clean underwear for that one to make your mom proud.) No, I am talking about a couple of sun-related events: a transit of Venus and a near-total solar eclipse. 

The first to occur is the near-total eclipse of the sun. Coming May 21, 2012 it will be a near-total event in the Black Rock Desert less than 100 miles north of me. Yes, it's the same desert where the annual Burning Man festival occurs every Labor Day weekend. Even here in the big city, the eclipse should be pretty spectacular. Of course, DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN if you are thinking of witnessing this spectacle yourself. Hie your eyes to a local university, community college or even a high school with an astronomy class to find if they are going to have their telescopes with appropriate filters fired up.  

Even if you don't live in northern Nevada, you don't have be the target of a Carly Simon song and fly your Lear Jet to Nova Scotia to see it. And we can only hope your experience is better than that of Monty Python's too. Visit NASA's website to see how much eclipse you get in your area. Below is a screen shot showing the details at the best closest spot to me.

The second event is the transit of Venus, which will be visible in my area the evening of June 5. A transit is mechanically pretty much the same as an eclipse, but on a much smaller scale, in that the disk of the transitor(?) isn't large enough to occlude the disk of the transitee. In other words, from the Earth, the size of Venus isn't large enough to hide the sun, it will only appear as a dot moving across it. Not exactly like the way The Police sang about it on King of Pain way back in 1983, either. The most recent transit of Venus was in 2004.  After the events of this coming June, the next such occurrence will be in 2117 - making it rather unlikely anyone reading this will be around for the next installment. 

Interestingly, a couple of hundred years ago, the transit was a way for astronomers to measure the size of the solar system. How? Observers from two disparate locations on Earth would see two distinct paths of Venus across the sun.  Using the slight difference in the length of time it takes Venus to move from one edge of the sun to the other, they were able to calculate the distance from earth to the sun, and thus the size of our solar system. Once again, science and math charging to the rescue.

Again, DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN - not even for just a second. I cannot stress this enough. You WILL damage your eyes, and I will take it as a personal affront, since you will no longer be able to easily read the pithy wisdom of my words.

For gobs more information on the transit, visit transitofvenus.org. Alas for my hordes of Brazilian, Argentinian, and Chilean readers, the transit will not be visible to you at all. 

I've been in my new digs for about a week or so, and my first and foremost task has been to migrate an "application" that I (mostly) wrote in MS Word 1997-2003 to work in a Windows 7/Office 2010 environment. On the whole, the migration is a smooth seamless process when it comes to processes in the code itself. VBA is VBA regardless of whether the base is 2003 or 2010. The issues start to arise when the time came to create the custom interfaces.

Back in the 2003 days, the way to get the specific functions in front of the user was through either:

1. customizing the standard menu;
   
2. customizing the standard toolbar(s);
   
3. creating a new menu;
   
4. creating a new toolbar;

As it turned out, I - and the others who worked the project over the years - did all four.

After migrating the templates and code forward to 2010, all the customizations we did still were there, but packaged in a god-awful "Add-Ins" tab (what was formerly known as a menu) at the end of the list of standard tabs. Yuck. Nobody in their right mind would think that an appropriate solution to put before the end user. I certainly couldn't do it in good conscience. So, I started poking around the web, looking for methods, instructions and tools that would help me to:

• Eliminate the "Add-In" tab and get back to meaningful named tabs;
  
• Get back to context sensitive tabs and functions based on document type (template) where only the one custom tab would be visible.

I must say, there really isn't a lot to choose from. And to make it worse, what is good to work with and useful doesn't play natively with 2010, and what is barely functional is what's needed to create 2010 ribbons. That is, unless you want to delve into the file structure itself, which I don't particularly want to.

Microsoft publishes an incredibly lame tool with the glib and catchy name of "Custom UI Editor for Microsoft Office" (hereafter to be known as CUIEMO) that is, well, functional, I guess. I picked it up here. It is needed downstream in my convoluted process. But for creating the ribbon from scratch, ugh. I really wouldn't like it.

The other tool I found is extremely useful, and intuitive. It's drawback is that it doesn't create native 2010 XML; it creates customUI.xml files rather than customUI14.xml files. The cool tool is an AddIn for Excel. Yes, Excel. To customize Word ribbons, I am using Excel. If nothing else, one must learn to be flexible when dealing with Microsoft products!

The AddIn is called the RibbonX Visual Designer, developed by Andy Pope, and is available from his website. Below are screen shots between the two tools. I'll let you choose which you think is more useful for designing your custom ribbon. 

Since one is useful for designing the ribbon and the other is necessary for creating the actual files necessary, I use the two in conjunction. Here's how.

1. Open the file (.docm/.dotm) that needs a ribbon in CUIEMO.
   
2. From the Insert Menu, select "Insert Office 2010 Custom UI Part."
   
3. From the Insert Menu, select "Sample XML | Custom Tab." You should see some XML inserted. We'll be replacing that later with what you really want.
   
4. If you want to add icons, select "Insert | Icons..." and add any images you want to be a part of the custom ribbon. Make note of the names, you'll need them later.
   
5. Save and close.
   
6. Open the .docm/.dotm in the RibbonX Visual Designer Interface.
   
7. Customize to your heart's content. If you have decided to use any of the custom images you added to the file above, enter the name in the image property without the extension. If you want to use standard iconography, use the imageMso property.
   
8. Click on the CustomUI XML tab.
   
9. Select everything between the <ribbon> and </ribbon> tags and Copy.
   
10. Save and close.
    
11. Open CUIEMO again.
    
12. Open the document.
    
13. Select the text between the <ribbon> and </ribbon> tags and Paste.
    
14. Click the Validate XML button to confirm nothing bad happened.
    
15. Save and close. 
    

Your new ribbon is done! If you need to edit it again later, all you need to do is from Step 6 and beyond. Oh, all your callbacks are also automatically generated, so all you need to do is copy and paste those into your VBA code too. Of course, if you are comfortable simply writing XML code, you can either do it within the CUIEMO environment, but it really sucks with jumping around and flicker. Or you can use your favorite XML editor and copy/paste that too.

 Have at it. I hope this saves someone else the difficulty I had in getting to a functional, custom ribbon. 

This weekend saw me at a wrestling tournament for my son. I haven't seen high school wrestling, or as this was, middle school wrestling, since I participated myself. But that was so many years ago, they did the timing with sundials. The energy permeating the gym was amazing, as was the skill of some of the wrestlers. Some were quite good - to the point of me thinking, "these are seventh graders?!" Spencer did well enough to qualify for the Northern Nevada Regional Finals next week, and he is very excited for the next tournament on the 31st . (OK, I'm excited too.) 

Below is the video of the match that qualified him. It was cut off before the end due to the score differential.  After the match, Spencer was gracious in victory, sincerely shaking hands with his opponent, the ref and the opposing coach. I like that he is being taught to shake the hands of all involved. Sports may end for him at some point in the future, but gracious actions in victory are a life skill.

I also wanted to see one other wrestler in particular. This one young man had an undefeated season rolling along. He was confident, as he had previously met and defeated all potential opponents. I was hoping to catch one or two of his matches - as long as it didn't interfere with seeing Spencer. As it turned out, I saw two of his matches; so much for the undefeated season. He was pinned in both. 

I was curious to see how he would react. Predictably, he was crushed after the first loss. I drifted over to eavesdrop as he was talking to his coach, and later his mom. No blaming, no deflection. He admitted he flat out lost. He was disappointed, sure, but he owned the loss in the same way as you should own the win. All on him. He was smiling and congratulating his ecstatic opponent after the second. That, dear readers, is losing with dignity.

From my perspective, the first match could have gone either way. Both wrestlers were good, and the match exciting. The second? Well, I think he wanted to get it over with, and went with a high-risk/high reward move. Unfortunately, he missed the high reward and was left with the high risk. It happens.

On another note, after the tournament, I went for my longest reasonably-pain-free run in weeks. Of course, it was barely 5K. Still, a pain free 5K is more than I had a month ago. Maybe the hip and glute strengthening program I am doing is working. That and/or the planking. I am up to 2:30 per plank on elbows, then shortly thereafter, on hands. What I like about the regimen is that I can read while doing it. I was wrapping up Brent Weeks' The Black Prism. Great stuff to take your mind off the pain and trembling of your muscles.

First of all, I am not a medical professional. Heck, my wife will be happy to attest that I am most male-like in my reluctance to even visit a medical professional, even if I am hacking up pieces of lung, or have a cut to the bone ("It's just a flesh wound!"). 

Noted. In that spirit, I ran across a blog post from Derek Lowe about medicine that was really interesting.  There might - just might - be a trigger link between an infection and the onset of Type 2 diabetes; a genetic predisposition to Type 2, kicked into gear as the result of a totally random viral infection. Wow. (Actual paper; original news article) 

On a different note, for any chemistry fans out there, this is the blog series that got me reading Derek's stuff in the first place.


Science. It Works.

According to the official astronomical observations, spring arrived at 10:14 p.m. PDT on Monday March 19, 2012. According to my own personal calendar, it arrived March 1 (Similarly, summer comes on June 1, autumn on September 1, and winter on December 1, but I digress.) 

According to the small members of the amphibious band "The Toads" (not to be confused with the human band Toad The Wet Sprocket) currently on tour in my front yard, spring arrived around March 9, when the first of them started to bellow in earnest. The first one I recall hearing this year actually was in February - very early, but the winter this year simply hadn't appeared, so I really can't blame him.

In years past, The Toads didn't start cranking up the croak volume until the end of the month, this year it's about 2 weeks earlier than past. Still, it's nice to enjoy the sounds of the jungle while sitting in a jacuzzi in the semi-arid environs of my conifer/sage ecosystem. I'm just thankful my kids haven't decided to form a band in the garage yet. That'll give The Toads a run for their money - at least in terms of volume.

Hey all you local Carson City/Reno/Douglas County/Lake Tahoe peeps, I found out about a run today that is happening in a few weeks on April 7th. It's called the Stephen & Keegan Memorial 5K Run/Walk. It's to honor two Carson High School students who died last year in a SCUBA accident in Monterey, CA. 

Proceeds benefit kids at the school who can't afford athletic uniforms and equipment. If you've got the time, this is a worthy cause. Check it out, please.

And since y'all are into the whole 5K benefit thing, the following week is the 2nd Annual Carson High School Safe Grad 5K. There were 175 entrants last year. Let's not see a drop off. Make the Race Director work it, unlike last year, when I slacked off.

With a tip of the earworm hat to Disney, I hadn't been in my new position 5 hours before I was unceremoniously dumped into the tech stew that is the Word 2010 object model, and more specifically, the ribbon. I have no one else to blame but myself, however, as the dunking was completely self-inflicted.

It took a few more hours of poking, prodding, reading and trial & error, but I think I am finally gaining some headway in providing customizations, and even dynamic ones at that. Of course, along the way, I made some wrong turns, and went down some apparently blind alleys, but every error-path turned up something useful – just not necessarily useful to me right now.

One of the alleys I followed included a process of making the OS (in this case, Window 7) think a .docx/docm file was a zip file, in order to add some material to it. That wasn't a direction I needed to be heading but…

Everything old is new again (according to Barenaked Ladies), and apparently everything recent is new, too. Making the OS think a document is a zip was the way in which I was able to crack it open and peer at the XML innards using OpenOffice. It seems that is the way of Microsoft Word 2010, too. In addition to recalling my VB/VBA/MS T-SQL stuff, I guess I get to leverage my more recent knowledge of XML inside a document. 

I don't know for sure if I can play directly with the XML at this point, as the direction wasn't where I needed to be heading at this time. But you can be sure I'll be purposefully looking down that alley in the near future. 

No this isn't the Weekend Update of my youth, with the anchor telling me, "Good evening. I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not." If you don't get it, you're too young. Ask your Uncle Google, and get off my lawn.

This weekend was an interesting, for several disparate reasons. The first one, chronologically, at least happened on Friday: I became officially unemployed. I don't expect that condition to last any longer than 8:00 am tomorrow morning, though, when I sign my employment papers for my new position. As my father (RIP) told me oh, so many years ago, "Never leave a job with no place to land." Ever since that advice, I've never resigned one position without a second already arranged. It made sense to me then as a teenager and it makes even more sense to me now as a parent. I will keep a job regardless of how unpleasant the work, or the conditions, if I have my kids to provide for. I will admit, I've never had a really ugly, shitty job though. If I did, my absolute statement may not stand.

The second thing that happened was my daughter participated in a 3 vs. 3 soccer tournament. I hadn't seen one of them before, and I must say, they are fun to watch. It's kind of like Futsal, but outdoors with a smaller goal and no keeper. Her team, CSC  U10 won their age division with a 3-0-1 record, outscoring their opponents 16-6 (1-1, 5-2, 5-1, 5-2). Congratulations, Mikaela, you and your teammates played awesomely! And it truly was a team effort. The passing was what really made the difference. The weather, was not a factor, though...

Winter made an appearance in mid-March. That's not unexpected, but really? Really? After a super dry (though chilly) Dec - Feb., March has come to call, both cold and wet. Three inches of snow on the ground when we left for the final game today, but only a bit left on the field as you can see from the photo. That wasn't the tough part: the tough part was the raw 20+ mph winds and mid 30sF temps. Brrr. I think the parents deserved medals for standing in it like frozen statues. All applause was muffled by gloves: whump, whump, whump.

I had been planning on spending my Saturday in Fernley in the warm confines of a gymnasium, leaving the cold of the soccer pitch to my blushing bride. But my man-cub forgot his wrestling gear, and so attending the tournament was a no-go. I played the gallant, and offered to do the soccer thing. An offer that was accepted almost before I finished offering. Well, hmm. We'll have to see what that gets me. Karma points anyone?

Sounds cool, doesn't it? A web-hosting solution using all green technology? Solar, tidal, geothermal... wind, maybe? Kind of like tying the next generation of information sources to the next generation of energy sources: cut away from the dead tree paradigm of information (buh bye, printed Encyclopedia Britannica), at the same time as cutting the dependence on even deader trees and animals that have been oilified. (Yes, that's a new word).

Wait, what? Someone's doing it? Well crap, that blows away my million dollar idea. Heh, wind power blows away... Bad jokes aside, get the word out. Make this enterprise more widespread, will y'all?

You may have missed my previous post about Wolfie. It still ranks at the top of my GoToList on my iPad. I recently acquired a couple more really cool apps, and thought, "Gee Slang, how about a post about some cool apps? Maybe people will respond with additional cool app recommendations!" In no particular order, here are the apps I seem to use the most, or find to be the most interesting now. (Post edit: I didn't plan this to be a "top 10" kind of thing - it just worked out that way. Toss in Stash, Dropbox and Bloomberg to make it a Lucky 13 instead):

1. iSpy: This is a collection of webcams around the world. It's good for a mindless few minutes or hours. I particularly like the ones of the cat hotel in Aspen, CO, (Cats! sleeping!) a set of bird feeders in Marshalltown, IA, doggie day-cares in Chicago, IL and Colorado Springs, CO. It has default filters for random, top rated, and most recent. You can also save your own favorites.

2. Star Walk: If you have any interest in the skies above you after dark, this is the app for you.  The opening screen should be enough to get the blood moving:

Awesome, isn't it? Once the screen is showing the heavenly bodies themselves, it aligns to whatever direction and elevation you are looking. Tap on an object and tap the information icon, and all is revealed for you. 

3. Waze: I admit, I don't really need this where I live, but you might. This app gives you real-time traffic data showing where you are, and where the bottlenecks are. Perfect for the second seat navigator, because you and I both know you'd never use it while driving yourself. Right?

4. Kindle: Yeah, I went there. I have a Kindle for the great outdoors (it can't be beat for bright-light reading), but I like reading in lower light locations, and my eyesight isn't what it used to be. The app works quite well both in portrait and landscape mode. I particularly like the sepia color scheme. If I'm not reading a MOBI file, I use GoodReader, and if I need to annotate, I use iAnnotatePDF. My local library has books available that I use Overdrive for. I guess books and reading are a thing for me.

5. Wundermap: I'm a weather junkie. There, I said it. That now being out in the open, this app allows me to see all the personal weather stations hooked up to the WeatherUnderground.com network. It also has weather warnings, and forecasts. Perfect.

6. MyTopo Maps: I just discovered this quite awesome app. Funny story on how I got it. I visited a local running website, and actually clicked an ad link. O_O
Possibly one of maybe thirty I've clicked in my entire history using the web, and probably one of only ten that I thought I might find something truly interesting. I was right, THIS IS AWESOME! It mixes topographic maps with the aerial (Google Earth-esque) view, and has a slider that you can use to merge the view between. So, so cool. You can also manually create GPS waypoints to create "trips." Oh, and it's FREE, so there ya go. Click ad links. ;-)

7. Khan Academy: I admit, I forgot all about fraction math quite some time ago. However, fraction math is of utmost importance to my 10-year old daughter. NOW. I remembered viewing some instructional videos a while back on algebra and trig with my son online. Imagine my delight when I discovered that the Khan Academy now has an iPad app? I think you can. It not only has videos for kid-level stuff, but for adults as well: finance, history, math, science. It's all subtitled too. Sweet.

8. FeeddlerPro: I use Google to harvest RSS feeds. I like to read on my iPad. What is the most natural app? Why, of course, one that links to my Google Reader. Feeddler does just that. I creaked open my wallet for the paid Pro version. You likely will too.

9. Trailers: I don't watch TV much, and I even more rarely go to a movie. Though I enjoy them, it's hard to know what's out there without viewing the trailers. This app gives a consolidated run down on what's out there and what's forthcoming. What's pretty cool is the Calendar view where you can see what's being released when.

10. CribbagePro: Yeah, I play games occasionally. Most of the time games are played on my iPad is when one of my spawn steals it from me though. Right now, cribbage has overtaken all the others as the game of choice. CribbagePro give a pretty good game, though I would like it to not go quite so fast on the transitions. I do like the classic Mac look though. Takes me back to my original Macintosh SE days...

I don't expect anyone to agree with my selection, though a few might like some of them. Send me what you are currently finding irresistible in the comments. I am always up for new fun stuff!