I was trying to have a conversation on the phone with one of my
co-workers. As I was helping him, I made an offhand comment
that it was quieter at my house with five kids than it was here at the
office. As if on queue, loud applause, cheers and clapping erupted
from the cubes behind me. My colleague then said, ‘They must be having some sort of celebration.’

I replied, ‘They’re sales people; they do that when they go to the bathroom.’

sigh… I’m just grumpy, I guess…

Tags: cheer, grumpy, sales

I consume a large amount of podcasts. One of the podcasts that I listen to is a D&D podcast that is a recording of live play. The podcast is called Combat Cast. Anyway, they were looking for another player and put out a notice to listeners to apply. I applied for the open slot and after a few Q&A sessions I was invited to join their group.

I am thrilled about the prospect of joining this group of players because they are a blast to listen to. I will be joining them on Monday nights for a two hour gaming session. I will be playing a human swordmage called Drew Steel. You can see my character stats on the iPlay4e web site (Drew Steel)

I am a huge fan of Pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup. In Northern Virginia we were spoiled by having tons of fantastic Pho bowl restaurants. My favorite, Pho Bowl, was in Landsdowne center off of Beulah St in Alexandria.

Tampa, unfortunately, does not have many Pho restaurants. And none have wonderful owners and delicious Pho like Pho Bowl in VA. So we decided to try making it ourselves. We found numerous recipe’s online but we wanted one that did not require days to create the broth. Finally we found a recipe that one could make in a crock-pot.

I grabbed the list of ingredients and went to our local asian market. That place was packed! But fortunately, there were some nice folks there that helped us find the ingredients we needed so we went home dumped it into the crock-pot and waited.

It wasn’t long before our impatient kids exclaimed, ‘It smells like Pho!’ Soon we were all huddled around the crockpot sniffing the mixture… Mmmm, yes it did smell good!

It tasted good too! I suspect we will be cooking a lot more Pho in the future. Who knows, maybe one day we will be able to have fantastic Pho like we enjoyed at Pho Bowl!

Tags: crock-pot, Pho

I am still excited about openmolar. The story behind it’s development is very interesting; you should give it a listen. The author describes his motivation in a tllts podcast episode 290.

Neil, openmolar’s author, recently made a screencast of the program. It is an excellent intro to the features of the program. Check it out on tinyvid.tv.

Openmolar uses PyQt. I was surprised at how easy it is to build a gui. I picked up a great book on PyQt called Rapid Gui Programming with Python and Qt. It is a stellar book. Summerfields writing style is conversational; which is very rare for a computer book. I actually enjoy reading it. You should check it out if you are into PyQt.

Tags: openMolar, PyQt, python, Qt

Found a neat open source project called openMolar. It is designed to be used in a dental practice. It is written by a dentist for his practice.

I would like to help out on this project. But I have to get up to speed on Python and Qt first. I bought a book and I have been studying some on-line tutorials. It looks straight forward…

Piotr Malinski has a really good set of tutorials here

Tags: open, open-source, openMolar, python, Qt