Scott Gruby’s Blog

I received email from the alumni office of my alma mater (Harvey Mudd College). The message starts out: “I received your name from the Office of Alumni Relations as someone who might be able to attend our Social Business Luncheon…” and then goes on to say “The purpose of the evening of course is to [...]

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My wife and I signed up for the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall newsletter. I thought this was a good idea to see which of our son’s toys we need to inspect. Little did I know that we’d get email just about everyday with a few more recalls. These recalls don’t make headlines, but they [...]

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Monday marked a sad day for NotifyMail. After 13.5 years of using the product that I wrote (it helped launch my career), I have finally stopped using it. Do I still want to be notified instantly of new mail? Absolutely. Do I still believe in the product? Well, sort of. Several months back, I wrote [...]

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Most people don’t look at the markings on the side of cables, but sometimes I do to see if it is Cat5 or Cat6 and see what other ratings are on it. Today as I was helping my dad with his dying computer, I look at the GeekSquad cable he brought over (I’m not a [...]

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When I first moved back to San Diego about 8 years ago, I searched for a large desk to fit in my apartment. I ended up buying 3 desk pieces (2 the same, one a large corner piece). The desks gave me a lot of room and weren’t cheap. Over the last 8 years, the [...]

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Lately the news (NBC Nightly News is what we watch) has been talking about the Republication candidates for president and has said that while Giuliani is the front runner, the conservative base has no clear candidate. They keep bringing Pat Buchanan in to say that conservative Christians have no clear candidate. Basically this means that [...]

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Several types lately, people have said that our son’s name, Aiden, is very popular. While this may be true in some people’s small sphere of knowledge, facts don’t seem to back that up (at least not this year). The Social Security Administration’s website lists popular baby names for each year. For 2006 (the last year [...]

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I’ve said in the past that I thought OCR was pretty ridiculous for receipts as it isn’t 100% accurate and receipts have so many wacky formats. Well, after a lot of work and evaluation, I have managed to integrate the Tesseract OCR engine into ReceiptWallet. It is an open source engine that has OK results [...]

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Yesterday I took Marley (our dog) to the vet because of some redness on his belly (yes, I realize we keep taking Marley to the vet, but he’s our first “child”). As I was talking to the vet, I mentioned we just bought him some Kingdom Pets chicken jerky treats at Costco. The vet said [...]

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