This was originally posted to the InfoWorld Electric forums on 01 April 1999.

PR: "Cottingham TNG" Ships

April 1, 1999
For Immediate Release

Cottingham & Cottingham (C&C) of Olathe, KS, USA today announced their first product, Abigail Rose. "This product represents a major milestone for C&C," said marketing director Craig S. Cottingham. "Abigail Rose is was designed and produced entirely by C&C, from the ground up."

C&C describes Abigail Rose as "a cooperative set of non-linear servoactuators controlled by a non-deterministic processor, in a package only 20" long and weighing only 8 lb, 6 oz." What sets Abigail Rose apart is that the processor ships with only basic functionality enabled. More advanced tasks become possible as Abigail Rose adapts to its environment, effectively "learning" new behaviors. "It's amazing to watch," noted Cottingham. "In the few short hours since the release party, we've seen an increase in input/output processing and fewer audible error conditions." Abigail Rose also includes an adaptive code generator featuring C&C's Dynamic Realtime Object Oriented Language (DROOL), and can produce large quantities of DROOL in a short time period.

The product was announced at a developer's conference held on an unlikely date (April 1st, commonly known as "April Fool's Day" in the US) at an unlikely time (5:45 AM CST) in an unlikely location (St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, MO, USA). "At first we were worried that people might think that the announcement was some kind of April Fool's Day prank," Cottingham said. "At C&C, however, we believe that once the product is ready, it ships." As evidence, he pointed to the fact that the development team, led by Angela Cottingham, was working hard right up to the literal moment the product was released. "We're very proud of the quality of work they did. We in the marketing department basically provided them with an incomplete design specification, and they came up with this gem."

Additional details on Abigail Rose, including product illustrations, can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/craig.cottingham/AbigailRose19990401

About Cottingham & Cottingham (C&C)

C&C was formed in 1995 from the merger of two unrelated corporate entities, with the goal of maximizing long-term gains while providing an enjoyable end-user experience. They can be reached at craig.cottingham@gmail.com.

It’s time for another “52 Books in 52 Weeks” recap.

The grand total was 49 books this year, three short of my goal. I recall around the beginning of December that I was running about 5 or 6 books off my pace, so apparently I made up a little ground at the end. Not enough, as it turns out.

I keep track of both the books I’ve read and my todo list on Backpack, as a checklist. Recently, they added the date an item was checked off to the list display, but it looks like they’ve been collecting it all along. As a result, I now have a record of when I finished each book, to within a day or two.

This lends itself to some more sophisticated statistics.

For instance, here’s a crude histogram of how many books I read in each month of 2008:

Jan: ******
Feb: ***
Mar: *****
Apr: *
May: ****
Jun: ***
Jul: *******
Aug: ***
Sep: ***
Oct: ****
Nov: ****
Dec: ******

July was my best month, April my worst. April was when I fell behind, and I never recovered the pace, though I came close in July.

Other quantitative facts:

• Books by sportswriters: 3
• Books by children of former US Vice Presidents: 1
• Books made into movies: 3

The biggest disappointment of the year was, I think, The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold. Her first book, The Lovely Bones, remains one of my all-time favorite books, and I was excited to learn earlier today that it’s been made into a movie, by Peter Jackson no less. Compared to it, The Almost Moon was a letdown. No, that’s not entirely fair; it was a letdown even when not compared to The Lovely Bones.

Picking my favorite from this list is a lot harder. In fact, I’m not going to. Maybe I could come up with a top 10, but since that’s almost 20% of the total list, that doesn’t seem terribly useful.

Here’s the entire list for 2008, in reverse chronological order:

• Fatsis, Stefan. A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL.
• Sheehan, Michael A. Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves.
• Phillips, Marie. Gods Behaving Badly.
• de Santis, Pablo. The Paris Enigma.
• Butcher, Jim. Fool Moon.
• Quinion, Michael. Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds: ingenious tales of words and their origins.
• Shepard, Jim. Project X.
• Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t.
• Pelecanos, George P. Hell to Pay.
• Niven, Larry and Lerner, Edward M. Juggler of Worlds.
• Posnanski, Joe. The Good Stuff.
• Petroski, Henry. Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering.
• Connelly, Michael. The Black Ice.
• Deford, Frank. I’m Just Getting Started.
• Huff, Tanya. Smoke and Shadows.
• Walsh, Peter. It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff.
• Gill, Michael Gates. How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else.
• Sedaris, David. When You Are Engulfed in Flames.
• Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34.
• Miller, John Ramsey. Upside Down.
• Coupland, Douglas. Girlfriend in a Coma.
• Spencer-Fleming, Julia. I Shall Not Want.
• Wells, Ken. Travels with Barley: A Journey Through Beer Culture in America.
• Winchester, Simon. The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.
• Butcher, Jim. Storm Front.
• Couch, Dick. The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228.
• Johnson, Adam. Parasites Like Us.
• Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
• Child, Lee. Nothing to Lose.
• Helprin, Mark. The Pacific and Other Stories.
• Fuller, Alexandra. Scribbling the Cat.
• Joss, Morag. Fearful Symmetry.
• Mezrich, Ben. Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions.
• Prachett, Terry. Carpe Jugulum.
• Metzger, Robert A. Cusp.
• Connelly, Michael. The Overlook.
• Coupland, Douglas. The Gum Thief.
• Logan, Chuck. After the Rain.
• Mayle, Peter. A Good Year.
• Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us.
• Crile, George. Charlie Wilson’s War.
• Gore, Kristin. Sammy’s House.
• Clarke, Thurston. Searching for Crusoe: A Journey Among the Last Real Islands.
• Frey, Stephen. The Chairman.
• Niven, Larry and Lerner, Edward M. Fleet of Worlds.
• Curtis, Bryan. The Explainer.
• Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon.
• Buford, Bill. Heat : an amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany.
• Grafton, Sue. T is for Trespass.

Angela just got back from the hospital, where her niece was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The good news is, since we went through the same thing two and a half years ago, Angela's brother and his wife had a better idea of what they were dealing with than we did at the time. As a result, their daughter wasn't as far into DKA as our daughter was. The bad news is, there's now one more child in the world with diabetes.

We went to Wichita yesterday for Equifest of Kansas, a horse-related expo. It was nice to get out of the house and go somewhere that we hadn't been before. On the plus side, to get there from here you go through the Flint Hills, which is the closest thing we have in Kansas to, well, hills. On the minus side, apparently I snore when I sleep, and I snore louder (or perhaps more) in hotel beds than the one at home, so neither my wife nor my daughter got as much sleep as they'd have liked.

For lunch on Saturday we went to River City Brewing Company in Old Town Wichita. They're in the middle of their 15th anniversary celebration, and the place was packed even at about 2 in the afternoon. For the occasion, they had on tap a porter aged in Bulleit bourbon whiskey barrels; it had a slight oaky, smoky flavor, as well as a touch of bourbon—which is not necessarily a bad thing. I also sampled an oak-aged old ale, which was tasty but had little to none of the oxidized character you usually find in an old ale. The chocolate bock was lighter in body than a traditional bock (note that I'm not talking about Shiner Bock here), but with some roasty, chocolately notes that you don't find in a maibock. The Rock Island Red was a good American pale ale, but not red enough for an American amber (which a red ale should qualify as).

Yes, I judge beer even when I'm out for food or fun. This time, I was aided and abetted by our friend Stephen, who not only is a horse person (we met up with him at Equifest) but also a fellow homebrewer from the NE Kansas area. He noticed that several customers were carrying T-shirts the same burnt-orange color as those the waitstaff were wearing, and asked our server about them. She said they weren't for sale, but the manager was giving them away to selected individuals at his discretion. Upon hearing this, Stephen and I pulled out our BJCP membership cards and explained that we are registered beer judges, and did that count for anything? Sure enough, she came back a few minutes later with T-shirts for us.

See? Being a beer judge is cool. :-)

...fact is, it's all dark.

Taken with a Canon PowerShot A530 jammed up against a 25mm eyepiece in a 4.5" Newtonian telescope. I was hoping to get a picture at the moment of totality, but the mother of all cloudbanks moved in from the southwest.

I have finally started clearing out our CD collection. There are a lot of discs in here that we never listen to, and others that we bought just for one song. (Remember when that was your only option?) Half Price Books offers a decent price for used CDs with little hassle, so that has been my outlet of choice so far. The proceeds from selling discs will go to buying individual tracks to replace more CDs, though I’ve found fewer than ten songs so far that I feel need to be replaced.

Not every song on CD is available at the iTunes Store, and getting rid of plastic mass outweighs brand loyalty in this case. Amazon’s MP3 store got a lot of press a few months back for offering DRM-free music at a price matching or beating Apple’s FairPlay-protected files. I figure that’s a good alternative, right?

One of the discs I’m looking to replace is a compilation of songs from movie soundtracks, produced by Blockbuster. The only track worth keeping is Vince Gill’s “Ophelia” from the Mel Gibson-Jodie Foster flick Maverick. The iTunes Store doesn’t have it, so let’s check the Amazon MP3 store.

Searching on “vince gill” is easy enough, but returns 285 results, more than I’m willing to sift through. Any way to refine the search? Not that I can see. Okay, I’ll sort by song title and just page down to the “O”s. Clicking on the “Song Title” column header doesn’t work. Off to the right, I notice a dropdown that says “Sort by”. That looks promising. My options are “Relevance”, “Bestselling”, “Price: Low to High”, “Price: High to Low”, “Avg. Customer Review”, and “Release Date”. No “Song Title”, no “Album”, apparently no “Artist” (assuming I searched on just a last name or the name of a song or album).

And like that, I suspect that I won’t be shopping the Amazon MP3 store again any time soon.