New York State Museum Focus on Nature

Copyright © 2005 Tara Bensen. All rights reserved.


Each year the New York State Museum hosts the Focus on Nature exhibit from April 17–September 7, 2008. The Missus has three pieces in the show this year and one piece, Worker Bee on Honeycomb, was purchased by the museum for their collection. If you are in the area stop by and check it out, there is some amazing work being done by these science illustrators.

Delphi Tips and Tricks: Copy and Paste from the Type Library Editor

If you've used the type library editor in Delphi or C++Builder you've noticed that Cut, Copy and Paste don't work (CTRL + X, CTRL + C, CTRL + V). Well actually it's just Paste (CTRL + V) that doesn't work. To make a long story short the reason for this problem is due to the architecture of the IDE making it impractical to get this to function. The good news is there is actually a shortcut for Paste. So instead of CTRL + V, use Shift + Insert.

C++Builder Applications in the Wild

About 8 years ago the Missus worked for Santa Cruz Environment Health Services sampling the water at all the local beaches. It was a pretty cool job where she drove around Santa Cruz visiting each beach, kicked off her shoes and got a sample of water. Environmental Health Services wanted to display a graph of the amount of E. coli Bacteria and Enterococcus in the water samples on their website. So I spent a few hours writing a simple tool for them called the Poop Plotter using C++Builder. Turns out, it's still being used!

Check out the graph by going to Water Quality Reports and scrolling down to the "Trends for Weekly-Sampled Sites" section. You can also see a more detailed graph of each beach by selecting a beach from the table above.

So if your gonna go for a swim you might want to avoid Capitola, Natural Bridges, and the Boardwalk.