I recently helped a lad put together a school science project that involved the idea of using "shake flashlights" as a power source.  The idea seemed like a good one when he first proposed it.  But when we began to implement it we immediately ran into a quite unexpected problem: it's impossible to find shake flashlights in retail stores.

I ran into Gall's Law recently, which states: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

 I decided to try to speed up my Vista laptop in place of - or at least before - upgrading it to Windows 7.  That would allow me a fairer comparison to the speedup after a clean install of Windows 7.  And that led me down the Yellow Brick Road of the Vista defragger.

I spent part of the day today trying to figure out whether I want to "upgrade" from Vista to Windows 7.  I run Vista on a Toshiba laptop and I've had a lot of problems with Vista: it's really a complete piece of garbage. 

Well, dspGuru will be ten years old in a few days. It hardly seems possible. It's interesting to look back on how it turned out relative to what I was hoping for when I launched it. dspGuru has mostly been a success. At the most basic level, it scratched an itch that I had - and still have - to spread the gospel of DSP. Of all the missions one might adopt to make the world a better place, helping folks learn DSP pales in comparison to ending polio and squashing sugar ants. But we all need a mission.