Irony

Trying my best to finish some stairway lighting today but the electric gods are against me. I spent all morning trying to find a possible error in my new 3 way lighting circuit only to find that the fixture itself is giving me problems. Oh - well - I had to stop and move on. Eric and i are having our friends over for dinner tonight and the house is a mess. So I am quickly cleaning and will start cooking shortly. Hopefully the chicken defrosting gods are at least with me today.













In a biting piece of irony, the U.S. patent office sent me a nice letter letting me know that on January 2nd, patent # 7,158,123 Secondary touch contextual sub-menu navigation for touch screen interface was awarded to me and several former coworkers at Xerox. Here is the riveting abstract: A touch sensitive user interface of the type having a display screen for displaying images representative of menus and selectable list objects, for example; control logic responsive to the touch sensitive user interface for determining the contact position of a first probe and a second probe, such as two separate fingers, thereon, displaying menus including list objects representing primary and secondary features or functions respectively, so that a user may touch a selection on the primary menu with the first probe and subsequently touch an area on the display screen where a contextually related secondary menu is displayed for selection of contextually related features or functions.
The idea was to basically provide a "right mouse" menu to people using touch screens.
the Irony: Three of the people on the patent [ including myself ] have been laid off over the past 3 years. - Oh well - back to chicken defrosting.