I found this through a AdWord on Google search for “What are we having for lunch?”. Sometimes life is too short.
The Countdown Begins
It looks like today is the 7th, which means it is a mere 4 days ’till my birthday. I will be turning a healthy 19 years old. At a loss for what to get? I have a wishlist available for those who may be curious.
Now is also a perfect oppurtunity to plug Kymberlie’s neat project I Wish, You Wish which is a collection of bloggers’ birthdays and wishlists, which i think is a pretty nifty idea.
Switch… Again.
It has been a while, but it seems like my laptop has finally been fixed. Of course, they took just long enough to mess my schedule up, and get totally used to this laptop. The good news is that the old laptop should have all my stuff on it, and it will be nice to get back to the 1600×1200 screen, but I will miss the built-in Wi-Fi on this one. Now it’s time to do the dance of transferring all my stuff over. Since my email is all in IMAP that usually isn’t a problem, but somehow I always seem to accumulate tons of junk all over the hard drive that is important for whatever reason.
I have a really funny story about the Best Buy people fixing it: My mom calls them up today to see if it’s ready, well the guy says they got the pesky power button problem working, but now there’s something else wrong with it. He wasn’t able to log in to my account (good) but he tried to guess the password anyway (Umm, why?). Apparently when he pressed the keys, it would type a different letter than he was pressing. When he pressed “a” or “m” it was fine, but every other letter was wrong.
Sound familiar? As everyone who has ever used my laptop knows, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature . I switched to a Dvorak keyboard layout two years ago and I haven’t looked back since. In addition to allowing me to type faster and more comfortably, it also has (as demonstrated above) a security benefit. (Unless of course you know the secret combination to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.)
To Good To Be True?
I love how every link on this site leads back to itself. I just got something identical in the mail from PalmGear, that linked to that page. I’m skeptical, especially when the source shows the whole thing was done with Word.
There is a site that gives away free screen protectors, but they charge unusually high shipping rates. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Habit
Aristotle said that excellence is not an act, but a habit. So is blogging. Over the holidays I’ve been away, busy, out, and I’ve fallen out of the habit of sitting down at the computer and writing the things that are important to me. My online time has only diminished somewhat, but my blogging time has diminished a great deal.
What the hiatus lacked in writing, I hope to make up in pictures. I have about five hundred pictures, in various stages of being posted, from the holidays. Once they’re all up I’ll post some highlights.
Gallery: 1-6-2003
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Holidays
I hope everyone had as nice as a holiday as I did. It feels good to be back though.
Glasses
About two years ago I went and picked out a new frame to go with my new prescription. I wandered all over the store, but the ones that caught my eye (so to speak) were, in hindsight, terrible for me. I have an ovular face, and these were skinny and rectangular. The color was a deep brown, I put them on and felt a little taller, and things looked a little sharper, despite the fact that the prescription wasn’t in them yet. The design was fairly basic, but they had a brand name on them (I think Polo) so they were hideously overpriced. My judgment was influenced by Antitrust, a movie where the handsome main character, Milo, had dark glasses much like these.
Once the lenses came in I wore them to school, and the reactions were mixed, to say the least. Even the same people seemed to vary their opinions throughout the course of the day. It was different yes, but I don’t seem to remember it being that big of a deal. As my love goggles began to fade, I started to see why. They were skinny, and the way they sat on my “Roman” nose made them tilt oddly. One of my best friends summed it up later is that with the old glasses I looked like a doctor and with the new ones I looked like a lawyer. How should that be taken? I still don’t know. I’ve seen Ally McBeal, there are attractive lawyers. I’ve met some nice lawyers. But does it have an implication of moral tinge? When someone says you look like a lawyer in high school, it makes you think.
Anyway my mind wandered down this path today in the glasses shop by my house. I stopped in to get a “tune-up” on my current old glasses. They’ve been bent a little funny, thanks to me sitting on them a few times; the nose-pads needed to be replaced; the screw on the left was about to come out. The prescription is a little old, but that’s to be fixed later. The dark rims were there, and they called out to me. I flirted with them, tried on a pair or two, and laughed at the mirror at someone I had forgotten.
Gallery: 12-31-2002
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Gallery: 12-29-2002
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Gallery: 12-28-2002
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Bah
Don’t you hate it when you’re working on a really nice post through the web interface and you lose it? Bah humbug!
Merry Christmas!
I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. 🙂
Wish Me Luck . . .
. . . as I head out into the massive throngs tomorrow (today) to do Christmas shopping. I’ve made the list; I’ve checked it twice. If I had any sense this would have been done weeks, if not months ago, but this should be an adventure. If you want to join in for the time of your life, give me a call :). Or not: apparently my phone has been giving “Ciruit busy” messages to people all day. Hopefully T-Mobile will resolve all that by tomorrow.
Gallery: 12-24-2002
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Gallery: 12-22-2002
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PHP Acronym Function
The acronym script I discussed in my last post is now finished and ready to go. Check out the acronymit function if you think you have someplace to use it. I have to stop naming these things myself, it gets worse as time goes on :).
Also there are tons of new photos in the photolog so check that out if you haven’t yet. Note that some days have been updated!
Gallery: 12-21-2002
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Almost There
I believe that in the weblog medium, nothing should come between the world and your words. Ideally you should be able to type a block of text, and it will be presented in a typographically sound, semantically meaningful manner without any intervention from you, the blogger. Unfortunately, everyone is caught up in presentation. Personally I’m very familiar with this because my aesthetic compels me to do things like curl my quotes, define every single acronym, and use paragraphs instead of multiple break tags, but this is a barrier to publishing. Before I had the curly quotes script, I would manually type in the HTML entities every time I used an apostrophe or quote, which as you can imagine can be very tedious. That’s been taken care of, and the code has even been integrated into Cafelog, the classiest weblogging software out there. I’ve addressed the paragraph problem in a rather superficial way that needs some looking at, and today I decided to take a look at the acronym problem. I’ve got it working just fine, I just need to hash out a little code that sorts an array based on the length of its key, and then I’ll put it up on the scripts part of the site. After this I want to clean up the paragraph code to deal with block-level tags, and then maybe port this BlogTimes thing I’ve been seeing around to PHP.
Update: Darn recursive acronyms! How ironic that the acronym PHP is messing up my script!
Update: It’s now online.
Acronym Test
My laptop has 512MB of memory. The W3C should encourage WYSIWYG editor makers to output valid XHTML. MB RSS XML.