The Houston Palm Users Group meeting went very well, with Chris giving an interesting presentation on networking using your Palm, which I enjoyed. Afterwords I drifted over to the Web Tech SIG where they had food, and I ended up winning Microsoft Visual Interdev 6, and a Microsoft t-shirt, and a “security pack.” Oh the irony!! Not going to Galveston tonight like planned, but we’ll see what happens. Tonight actually might be a great opportunity to catch up on some work.

I’ve been basically totally preoccupied the past week, so I have a ton of catching up to do online. Most importantly Friday was Elaine’s birthday! Go send her some birthday love if you haven’t already. While your at it Kymberlie sounds like she had a wonderful anniversary, and that’s wonderful to hear. I finally got my blogroll working again, and took the opportunity to add some links that have been missing for a while. Zeldman has had more good writing lately then I can keep up with. So much content, so little time! Follow every link on his site. The Houston Wireless list has had some goings-on lately, and it should be interesting to see how things pan out. Joe Clark’s Slashdot interview is the longest I’ve seen yet, probably about 54k of text. That guy never ceases to amaze me.

People are coming into town from all over, and I am free as a bird till January, so this should be a lot of fun. Tonight I’m spending the night in Galveston, just because. Yay for Christmas break! It’s really my favorite time of the year. The music, the food, the weather—it’s just perfect. I hope everyone is having a happy holidays.

I know that as soon as I get used to this laptop I’m going to have to take it back. *sigh*

I just took my last final and turned in my last papers. I’m golden until January :). Now it’s time to party like it’s 1999!

My mother would be proud.

While I am a fan of Dante, I think he may have missed something in his portrayal of the netherworlds, and I just want to assure the guy who went out of his way to splash me with his car as I was waiting to cross the street that there is a special level of hell reserved for people like that. Geez.

I got my first final out of the way, only three more to go. I’m right now enjoying the broadband at a nice internet café called “Get Internet Café” or something like that. The salad was great, but I must get back to work now. Wish me luck!

I’ve been using the new Cross Ion pen for a few months now, and it has worked wonderfully. I think my favorite thing about it is the small size it goes to, which is easy on my pockets. That’s also why I think I’d like a Tungsten T. But apparently I just ran an entire load of clothes through the washer and dryer with this pen, unknowingly of course. I saw the pen first thing when I opened the dryer, and even though some of my favorite shirts were in there for some reason the first thing I did was see if the pen still worked! Even better yet, it did. On to the clothes: as far as I can tell there are no ink stains on anything! I’ll do a closer examination in the morning but things look good.

Got this in the mail this afternoon from Mike, thought it was interesting.

This is a VERY simple way to understand the tax laws.

Let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day,
ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their
bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this.

The first four men—the poorest—would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1,
the sixth would pay $3, the seventh $7, the eighth $12, the ninth $18, and
the tenth man—the richest—would pay $59.

That’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant
every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement — until one day, the
owner threw them a curve (in tax language– a tax cut).

“Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the
cost of your daily meal by $20.” So now dinner for the ten only cost $80.00.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the
first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about
the other six — the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20
windfall so that everyone would get his “fair share?”

The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted
that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and The sixth man would end
up being PAID to eat their meal. So the restaurant owner suggested that it
would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he
proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so the fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid
$5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the tenth man with a bill
of $52 instead of his earlier $59. Each of the six was better off than before.
And the first four continued to eat for free.

But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
“I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man, but he, pointing
to the tenth. “But he got $7!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man,
“I only saved a dollar too, It’s unfair that he got seven times more than me!”

“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man, “Why should he get $7 back when I got
only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!.” “Wait a minute,” yelled the first
four men in unison, “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the
poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn’t
show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it
came time to pay the bill, they discovered, a little late what was very
important. They were FIFTY-TWO DOLLARS short of paying the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college instructors, is how the tax
system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from
a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they
just may not show up at the table anymore.

Where would that leave the rest? Unfortunately, most taxing authorities
anywhere cannot seem to grasp this rather straightforward logic!

I’m staying at my Grandmother’s house because the gas at my house is off, which means no heat, oven, or hot water. Also in an unfortunate turn of events my laptop has stopped working, so there most likely won’t be many updates the next couple of days.

Note to self: I will stop labeling CDs before I actually burn them.

Okay the weirdest thing happened to me today. I’m just going about my business, and chatting with a few people online, when all of a sudden everything I type goes in backward. The cursor would stay at the start of the line and the letters would just go in normally, albeit in the wrong order. At first I really didn’t even notice, because I was typing and looking at my other monitor. Then it started worrying me. What could have caused this? Did I somehow activate a international feature in Windows for languages that read right to left? Well I racked my brain, and also kept up my conversations on instant messenger, mostly because it was really funny seeing different people’s reactions to it. To my surprise no one at all had trouble reading the backward text, and they all recognized it immediately. Two people were cracking up while another was convinced I had downloaded some program to do it. The other possibility of course in the back of my mind that I had gotten a virus with a sense of humor. I suspected this doubly because I never get viruses in my email but today I received (and Norton caught) four of them.

Anyway, back to the mystery of the backward typing (gnipyt sdrawkcab), it turns out that when I had gotten a call I put an hard drive down on my desk, however it was on top of my wireless keyboard. Specifically, on top of the left arrow button! Try it, hold down the left arrow button with something and then start typing. It was a very chance thing as well, because if had been in Word or a text box like I am now I would have seen the cursor whizzing by and suspected a key down, but in the chat boxes there was nothing to indicated that the cursor being pushed to the left. Now I better go before they take my geek license away :). (Actually, I was installing GNU/Linux on said other machine so they let me keep it. Whew.)

Well as per my previous commitment, I’m putting my third paper for my Human Situation class online here. It is not my last paper for the class though, as I found out much to my chagrin today. Don’t you love it when they spring these things on you? You can read the text of the paper below as part of the extended entry, how I would highly recommend you read the PDF version of it instead because it captures not only some additional text that I haven’t put below, but also the presentation and layout, which I put a lot of effort and thought into. Also the raw text below doesn’t have citations and other things which are cumbersome to put into HTML right now. I’ve embedded the fonts and such so you can get the full experience as well. If you have any thoughts or criticisms let me know, because although this paper has already been graded and done (I got an A) I’m going to file it as a topic to examine again perhaps later in college. Again you can get the PDF here. Without further ado . . .

Continue reading An Examination of Group Forms →

Very seldom do I read anything on the web as well-written or as well-researched as Understanding Web Typography. It was a long read, especially with all of the juicy links, but I enjoyed it immensely. Via Anil Dash