Glasses

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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.

Wish Me Luck . . .

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. . . 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.

Almost There

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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.

Cheeky Photocopies

Humor

It’s not often you find a gem like this on a fairly reputable website, but they have a quite humorous answer to the question Our office parties can get a bit out of hand when people start playing pranks. Will our photocopier support anyone’s weight? Here’s a taste of it:

If the office Christmas Party goes really traditional and you end up making ‘cheeky’ photocopies, you won’t be exposed to toner or harmful light for long enough to hurt you, but you may well find yourself spending the rest of the evening face down in casualty, having shards of glass removed from your bottom. This is a surprisingly common occurrence, as photocopiers simply aren’t designed to be robust enough to take any kind of weight, even if yours has managed to withstand a lot of rough treatment and kicks all year.

Creative Commons License

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I’ve been following the Creative Commons for a while now, and finally it recently came online. I browsed the site a bit, read through the featured profile of the Rice guy, but didn’t really do anything. Today I decided to choose a license to put all of the original content of this website under, and you’ll find the details at the bottom of every page. This means the photos, scripts, text, everything is available under this license. So enjoy!

Random Number Generator

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There used to be a relatively nice random number generator on the computer where we do the HPUG meetings, but when they redid some stuff they took it off. We used to use it to pick winners for door prizes, and all was good. But since it’s been gone we’ve been resorting to less-than-random methods for picking winners, and the Web-Tech SIG was having the same problem. So I decided to put a little something together. Enjoy!