Today has been one of the busiest days I can remember, which is nice because I like having things to do, but is subconciously stressing just because there are things right after another. I’ve had my two hardest classes, a meeting with David Caceres, and now I have to go take a test. After that there’s a two hour rehearsal for the big band, and after that who knows what. On a more interesting note, I had a good talk with David about possibly starting a blog on his site. This would be espescially interesting because I don’t know of any full-timu musicians, much less jazz musicians, who have blogs.

Someone pointed out to me the other day that, without fail, I always eat french fries with my left hand. As I looked down at my left hand digging into the fries and then at my completely idle right hand, I was perplexed. Why was I eating my fries in such a particular fashion? Nature or nurture? It was obviously a learned condition, as I don’t know anyone else who does it, but the real question was how had I learned it?

As much as I analyzed my daily patterns, I couldn’t nail it down. Finally, it dawned on me: the mouse. Years of eating while I was on the computer had trained me to eat hand foods with my left hand and compute with my right. While this isn’t effective with a command-line interface, where I do a lot of my work, for browsing or reading it is just fine. Lately I’ve begun to notice there are several benefits to being able to eat with one hand, multi-task with the other. I’ve found it especially useful when driving, but that warrants a whole other article :).

Just a reminder for those who are interested, the pilot episode of PalmTalk is going to air Tuesday at 9:30 PM, right before the news. If you have Time-Warner cable it’ll be on channel 19, and if you have Phonoscope or TV-Max it’ll be on 71. Next Tuesday is going to be an espescially fun episode as well because there are all the new units coming out and we have also ironed out a lot of the technical kinks we had with the first filming. Now I just need to find someplace with cable so I can watch it!

Well, at about 5 earlier today the finishing touches were put on the curlyquotes module for Movable Type, and I began working on posting it. I had a 5:30 class though, so that put things off for a while. Then there was dinner, then some friends, then the phone, and more distractions (I mean that in the best possible way!) till about 11 p.m. By that time I had been thinking about it forever so I had some neat ideas about how to present things and integrate it into the site. Well, three hours and 1300 lines of PHP later, the site now has a Script section integrated with the new membership system. Whew, Talk about feature creep!

The best writing is rewriting, as is evidenced by the regex module reaching its maturity. The basic functionalities of the member and systems are in now, but watch for it to mature quite a bit over the next week or so.

Register on Photomatt.net, you’ll see why in a few minutes.

Well one nice side benefit of adding the new search engine is that now I know definitively how many pages there are in this site, which I could only speculate on before. Drum roll please . . . 14831. Have you seen them all?

I’ve made quite a few changes to the JazzQuotes section of the site, the most important of which being that it now accepts submissions. I strongly encourage you if you have a favorite jazz quote that isn’t in there already to submit it. I also expanded the database to hold some interesting information in the future. Watch this space.

Picture yourself, the website I posted about a few days ago has posted my submission. Cool, huh? Your homework assignment for the night is to submit your own, then leave a comment telling me about it.

I think I’ve started to taste the first bit of winter in the air. I better get to bed though, if this rain keeps up I’m going to have to swim to school.

Todo:

1. Buy umbrella
2. Check if it’s going to rain before I go out in the morning
3. An active desktop item for this would be cool

That said, I do enjoy frolicking in the rain every now and then, but I have electronics to watch after! I can’t think about just myself anymore ;).

My first attempt at a trackback, and it appears I’ve failed miserably! Sorry Kymberlie!

The (Ch|K)ristine’s have a very cool new site called Picture Yourself which is a photo site which features pictures where the subject is also the photographer. I think this is a very fun idea, and I look forward to seeing the site grow. Go check it out and submit any photos you might have. I’ve sent one in already.

You know how sometimes when you’re walking under a tree after it’s rained and someone shakes a branch while you’re under it and it drips all its drops on you? Something similar happened to me while I was driving today down Weslayan in West University, a street which doesn’t commonly have eighteen-wheelers on it, but I was behind one. Anyway this huge moving truck would shake all the trees when it went under them and they would rain on me. My car emerged slightly wet, but covered in flowers, so this cloud had a silver lining.

The cold is starting to subside, and things are clearing up. I’ve only missed one day of classes and I’m looking forward to going back tomorrow. I went by Fry’s today to pick up some wireless networking equipment for a client (setting up wireless networks is a gas!) and took the oppurtunity to pick up some of those blue LED fans that they sell there. Not only do they look pretty darn cool, but they seem to work better and ‘fan’ more than my old ones. However with a grand total of five fans running in my tower now, it sounds like a plane is taking off when I bot up. I’ll take some pictures soon! I still have some picture catching up to do though.

My sinuses do not get along with the rest of my body.

I seem to have contracted what I can only hope is a common cold, with all the symptoms to be expected with such a malady. Now beyond the normal yuckiness, this is espescially a bummer (technical term) because I haven’t gotten sick in a while. Not a while like my Dad, who is remarkably healthy, but long in Matt-time, about 3-4 months. This might not seem significant but if you’ve known me for a while you know that sometimes I’m liable to get sick a lot for extended periods of time. I credit my run of healthiness at least in part to my health-nut former economics teacher, who showed me the wisdom in good living. Overall I’m not too worried about this; I can judge these things pretty well by now and I should be able to get this out of the way pretty soon. Or at least I better–I’m too busy not to! Maybe that’s why I haven’t gotten sick lately, I just haven’t had time.

Dave Barry – On hallowed ground is one of the best articles I read yesterday. There was quite a range, from an utterly offensive editorial in The Daily Cougar to the dozens of touching accounts I read on different blogs.

A return to normalcy? Not quite, but it’s a beginning. Grief is a natural reaction to extraordinary events, it’s a protection mechanism to help us cope. However when it’s prolonged it can have the negative effect of holding us from moving forward. It’s impossible not to grieve with the images being shown on every station and website, however, things must move forward. I think that a lot of people took a step back and thought about things yesterday, and I couldn’t think of a better way to honor the memory of September 11th.

9/11 is a flashbulb memory for most everyone; every trivial detail about where we were, who we were with is burned into our memories. For my generation, this is really the first event of that kind, thankfully. I tried to think of today as a day of quiet introspection–remembrances, resolutions, emotions, and most of all, examination of today’s events. Where has the US gone since 9/11? I think reaction-ism on the part of some lawmakers has hurt the very things we’re trying to protect: our liberty, freedom, and ultimately, safety for ourselves and our progeny.

Anyway, mostly because I don’t want these things to fade in my own mind, I have set it up so on the 11th of every month the memorial (greyscale) theme will load for that day.

I know at some point you’ve wondered just how big this site really is. Or not. But if you want to know how much space all those dang pictures take up check out the new feature on the Zeitgeist. All the stats on that page are live!

Just wanted to let everyone know that the Houston Wireless Users Group is meeting tomorow at Kaveh Kanes. Here’s the announcement from Barrett:

Tuesday September 10th is the second Tuesday of the month…which
means…it’s meeting time again! Steven/Erewhon will be speaking about
video via 802.11b and a neighborhood-wide “wireless security mesh”
starting at 7:30 PM @ Kaveh Kanes. This is our first presentation on
the application of 802.11b technology outside of simply extending
Internet access. It should be fun.

The Zeitgeist for this site is now officially online, though it still needs some work. My plan is to add a new statistic to it every night for two weeks, so check it often to see what’s new. It’s great practice for my SQL and PHP skills, and I highly recommend making your own if you would like to hone your programming chops. I also have a similar page over at Mullenweg.com that gives some interesting info gleaned from our genealogical database, though I must admit the life expentancy data isn’t heartening! If you have any ideas for possible statistics for this site leave a comment and I promise I’ll implement every feasible idea.