Just testing to see if the new design is working, I think I’ve made a bad mistake in the templates.

[update]. Yep. Bugs. More than I thought, stupid IE. Some of these bugs will persist for a little while as I work through the most important issues one by one. Anyway let me know what you think of the new look if you’re so inclined. And again I plead, ditch IE and use a better browser, mozilla is tops these days but anything is preferable to IE.

…after someone tried to use the number of hits on a particular term on google:

[original quote]And I can also search for “liberal satan ass cream” and I get results too, over 2000 in fact.

[followup]Without commenting on the validity any opnions regarding the justification of the war, that is the best rebuttal of google evidence I’ve ever seen.

Cracked me up. Have to agree with the second guy, too; you can’t use the number of results on a particular search term as evidence of much. You can search on pretty much anything and get thousands of hits.

I’ve installed two very handy new utilities on daves-place. First of all, my own instance of sitebar, which is an excellent server-based utility for managing your bookmarks. I regularly use 5 different computers and trying to keep track of where I have a particular link is a major hassle for me. My hope is sitebar can solve this problem. You can access my copy here, and if you use the help link at the bottom it will show you how to install the system as a sidebar in your browser, or at least in browsers that support such things, like mozilla.

The other thing I now have up and running is my own teamspeak server. This is mostly for gaming with friends, but it can also be used for the equivalent of internet telephony. Pretty soon I’m going to start leaving myself logged in as a test to see who will actually log in on a regular basis and say hello. Mind you this is PC only for now, and you need to get in touch with me for an account. They’re working on porting the client to other platforms, wander over to their forums and encourage them if you’re so inclined. Teamspeak has become the defacto clan gaming voicechat app over the last year and a half. Oh, the address for the teamspeak server is this site’s domain.

Remember Sea Monkeys, from the back of comic books when you were a kid? I actually had some when I was around 8 or 9. I remember being tremendously disapointed that my sea monkeys didn’t look like the jovial family unit the ad had promised but still, I had some fun with them way back in the day. These are basically sea monkeys for adults, in an attractive sealed glass container. I confess, I’d really like to have one of these for my office, even though they are fairly pricey. Still, I might splurge after christmas and get myself some.

Gross right? Yet that’s me these days. It’s all because of this research. This is to my knowledge the first clinical proof of this, though it’s been sort of folk wisdom that this works prior to this study. So now twice a day I eat a quarter of a teaspoon of cinnamon. We’ll see at the end of January whether it helps. Oh and the burps? To be honest they’re actually kind of pleasant 😉

For several years I was fascinated with QTVR and even investigated working as a service provider to real estate agents producing panoramas of houses going on the market. I’m glad I didn’t get seriously into that business, as ultimately I would have failed as the products worked their way down into the consumer market, but I still have more than a passing interest in the production of qtvr. We also use them at work occasionally. One of the impediments to production of qtvr’s is how time consuming the process is. You have to shoot multiple images and then stitch them together in specialized software, very little of which has been particularly easy to use. In response to this vendors produced lenses that can shot 180 and 360 degree panoramas, but they suffered from the barrel distortion wide angle lenses introduce, leading to very odd looking panoramas. The prices are also very high and the 360 degree solution is too bulky to be carried around on a regular basis.

Sony is trying to take the process another step forward with a new lense system that aims to be small , less susceptible to distortion, and inexpensive. I hope this leads other vendors produce cheaper higher quality lense systems. It’s unlikely I would buy a Sony camera to shoot VR’s, but I would definitely buy a lense for my canon that operated like the system Sony is producing.

I actually never played around with them when I was young, I think I was one generation too old for them, but I remember my brother having a few of them around when I was in college. Many of the different series that were available have gone out of print and now some of the original authors have agreed to let them be republished online. To that end developers have created and xml schema and tools to allow you to publish your own works online. You can check out some of the finished books or if you’re more interested in creating your own, the toolset is a free download.

…work around them. It’s well known that Bush has interfered with stem cell research. Clever scientists have managed to coerce white blood cells into becoming stem cells recently, theoretically managing to get around the restrictions on stem cell use. This has potentially huge ramifications for disease treatment, including my own diabetes. Keep your fingers crossed that this pans out.

Check out wolfenstein in 5k, a clone of the seminal 3d shooter written in under 5k to run in your webrowser. Impressive, even if the graphics do err…well, they suck. Mind, you need a reasonably standards compliant browser, ie, mozilla, etc etc.

…the new worry when going on vacation is how much of your automatically recorded tv will your tivo eat. I have a 20 hour partition on my home-built tivo clone. I came back from a week’s vacation to discover that Mean Streets, the latest Harry Potter Movie, several episodes of Law and Order and Survivor, and a smattering of other stuff had all been eaten to make room for the new. HBO ran a Larry David Show marathon over the Thanksgiving week and that seems to be the culprit. Time to scrape together some cash for a large drive to hold all this stuff.