So…am I happy about it? I guess I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I love lounging around the house in my sweats taking it easy, watching football, playing zoomies, etc etc. When the weather’s nasty I can do this guilt free, so in that respect yesterday was a great day. On the other hand, I had to shovel the driveway for the first time this year. With only 2-3 inches on the ground it was easy as pie, but I couldn’t help ruminating on how soon enough it will be 10 inches or 2 feet or whatever. Becky is convinced I got my double hernia shoveling all the snow last year, so the thirty minutes or so it took me to shovel the driveway were spent mulling this over. On balance, I could do without the snow. Old man winter, I hope you get an intimate introduction to ms global warming this year 😉

I saw myself from two irreconcilable angles in this quote:

[an individual, I’m paraphrasing here], in order to say anything significant, is “forced to generalize.” The true measure of a theory is not that it accounts for all the relevant facts but that it accounts for those facts “better than any other theory.” Without abstraction and simplification there can be no understanding, Huntington maintained. Those who concentrate on the imperfections of a theory, without coming up with a better alternative, are helping no one.

On the one hand I’m incapable of precision when I try and describe things. I can never remember dates, sizes, places, names, anything specific. On the other hand I feel I’m quite good at synthesizing meaning from a complex mess of data and expressing a well constructed opinion about it. So on the one hand the first half of the quote seems to apply directly to me (and I do agree with Huntington’s supposition). On the other, my former coworkers used to hate the fact that I was a deconstructionist – they would come to me with business plans or new product lines and I would rip them to shreds in short order. Yet when asked to come up with better alternatives, I was usually unable to. So which one is me? The deconstructionist or the able synthesizer of ideas? Here lies the irony because in the end I think it’s both.

This weekend my littlest sister went looking for my xmas list and couldn’t find it on my site. Thinking she was dense, I tried to walk her through it on the phone and it soon became clear that her browser wasn’t rendering the site correctly. She was using netscape 4 on a mac and the .css positioning wasn’t rendering correctly. This sucks. Netscape 4 suckage is not news to me, I do this stuff for a living after all, but I’m not using anything radical in my css and the site validates for .css and html. So wtf am I to do. The answer is soon I will have a redirect script in place to deal. I’m not going to spend time trying to accomodate a 3 year old bug ridden browser, very sorry but that’s the long and short of it.

I upgraded to the latest release of moveable type, which is the software I use to run this blog. This post is just a test to make sure the upgrade’s gone smoothly.

I had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled today. What can I say, it sucked. The surgery itself went fine, much like my hernia operation – they put me under and I don’t remember a thing until after they’d finished. On the car ride home the novicaine started to wear off and by the time I was back in my house I was in a lot of pain, but they gave me excellent pain killers (percocet) which really take the edge off. The only problem is they seem to last for about 3 hours and I can only take one every 4 hours so my day went like this: take painkiller, fall into pleasant dreamy sleep. Wake up 2-3 hours later with a gradually increasing throbbing pain in my jaw, watch clock anxiously until I can take a pill again, rinse, repeat 😉

The only other issue is the amount of bleeding, it’s pretty intense. I don’t want to dwell on it so I’ll move right along.

I saved the teeth and now know why I was getting recurring infections the last six months or so. One of the teeth had a cavity in it you could almost fit a bb into. My hunch is that this cavity was up under my gums (my gums were partially covering my wisdom teeth) and this is the source of the infectious material that was causing me so much grief.

All in all I’m relieved, it hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be. I’ll post some pictures of the teeth for the curious, and Becky took a before (normal dave) and after (chipmunk cheek dave) photo so maybe I’ll post those as well. Now it’s back to obesessively watching the clock; 27 minutes till I can take another pill.

I love metafilter. It’s come to be one of my favorite sites. Today’s funny line comes from a thread on metafilter about the Bush administration continuing to push for national missile defense despite the changed political climate:

I thought for sure Bush would stop pushing this after 9/11. I’m not sure where his head is on this. We’re opening our mail with salad tongs and he wants a missile shield?

Think ‘Microsoft’ as you read this:

“Laws are like cobwebs, for if any trifling or powerless thing falls into them, they hold it fast, but if a thing of any size falls into them it breaks the mesh and escapes.”
<font size="-1"Anacharsis (C.600 B.C.)

I haven’t been doing much ‘cool link of the day’ stype stuff in ages, so today, here’s some excellent panoramic maps of various cities around the country from the library of congress.

I can’t possibly say it any better than this. A telling quote:

This war, it will be just like the War on Drugs. It will be potent and effective and our objectives will be clear. The nation had a nasty drug problem and we declared a war on drugs and spent billions over many years and now you can’t buy drugs anymore. It will be just like that.

(that’s sarcasm for the sarcasm impaired 😉

I’ve updated the stylesheets so things look a little better and I’ve spent some time working on the logo with much help and inspiration from Jesse. Also the christmas list is up so those of you who were bugging me about it….stop bugging me 😉

I make no promises but I do hope to be posting more frequently now that this place is starting to look presentable.