Taking niacin for your cholesterol? This stuff from GNC is awesome. I’ve been taking 500mg of Niacin 2x a day for years now. As daily pill regimens go it’s relatively benign, but the 10 minutes or so of hot flashes and flushing 20 minutes after you take the pill sucks. I thought the no flush version from GNC would be a gimmick, and it’s a good bit more expensive, but man, it’s worth it. No flushing, no itching, no hot flashes. Well worth $15-20 more a month. If you’re taking Niacin you owe it to yourself to try this stuff.
In which my mother meets a feral cat
My mom’s cats have been stalked off an on by a feral cat that’s taken up residence in their neighborhood, and at least once one of her cats has ended up in the hospital as a result. Her most recent adventure follows, in her words, edited slightly by me:
Picture this: I’m minding my own business–taking a bath (okay, don’t
picture that) reading my latest escapist lit when I hear a crash in the
house. I am alone; the door is locked; the lights off in the living
room; only the cats are in attendance. I hear no strange cry out, meow
or anything. So I just wait then call out “everything okay out there
boys and girls?” and hear nothing for a bit. Then I think I hear
something, but it sounds like young girls talking. No TV, radio, etc.
is on. We have no phone machine that records out loud, we have no close
neighbors…so I get out, wrap a towel around me, and go check. I find
nothing wrong in the kitchen, but when I turn around, I see Black at
attention looking toward the living room. I head in that direction. As
I pass the staircase, I see the screen has fallen from the sky light
and is a bent mess midway up the stairs. All my cats are in these days
because of the recent injuries at the mouth of the local bully cat. I
can guess what’s going on at this point. The hissing and growling
confirm that said bully cat has just “dropped in.” What follows was
not fun. The living-room was dark, I’m still barefoot in a towel, so I
get a robe and sandals on and go in carefully to turn on the light. The
other cats are getting defensive so I lock Black in my room. Meuller is
crouched by the corner next to the couch, so I don’t worry about him so
much and Kitty Girl is somewhere out of the way. The feral cat is
throwing itself against the screen in the open window seat window. I go
over, turn on the lights and try to open the other window– that now
has a broken screen thanks to one of my boys– (discovered after Black
kept getting out one day last week). The cat hissed and growled at me
and made those little raised claw gestures to me, then ran out of the
living room. I went to open the front door and he ran back to the
window seat. I followed him and tried to calm him and coax him out and
he eventually figured out it was an opening and he bolted. Such
excitement.
How much do I hate that cat? The cat fell at least 10 feet! It couldn’t
have broken its neck and died? Every time I think it has gone to a new
territory I see it and have to start my “count” again. But this was too
much. Now I have to worry about it falling through in the guest room
which is closed off to keep the AC in the other room. It would tear the
room apart. No one would know it was in there if it happened during the
day. What a nightmare.
I was number 50 something for the have-a-heart trap at the pound two
weeks ago. They said it would be a few weeks.
That cat is damn scary I’ll tell you. It is truly a wild creature.
Beautiful, but wild.
Other than that, sure, I’m fine if you overlook my pulled back gained
when I reached and bent (bad combo) to pick up the lysol can to give a
little relief to the room because at least one of the cats is relieving
him or her self on the bathroom floor just outside the cat box–too
lazy to go in? I think not. They are pissed (literally) cause I won’t
let them out!!!!!!!!
[/end mom adventure]
It’s funny, I never thought of a feral cat as much of a nuisance. We used to see them behind the restaurants I worked at when I was a kid, but they were skittish and seemed harmless. How bold would you have to be to jump through a screen on the roof of a house? That screen she is describing is at least 8 feet off the ground too, it opens over a stairway. Hard to imagine a cat leaping through that hissing the kitty equivalent of ‘I kick all your asses now!’ My mom’s cats are, sadly, declawed, which is why they are getting their heads handed to them. If she manages to do away with the feral kitty from hell or gets it trapped and shipped off to kitty penitentiary I’ll post a followup.
You have to love the name of this perl script
The Demoroniser ought to be in every self-respecting web geek’s toolkit, even if I can’t vouch for it being any more useful than, say, the tools in Dreamweaver designed to to do the same thing. It’s a perl script designed to help clean up the unholy mess that is the html microsoft word writes if you use its html export function. Even if you have no intention of downloading it its worth visiting the site just to read the humorous jibes directed at Microsoft by the script’s author as he takes them to task for being so clueless about html and text encoding.
Go on vacation. Take lots of pictures….
…come home to discover they’re all corrupt and you can’t get any of them off your compact flash card. Sound like the plot to a bad tv sitcom? Actually it happened to me. I spent a glorious 5 days on Lake George during the first week of August, took tons of pictures and then got home and discovered every single one of them was corrupt. Did I give up in frustration? Smash my camera in a fit of angry geek violence? Go steal someone else’s vacation photos off of flickr and then try and pawn them off as my own? Nope, none of the above. Instead I did some research and found Smart Recovery, a free win32 utility for file recovery off of corrupted memory cards. There are plenty of commercial products designed to deal with this problem, but I’m cheap and impatient and this filled the bill nicely – in fact it also recovered photos that I had taken at Roger’s Rock earlier in the summer which had also gotten corrupted (and which should have tipped me off to something being wrong with the camera – at the time I thought it was just an aberration since it had never happened before). Anyway this should definitely be added to your toolkit if you’re on the pc.
A slightly ironic aside – a couple of days after I recovered my pictures an instructor at Skidmore called to thank me for the help I had given her with some materials she was using in a book being published this fall. She had just sent the final version off to the publisher. During the course of the conversation she told me her horror story of losing a ton of materials she had on her 1 gig thumb drive that had gotten corrupted just days before she had to send it in, and how thankfully it only cost her $90 for a technician to recover them. I told her to call me next time, I would only charge her $45. I was kidding of course, but it is worth keeping Smart Recovery around for these kinds of episodes.
Automate your adblock extension filterset updates
I’ve mentioned how fantastic the ad block firefox extension is in the past. Properly configured, you need never look at an ad again. I’ve also linked to the location of a great, regularly updated set of filters at pierceive.com. The problem is you have to remember to update periodically, and given the struggle going on between the advertisers who want you to see their ads and the rest of the world who would rather not, you really need to update pretty regularly, which is something of a hassle. Enter the Filterset.G Updater, a firefox extension that will automatically update your filterset every 5 days. Sounds like an anti-virus checker, doesn’t it? It’s still in beta but has been working fine for me since beta 2 (they’re up to beta 3 now). If you’d rather not see ads when you’re browsing, get this up and running. And install the most excellent Flashblock extension while you’re at it, so you can opt out of any non-essential flash content.
How to make Mac OS stop dumping .DS_Store files everywhere
Well, actually just across networks, where it’s the most infuriating. If you run servers and you’re sick of having to clean up the bajillions of .DS_Store files macs dump everywhere on your drives, get the mac support person/s to read this brief documentation then get them to make the appropriate changes on the macs attached to the network. It won’t make the problem go away, but it will reduce the volume somewhat. I understand the usefulness of these files but I think Apple is being a bad network citizen by shipping their machines with this setting on by default. It makes sense on an all-mac network, which exists in maybe .01% of the networks in the world. The rest of the world’s networks would appreciate Mac’s keeping their metadata to themselves.
At first, there was the list of gui web editors….
…and it was good. But then it stopped being updated, and there was some small gnashing of teeth. But then the good folks at Genii Software took over and started updating it again, and there was much rejoicing in webgeek land.
So long Hunter
Thanks for being you. This article brought a wistful smile to my face this morning. Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes are to be blown into the sky via fireworks from the top of a huge double-thumbed fiberglass fist. It’s so perfectly appropriate. If you’ve never read any of his books, go get Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You’re in for a treat.
Interesting win32 knowledge management tool
Evernote is most closely related to Macintosh tools like Hog Bay Notebook and Aquaminds Notetaker – it’s a note taking/personal organization tool. It distinguishes itself in a couple of ways. Firstly it has an attractive and well designed interface. It also supports a ton of data formats and input methods, allowing you to draw together web pages/snippets of html, handwritten text recorded with a tablet or digital pen, imagery, and data from a spreadsheet all into one collection of materials. It also has native support for Tablet PC’s ink and has handwriting recognition. It has a couple of useful tools for organizing your content – the somewhat standard categories and the timeline ‘tape’ view which lets you see your content as you added it over time. Additionally it has some built in templates for things like todos, shopping lists and other personal organizational tasks. It also features rudimentary outliner support and comes with excellent documentation. This is a really promising and well designed app that’s worth a look for windows users looking for some help organizing their digital (and analog) lives.
Another excellent free screen recorder
I mentioned camstudio recently. Today I found an alternative solution, also free. Wink. It can’t output to video (it only outputs to flash) but it’s more featureful in terms of markup and presentation tools you can use to overlay instructions, text, audio, pictures and so on onto the screen recordings you make. It also runs on Linux as well as windows. Again no mac version unfortunately, though since this runs on linux there is at least some hope that it will ultimately run on a mac. This is another package that we’re evaluating for training and documentation purposes. If you need to do screen recording on your windows or linux machine this is well worth a look.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 