Check this thing out. It lets you broadcast mp3’s from say your laptop or your portable mp3 player to your car stereo using the FM radio band. And it’s only $15. Someone is getting one of these for xmas, and no, it’s not you Jesse 😉
A test
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.
Oral surgery is no fun
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.
Metafilter is my favorite source of quotes these days
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 quote.
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.)
Excellent historical maps
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.
Cool jabber idea
Man do I wish I knew how to program better. I’ve been playing around with ways to publish a sort of daily ‘stream of conciousness’ page where I could instantly publish phrases, thoughts, links and so on in one contiguous stream. So I started block diagraming how I would go about doing it, kicking around various techniques and so on and it occured to me that the coolest thing would be to have it be possible to post via an instant messenger client, which in this case would have to be Jabber. The problem is getting it running would require my getting a number of things installed onto the server, including xerces and Xalan and so on, and put simply, I suck at getting things installed on linux, and even once I had everything installed I would still have to figure out how to parse the incoming xml from Jabber and…..and…and a lot of stuff I don’t know how to do. Still, I’m going to dig into this further, I really like the idea.
CSS box model – more complex than rocket science
I’ve spent the day trying to better understand how the CSS box model* works. While doing so I came across this paragraph:
Vertically adjacent margins of elements in the normal document flow are collapsed. In other words, if two margins are vertically adjacent to each other, then the actual distance between the two element borders is the maximum of the adjacent margins. In the case of negative margins, the absolute maxmimum of the negative adjacent margins is subtracted from the maximum of the postive adjacent margins. The vertically adjacent margins of elements which have been floated or positioned do not collapse.
Riiiiiiiight. Got that? The next paragraph is even worse.
*(cascading style sheets – the lingua franca of web aesthetics….the box model refers to using CSS to position elements on the page)
Finally a voice of reason
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 😉
Site news
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.
