Category: general

Napping instead.

:/

(And I’d note that I’m listening to “Let the Music Take Control” by Darude.)

Okay, so I may have bitten off more than I can chew here.

My client recommended me to a friend, and I accepted a new project. Now I have to learn an entirely new system, and figure out what the previous designer did with it–of course he didn’t just use a default template!

I think I could have handled this if I hadn’t said it would take me ten hours to complete.

Somehow, setting a deadline always seems to destroy my ability to think, thus completely undermining my productivity.

HappyNews.com pointed me to The Remembering Site today. It’s a nonprofit website that helps people write their autobiographies.

The brainchild of [Dr. Sarah] McCue and biographer DG Fulford, The Remembering Site is a new non-profit initiative that allows anyone–anywhere–to create their online autobiography by answering a series of story-telling questions from birth to present day. When completed, the author can email the biography to loved ones, make it available for others to read online or even print paper or hardback copies.

“Writing a biography is not as daunting as it appears,” said McCue. “The way we have designed the site makes it easy, fun, and once you get into it, you just can’t stop.”

I would love not only to do this myself, but to get everyone in my family to do it. Mom and AJ might be more willing than Dad and Ben, but I want all of their stories. To get Grandma’s answers I might have to get the questions and take a tape recorder over to her place.

And not just family–I’d love to hear stories from Brooke and Mari, Sam and Hai and Dawn, Noelle…everyone.

Wouldn’t it be neat to have the life stories of the people you love written down?

That’s why I love blogs and blogging…the stories. I love being transported into someone else’s life. And I love the idea that the people I love can live on through their stories.

Apparently it’s $10 to sign up for the website. So that’ll be $10 for each person whose stories I want to hear. Definitely a worthwhile investment, but probably something I’ll have to do one person at a time…

At this moment, I am very eager for it to be tomorrow. I have been eager for it to be tomorrow since this morning.

Tomorrow, I’m sure I will want it to be the next day.

And so on.

Because now I have more than a vague understanding of what to look for to figure out what’s going on with my reproductive system.

I want to take my temperature.

Well, my endocrinologist was very pleased to hear that I’d had a period last month. “I hear you have some good news!” she said excitedly (I’d briefed one of the med students before she came in). Our new plan is to hold off on hormone treatment a little longer to see what happens. During this time I am to check my basal body temperature every morning before doing anything else, and keep a chart. This is to see whether or not I am ovulating. I am to fax her the chart after two weeks or when I get a period, whichever comes first.

She mentioned offhandedly that if I am pregnant, the temperature will stay high on the chart. “Just for your information,” she said.

I’m seeing the endocrinologist tomorrow, and this is what I’m telling her:

1. My timeline of periods:

   9/23-30: last period on hormones; normal
   ~10/1: stopped hormones
   10/6-9: extraordinarily light period
   12/16-20: normal period on 12/17, light/spotty on all other days

2. Symptoms I’ve been having occasionally for the past month or two:
   • Mild to moderate nausea
   • Abdominal cramping

Maybe they hypnotized me into not writing a post about them.

Because both times I’ve encountered the little old man and little old woman on bikes, I’ve meant to post about it, and then never gotten around to it.

The first time I saw them was April 2, 2005, and I’ve had a post sitting in Drafts ever since then. The post isn’t even really about them, except to say that I saw them heading up Evans to Lock on my way to the Canal Trail and then, later, I saw them on their bikes in downtown Augusta. That day, we never got close enough to speak. But on the last day of 2005, I did speak with them, several times, and I even got a picture:

They’re “fruititarians”. They don’t pay rent and they don’t pay taxes. They live somewhere in Hephzibah, and they get to work every day by bicycle. They spend 24 hours a day together. Once a week they ride their bikes as far as they can, talking to as many people as they can about their way of life. They don’t get sick. Their New Year’s day is in the spring, when everything is new, “in the month of Abib”.

They gave me their literature on CD, but I haven’t looked at it yet. I have no idea what religion it is, only that it’s compatible to some extent with the Bible. The little old man said that I was in the literature he gave me, in chapters 37 and 38. He said it was a very inspiring thing to find yourself in the text, along with everyone else in the world.

The first thing he said to me, completely randomly, as he was riding past me (I’d stopped for one of the many pictures I took that day and was just getting moving again), was something about how you have to be careful who you spend your time with, because you don’t want to spend your time with losers who will drag you down. I agreed that that made sense. Really, I thought he and his wife were cute, and I am always interested to hear the philosophies of others. So I rode alongside him a little ways and listened to what he had to say.

I kept passing them and stopping to take pictures, giving them ample opportunities to tell me more about their beliefs. I was intrigued by the fact that they ride their bikes everywhere they go, even as far as Macon. It reminded me of Justin Klein’s “Tour de Japan“. Ever since I got Syuusuke, I have imagined taking a long road trip on my bike. The little old man and woman carry a sleeping bag and one change of clothes. They only eat fruit, and they don’t drink alcohol. I’m not sure if they find their fruit in the woods, or if they buy it at a store…

During our final meeting, heading up the hill towards the Pavilion and Evans to Lock Road, the man finally passed me the CD and told me where to find myself in the literature. Then he and his wife headed off, and I got into my car (and it stalled).

I found the encounter unique and fun. I’ve not been a very outgoing person in my life. Now I’m trying to be more comfortable with talking to strangers. It’s nice when they approach me willingly; it gives me some experience. (Earlier in the ride I saw a large family out together. A train pulled up and parked nearby and the father engaged the engineer in conversation. I said nothing to any of them, but did take some pictures.)

I don’t know that their lifestyle is for me, but I do find it inspiring. It’s great to see people living the way they want to. I often feel like I just go along with the flow rather than pursuing my dreams…

Today Brooke and I met up at the Activities Center at the Greeneway and went around the walking path. I’d never done it before. It’s a lot shorter than the Greeneway proper, and near the Activities Center there’s this awesome water fountain:

After that we headed towards the golf course, intending to head down the river side of the Greeneway and see if anything new is going on with Hammond’s Ferry. However, when we got to the new soccer field that’s being built, we decided to follow the sidewalk alongside it to see where it led. We ended up hiking down rough trails through the forest, spotting deer tracks and awesome soft yellow grass in swirls, until we realized we’d walked in a big U and were back at the soccer park. Like a moron, I didn’t take pictures of any of it.

We headed back towards the Activities Center; Mari had called and wanted to join us, and she would be done with her workout inside soon. So we waited for her on the hillside beside the center, and while we waited we chatted and looked into the sky and I took some pictures.

Then Mari appeared, and Brooke took this picture, which is rather frightening:

And all three of us headed back the way Brooke and I had originally gone, this time making it down to the river. We stopped at the boat dock for pictures before turning around to come back.

It was a nice walk. I really enjoyed being with both of them. We talked about all the usual stuff you might expect girlfriends to talk about. It was cool :)

MSN Encarta has a piece from Tamim Ansary entitled “News: Fact or Fiction?“. I love this guy, and I’ve often thought about this very subject. His is a thorough discussion of the possibilities. Here’s a snip from section two, “Why some news is untrue”:

Since Watergate, we often think of anonymous sources as brave souls revealing dangerous truths at great risk to themselves. But they may just as easily be people injecting falsehoods into the news stream at no risk to themselves.

Indeed, someone can “leak” information into the news anonymously, and then use the resultant story as evidence for a claim: “It must be true–it’s in the paper!”

News reporting based on anonymous leaks can thus turn the press into a particularly insidious type of propaganda outlet. Most people distrust explicit propaganda, but leaks framed as news skirt suspicion.

In the third section, “What to do about untrue news?”, Ansary makes this controversial statement:

In the end, professional journalists and their employers are accountable because they have profits and livelihoods to lose. Behziz, Blair, et al. got fired–every one of them. What can happen to a blogger who lies? Nothing.

I have nothing against bloggers, but “citizen journalism” isn’t journalism. It’s the crowd around the traffic accident. That’s where journalism begins, not where it ends.

The end of the article is a list of things we can do as news readers to sort out fact from fiction. These are some very good recommendations. Here’s the list; go to the article for the explanations of each item.

1. Follow story threads.
2. Randomize your exposure to news sources.
3. Decide if a stated item is a fact. Not a true fact, just a fact–a statement that can be proven true or false.
4. Distrust attribution to vaguely defined groups.
5. Consider a source’s competence and motives.
6. Consider why an anonymous source wants anonymity.
7. If it would make a good movie, be suspicious.

Start thinking critically now! Where are the facts in Ansary’s piece, and where are the opinions?

He actually arrived in the US a couple days ago, but he’s been in briefing/debriefing/medical screening hell ever since. Apparently he’ll be back in Kentucky soon, though.

I wanted to highlight the photos of Iraqi kids he’s got on his smugmug.

Pretty cool stuff. His “This Is Me!” photo is pretty good, too!

His smugmug tagline is awesome:

I love photography and just happened to get an all-expense paid trip to an exotic shooting location this year.

;)

There are all kinds of cool things to see and read on Eric’s blog and smugmug. Check them out.

I’m glad he’s back home safe and sound!

So Scott Kurtz is experimenting with quasi-animation for PvP. The first little thing he put up was so totally boring I couldn’t even finish watching it, but this second one is pretty cute. Hopefully he’ll get better and better at it and come up with some real gems.

But that’s not the most interesting part! You see, there is a mystery to be solved!

At the end of the animation, this screen appears briefly:

Recognize any of them? I spotted Hayao Miyazaki and Anno Hideaki. ;P (What I’d like to know is: why put some of the names in English and some of them in Japanese?)

Regardless, I was fascinated by this huge list of Japanese names, and I wanted to figure out who all those people were.

I need to learn to read kanji…the only name I could make out on my own was “Yamashita”. Oh, and of course I can read “Utsunomiya Satoru”, which is in hiragana. (I should have been able to read “Tanaka”, but alas, I couldn’t remember it.)

Here are all the romaji names, along with links to who they might be:

Anno Hideaki
Fukushima Atsuko
Hashimoto Shinji
Imaishi Hiroyuki
Inoue Toshiyuki
Iso Mitsuo
Kanada Yoshinori
Koike Takeshi
Kondo Yoshifumi
Kotabe Yoichi
Matsumoto Norio
Miyazaki Hayao
Mori Yasuji
Morimoto Koji (worked on Unico!)
Nakamura Takashi
Nishio Tetsuya
Ohashi Manabu
Ohira Shinya
Okiura Hiroyuki

And here are the names in Japanese, with possible translations. I made liberal use of Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC in compiling this list, notably the Kanji Lookup and Dictionary Search [enamdict] pages. Thanks to google.co.jp for helping me discover the links.

大塚伸治 (Otsuka/Ootsuka/Oodzuka Shinji/Nobuji/Nobuhara => Ootsuka Shinji)
大塚康年 (Otsuka/Ootsuka/Oodzuka Yasutoshi)
末吉裕一郎 (Suikichi/Suekichi/Sueyoshi/Matsukichi/Matsuyoshi Yuuichirou => Sueyoshi Yuuichirou)
田辺 修 (Tanabe/Tanahe/Tanape/Tabe/Nakagome Osami/Osamu/Osame/Osameru/Kazaru/Shuu/Shuusaku/Shuuji/Su/Tadashi/Nakashi/Nagashi/Yoshimi/ => Tanabe Osamu)
田中逹之 (Tanaka/Tanata/Tanka/Danaka Tatsuyuki?)
友永和秀 (Tomoe/Tomonaga/Tomohisa Kazuhide/Washuu => Tomonaga Kazuhide)
うつのみやさとる (Utsunomiya Satoru)
山下将仁 (Yamashita Masahito)

Some of those names are nucking futz! How do Japanese people know which pronunciation to use? (Actually, I think I’ve heard that you never really know how to say someone’s name until they introduce themselves…)

My Trick for Looking Up Kanji You Find in a Picture Somewhere and Therefore Can’t Just Copy and Paste:

First, try to figure out the radical! And if that doesn’t work, try looking up the kanji right next to it by radical, and then do a word search for that kanji and hope that the compound will appear. This has a better shot of working if you’re looking up names, but it’s still not 100%. I went through a zillion pages of names before I finally found Masahito. 将 was a slippery little bugger.

In any case…the mystery is solved! All of these people seem to be animators, which would explain the “In Memory Of”. Kurtz and Straub are joking that their Flash animation will destroy these people’s careers.

Me so smart!

(And it only took me three hours…)

…and all I could think to blog about was CSS.

Seriously, Sean and I both forgot our anniversary! :> I guess we’ve both had other things on our mind lately.

I’d forgotten for quite some time how much fun it can be to design and build a website. I had gotten to the point where even thinking about web design sickened me, and the idea of having to do it for a living made me wonder why I ever started designing web pages in the first place.

But right now I have a full time job designing a website, and I’m having a lot of fun.

I’m doing it in PHP and CSS; I’m actually using PHP to create dynamic navigation. I’ve learned a lot in just the week I’ve been working on it. A major focus for me has, of course, been reusability–if, in the future, a new design is needed, I’d like to just apply a new CSS stylesheet rather than rebuild from scratch. My current design is close to that level, but not quite there.

I’ve actually found myself borrowing a lot from what I remember about WordPress themes and templates. Those nice clean PHP layouts were quite the inspiration. I hope I’ve done them justice.

A lot of my web design experience involves throwing out some code and seeing if it does what I think it’ll do…and then debugging the hell out of it when it doesn’t work. It’s fun and I learn a lot that way. Obviously, I’m not one of those programmers who can tell if it’ll “compile” before I even “run” it. I guess my working style could be considered sloppy, which is part of why I gave up on being a computer programmer back in high school. Web design is a nice middle ground, because it requires both technical knowledge and creativity. Since I have reasonable abilities in both, there’s no disconnect between designer and coder, so it works out pretty well.

I think what has made this particular project enjoyable for me is the fact that I’m proud of the work I’m doing. I’m not just half-assing something to fling up and forget about. I’m invested in this project, and I want to see it succeed.

It also helps that my client loves the design ;)

Of course, when I get really involved in web design, I always learn something new, which means I always go back and think about my existing websites and how I can improve them. You never know, this might lead to a flurry of activity from me…

If your blog template is rendered entirely in CSS, and you have a float inside a float, please apply a line-height to the container to solve IE’s Peekaboo Bug. People have known about this bug since 2003, and I guess Microsoft isn’t going to fix it anytime soon. I personally discovered the solution via Google, as I was trying to make an all-CSS design and running into the same problem.

Yes, yes, IE blows. But a lot of people still use it (including me), so suck it up!

Because your life might be interesting to someone.

You never know!