Escaped Thoughts

I saw this headline on Google news, and found it somewhat disturbing: Mice succumb to HIV at last. From the article:

"Mouse cells are naturally resistant to HIV in many ways. Some of these barriers have been overcome by adding human genes to mouse cells."

Um... hooray for us, because we've genetically engineered mice so that they can contract a deadly disease that they would otherwise be immune to? And next on their list is figuring out ways to make the HIV virus spread even more quickly in the mice, so they can get sicker faster.

I understand the research significance, but still. It seems a bizarre thing to celebrate.

Category: Society

Writebacks (0)

In an attempt to get more fresh air and exercise Laura and I are taking up tennis, and today we played for the first time. By "played", I of course mean that we made attempts to hit the ball, ideally toward the other person, and over the net. It was comical, but a lot of fun, and we seemed to be getting the hang of things by the end.

I expect that we'll be playing for money any day now.

Category: Life

Writebacks (0)

It's a good day to die if you are a telemarketer, that is: the National Do Not Call Registry is now open. Ok, it would be open if it weren't for the fact that it's such a fantastic thing that it was "slashdotted" before it was even posted to Slashdot. The new FTC Telemarketing Sales Rules has some other nice features as well; I sure won't miss all of the dead calls we get.

Despite all the bitching from the telemarketing industry, I am convinced that this is a bright day for humanity. I only wish we could get a similar law for spam, and a way of enforcing it.

Category: Society

Writebacks (0)

So Apple's WWDC was yesterday, and I finally watched the Keynote live (via satellite) for the first time. It was fun to see, and there was some really exciting new stuff announced. Besides the obvious drooling over the G5 (although I'm not so sure I like the new case at all) I have a couple reactions.

First: Exposé. This feature is, in every way, insanely great. The video makes it look a little weird and jarring, but watching the Keynote demo, it looked like the most natural thing you could imagine. All I could think when I saw it was, "Wow. That's exactly how it should be. How could I ever have had to dig through windows for the one I want?" This is the sort of simple, powerful, and useful interface innovation than makes me love Apple.

Second: Safari 1.0. I want to love this browser, I really do. It's fast, it's sleek, it's elegant, it's tab implementation is very nice (even if they are upside down)... it's almost everything I want in a browsers. I like Camino quite a bit, but recently it's been flakey for me, and the development on it seems to have slowed down significantly, so I'd like another browser, at least for the moment, and I'd like Safari to be that browser. But. I just can't accept Safari's poor cookie management. Inexplicably, there is no option to prompt for new cookies, and thus allow or deny them on a site-by-site basis. Since every browser I can think of has this, I can only think of two explanations: They haven't had time to implement it yet, or they have decided that it's not a worthwhile feature. I sincerely hope it's the former, because as much as I like Safari, cookie control is a deal-breaker for me.

Category: Geek

Writebacks (0)

Laura and I have started teaching ourselves German, her for eventual grad-school requirements, and me because I enjoy languages. We've been having great fun with one of those cartoon-style audio courses, to soften us up for real grammar and vocab study later.

In the process, I've discovered that in the course of all of my French studies, the "foreign language" section of my brain has become very tightly linked with the "French" section of my brain. The humorous result of which is that when I don't speak German with a bad American accent, I speak it with a sort of a French accent. And even better, I occasionally toss in whole French words on accident.

I'm glad I'm not trying this in a real class, where I'd feel like much more of an idiot.

Category: Life

Writebacks (1)

I've just finished reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion series, and enjoyed it very much. He is good at imagining and describing both bizarre alien races and cultures, and believable social evolution of humanity in a variety of situations. I was also impressed by his ability to weave large plot-arcs, revealed piecemiel, without the story being hard to follow. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good science fiction series.

My one complaint is the end of the series. I found several of the "mysteries" revealed at the very end of the last book to have been painfully obvious (the Observer and the father, for those that have already read it). As I'm not exactly known for my ability to see ends of books/movies coming, it's a pretty good bet that if I thought it was obvious, the hero should have had a clue. So I found the last half of the last book slightly grating, since every time the hero struggles with emotional issues surrounding the mysteries, I had to roll my eyes and say, "Yes yes, poor Raul still hasn't figured it out." I'm not sure if Simmons intended it that way, so that the reader can feel clever, or if it was supposed to be a mystery to all. Either way, my patience with thick-headed heroes is limited, so that frustrated me.

But overall, the real substance of the plot and the ending were open and interesting enough that the above was only a minor annoyance in an otherwise great read, and in no way spoiled my enjoyment of the series.

Category: A & E

Writebacks (0)

My sidebar is actually starting to look like a real blog sidebar! Maybe a link to some photos next; I haven't decided. How much junk can I manage to squeeze into that tiny space?

Category: Geek

Writebacks (0)

I've recently learned that Googlebot has been busily crawling my blog (thanks to zeuropa, no doubt). And yet curiously, my blog doesn't appear anywhere on Google. I have no idea why it's refrained from adding me to the searchable index, and of course they are very closed-mouthed about why crawled sites aren't indexed... maybe it's a conspiracy, and They suspect that I know too much.

But the more curious question is, why, if I'm not cool enough to be indexed, does the Googlebot keep coming back? Clearly, Googlebot has become sentient and, for whatever reason, enjoys reading my blog.

Of course, now it (and of course They) will know that I'm on to the secret. If Google calls, you haven't seen me.

Category: Geek

Writebacks (3)

After a lot of frustrating attempts at debugging my Blosxom installation, to figure out why plugins weren't working right, I finally discovered the problem: I'm stupid. When I started using dynamic blog page creation, I made a new copy of the script in my web/cgi-bin directory. But I made all my debugging changes to the old version, in the static directory. Surprise surprise, it never made any difference when I made changes.

But now I really am running the latest version (instead of just having an inert copy of the latest version to confuse myself), and all is well. Even more exciting, I spent a couple of hours with trial and error, and Programming Perl, and I managed to hack a plugin to deal with non-existent urls for writeback posters intelligently, so people's names won't be links to nowhere if they leave info blank. To progress! (however slow and painful)

Category: Geek

Writebacks (0)

When I started doing CSS web development, I thought that IE was the enemy. I'd make a site that looked fine, but WinIE would mangle it. I cursed, I railed, but I began to learn the workarounds. The voice-family hack, and the child-selector override. And in a strange way, I owe IE thanks for making me learn more about CSS than I otherwise might have.

But now I have seen the enemy, and it is Netscape 4.x. When I'm making a personal site, with relatively simple layout, I ignore it. Who cares? I do clean design, so those who want to use NN4 can turn off style sheets and get the content. If they think it's ugly, too bad; it's their decision to use a stone-age browser.

Sadly, that mentality doesn't get me very far when I'm making a commercial "web application" that has to render readably in old browsers, because I don't have the luxury of writing off that segment of the population.

So on behalf of myself and all the other people out there in my position, who really hate supporting (at least partially) NN4 but have no choice, I submit a request to the virus writers of the world: make yourselves useful! Surely it can't be that hard to write a virus/worm that will search for NN4 on an infected machine, delete it, and automatically install Netscape 7, or Firebird (that's "Mozilla Firebird, the web browser formerly known as Phoenix" to all (three) of you FirebirdDB zealots), or IE6, or just about anything made in the last few years. And to be nice, be sure to import their bookmarks, to make the transition smoother.

Sure, it'll cause problems, and people will be upset and complain, but as someone who will encounter none of those problems, but who will reap the benefits of ridding the internet of a big chunk of cruft, I am willing to pay that price.

Category: Geek

Writebacks (1)

In the middle of the afternoon, access services decided that I am no longer a person. Why? Because it's apparently too much trouble for the powers that be to check against graduate school records when they make the axe list to give to access services. So despite the fact that I'm still a student at the university, receiving a degree doomed me to wander, adrift, from locked room to locked room.

I guess this gives me incentive to finish my fall registration (since of course I need a schedule to get a valid card again), and begin the exciting process of re-requesting specific room and building accesses.

Here's to bureaucracy!

Category: School

Writebacks (1)

According to Fannie Farmer, when whipping cream you must "be careful to whip just until soft peaks form: cream that is beaten too long will begin to turn to butter, often quite suddenly."

If only I had thought to consult it before I had a bowl full of butter.

Category: Random

Writebacks (0)

The tradition of freezing some of your wedding cake to eat on your first anniversary is highly overrated. Unless you enjoy eating cardboard, I guess.

On the other hand, it's impossible to say enough good things about spending your whole anniversary realizing that you are at least as happy as the day you were married.

Category: Life

Writebacks (0)