Voder-Vocoder

For those who care, the first two of the next batch of Very Secret Diaries are out.

Also check out this.

Happy new year and whatnot.

There are more Florida photos to come, but it might be a few days.

Today is my first day of unemployment that I’m not on vacation. I accompished nothing, aside from some nessisary apartment cleaning.

So far I’ve got nothing done on my quest to simplify my life.

I got a telephoto adapter for my camera this week. I took some photos with them on the 26th and the 27th.

I’m just about sick of the south again. I want to go back to Wisconsin, where its too cold for biting insects.

It was foggy all day friday. Here’s a photo of the capitol through the fog. If I had time, I would have tried other settings to try and capture the fog better. Thanks to Em, who actually took the shot.

Site Update! (I wonder who reads this, anyway?)

I’ve been going back and rewriting the perl backend of this page. You shouldn’t be able to tell a difference, but the code is a lot cleaner now. I’ve moved all of the reusable code into a .pm file so I can now knock out new cgi scripts much more quickly.

Yea! Reusable Code!

There’s now a Blog Submission form, which will only work if you are logged in. And I’m the only one with a login right now. So if I know you, and you are looking for a place to log your thoughts, send me a note.

I got sick of the tiny keyboard on my tiny notebook, so I went shopping for a keybord to throw in my suitcase when I travel. I need a full sized USB keyboard that doesn’t take up more space than it has to. Since I only have one USB port on my notebook, I also need a USB hub. The ideal thing would be a keyboard with a built in hub, like Apple has. So I wandered around CompUSA looking for such a thing. It turns out that half of the PC keyboards out there still have PS/2 connectors. And all of the rest are huge, with 20 unnessisary buttons.

So I ended up buying an Apple Pro Keyboard. It works perffectly. The only thing it lacks is a context-menu button. And the alt and start buttons are reversed. But I can deal with those issues. Apple could make a killing if they would market thier keyboards at PC users.

Yea! Hardware Standards!

Only a little more than one more week of work left. Yeah!

Last weekend, I got tickets to the midnight showing of The Two Towers. And this week I picked up the soundtrack while doing some christmas shopping. It’s growing on me. If nothing else, download and listen to “Golumm’s Song”

Random internet radio station.

“Bleg” is my favorite metasyntactic variable.

Okay, here’s the short list of classes for this winter. The ones
marked with *’s are the ones I have a preference for.

New photos: from my trip to Ft. Meyers last week here and here. I also put up some photos from a trip to Devil’s Lake on November 2.

Everyone needs family in Florida.

After just getting back to town late this afternoon, I’m packing my bags for another trip early tomorrow morning. Pittsburgh on business. At least it’s a direct flight. Let’s check the weather for Monday: “Cloudy. Scattered snow showers mainly afternoon. An inch or less of snow accumulation. Highs in the lower 30s. Southwest then 10 to 20 mph then west during the afternoon. Chance of snow 50 percent”. Fun.

Why do I listen to jazz music? Funny story. I detested jazz music. Couldn’t stand it. My father used to play the Memphis jazz station after finally giving up on commercial radio, but I hated it. Then some girl happened by my house, tagging along with one of my friends. She made the assumption that I liked jazz music, and started discussing the topic with me. I played along as if I cared, then immediately after, went out and started learning something about jazz. By the next month, I owned three Miles Davis albums. Just to impress some girl. Sounds like a bad sit-com episode. I was young and stupid then, now I’m old, stupid, and listen to jazz.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent is not as good as the other Law & Orders’s out there. It always ends the same way. The annoying, smart cop gets the criminal into the interrogation room and grilles them in a really scary, overacted way. The other cop says something every now and then. Eventually, the criminal confesses. It’s usually the evil old lady who did it.