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Milk was a bad choice
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Feb 4, 2008
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I talked to a guy on Saturday who said his family of two adults and four children (aged late-teens to early-twenties) drinks eight gallons of milk per week. I haven't drunk eight gallons of milk in the past decade. Granted, the man was tall and probably has tall children, but still. #food
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Just a typical day (1)
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Feb 3, 2008
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The 24-hour period of Friday afternoon to Saturday afternoon was pretty typical.
4:00 pm - Freezing rain and ice storm.
4:45 pm - Power goes out. This is a problem because our house has electric heat, electric hot water, and electric everything. With no electricity, absolutely nothing works.
5:00 pm - I'm not worried because the house is still pretty warm.
5:03 pm - The house is no longer warm.
6:45 pm - If the electricity doesn't come back on in the next hour, we need to buy a generator.
7:45 pm - We go to Home Depot to buy a generator.
8:00 pm - We realize generators are big, so we go back home to get Wendy's car, hoping the electricity will be back on and we can cancel our plans of buying a generator.
8:30 pm - We buy a generator.
9:00 pm - Generators are heavy, so I hurt my back lifting it out of the car (Wendy was fine).
9:30 pm - Generator is running, powering an electric heater in our room (Yay!).
10:00 pm - We empty the refrigerator and freezer and put everything outside on the deck.
11:00 pm - We drain the water pipes throughout the house so they don't crack.
12:00 am - We go to sleep in a warm room, surrounded by several very cold rooms.
4:15 am - I wake up sweating (generator works!) and in extreme pain because of my strained back.
6:15 am - Dilbert the cat wakes us up to tell us the electricity is back on (Yay!).
10:00 am - I almost die in the shower from back pain.
10:30 am - I call the doctor to see if I can get an appointment (the answer is no).
11:00 am - We get in the car to drive to Walmart to buy drugs and heating pads.
11:01 am - Wendy spills my hot coffee on my lap, soaking my pants and underwear.
11:02 am - I change into dry clothes and we go to Walmart.
11:30 am - We get in the car to go home and Wendy spills the rest of my coffee, this time not on me.
4:00 pm - I eat apple crisp, which pretty much cancels everything else out. #psychology
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Easy to die (3)
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Feb 1, 2008
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Sometimes it frightens me how easy it is to die. I'm not talking about death by dangerous things like skydiving or mountain climbing, or even death by somewhat normal things like car accidents or wildlife encounters while camping. I'm talking about everyday things like eating a meal or plugging in an electrical cord. If a piece of food gets lodged in my throat when I'm eating alone, there's a pretty good chance I could die. If my finger touches one of the metal prongs of an electrical cord as I'm plugging it in, I could easily die. I never think twice about flying in a plane or walking near the edge of a rocky cliff, but doing certain simple everyday things makes me nervous. #psychology
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Twitter downtime solution
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Feb 1, 2008
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Everybody complains about Twitter's constant downtime problems. It was down during the Macworld keynote address. It was down this past weekend (I think). As a non-user of the service, the one thing I always read about Twitter is its constant downtime issues and its scalability woes.
I have a pretty simple solution: STOP USING TWITTER. For reasons still unknown to me, many people have adopted Twitter as one of their top three must-haves, right after email and RSS feeds. What with the growing number of other solutions to the non-existent problem of keeping up to date with minute details of your friends' and acquaintances' daily lives, there are other boats in the ocean besides Twitter's (Jaiku and Pownce to name two). And by rejecting their service, you'll be giving them the exact feedback they need and deserve: Figure out how to scale up or host your service, and then look for users. Don't gain a bunch of users and then scramble to figure out how to keep your website working. If Digg can do it, if Flickr can do it, if del.icio.us can do it, then you can do it. Jaiku would be my top choice because Google just bought it. When was the last time Google had downtime problems? #technology
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This site in IE (3)
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Feb 1, 2008
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My apologies to anyone who uses Internet Explorer to view this website. You might've noticed that it looked pretty ugly for a couple weeks, with things spread out unevenly across the page. The problem is that I design my website to be viewed with Firefox, because that's the browser I use. Firefox follows web design standards, Internet Explorer usually doesn't. So everything looked fine in Firefox, but it looked awful in Internet Explorer. I think I fixed it. #technology
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