Oh heck, I forgot that Tartan Day was coming up (April 6). If you’re near Mobile, AL, you might want to check out the event hosted by the Historic Mobile Preservation Society.
“Every line of strength in American history is a line coloured with Scottish blood.”
Woodrow Wilson
When I get back around to playing with my cameras again, I might just have to start playing around with PhotoPal, as well. It looks like a simple design, and I’ve already got some ideas for some features I could add. Maybe I’ll get a chance to contribute some code back to Noel.
My idea is to add a “thumbnail tweaker” feature to the system, to allow the user to optimize the part of the picture that the thumbnail is extracted from.
Here in the good ol’ US of A, it’s almost Daylight Savings Time again. Don’t forget to “Spring Forward” this weekend!
There’s also some info at the U.S. Naval Observatory, if you’d like a more “official” source.
I’m surprised to see that my blog is worth $132.52 on BlogShares. Especially since Phil Ringnalda was complaining just the other day that his was only worth $18.94. Phil is already planning to manipulate the system and artificially inflate his share value. I bet that if I had enough time on my hands, I could trump his efforts and become the Enron of the blogging world….
I’ve been buried in work again, thus the dearth of posts over the past week+. My wrist is doing better — it only hurts when I use it for something really stressful (e.g. picking up something heavy), rather than almost constantly.
On the downside, my car has apparently realized that it’s paid for, and is trying to make up for it by finding other ways to drain my bank account. The A/C compressor has died (just in time for the warm weather), I just replaced a couple of bulbs in my tail lights yesterday (cheap and easy to replace, fortunately). and when I had my oil changed last week, they told me that the serpentine belt was looking worn. I don’t know the cost for getting that belt fixed yet, but I’m willing to bet that it’s nothing compared to the cost of that compressor.
In other news, I was recently quoted in a press release.
For the last several weeks, I have had accute pain and some weakness in my left wrist. At first, I thought I must have stressed it when I was picking up my son, so I tried to be more aware and avoid putting further strain on it. However, the pain persisted, and I began to wonder if I was suffering from carpal tunnel or some other kind of computer-related RSI. The only problem with that theory is that I feel like I do a pretty good job of giving my hands a break from the keyboard and mouse at intervals throughout the day, and this pain came on me fairly quickly. However, yesterday, I think I finally figured out the cause, and I believe it is RSI.
In late January, I began using a news aggregator called Syndirella. This program automagically fetches headlines from a selection of about 50 web sites that I have chosen, and presents them in an easy-to-manage format which easily allows me to see which sites have updated, quickly skim their headlines, and read the stories that look useful or interesting.
Of course, with that much information, I am not going to read every single story on all 50 of those sites, and Syndirella gives its users a couple of different ways to mark all the remaining headlines in a newsfeed as read, either by right-clicking the feed and choosing Mark as Read from the context menu, or by hitting CTRL-M on the keyboard. I quickly settled on the keyboard option, since that allows me to minimize mouse movement. However, in order to keep my left hand near the home keys, I was activating the CTRL-M combination by putting my pinky on the left CTRL key, and stretching my index finger over to the M. And yesterday, I finally realized that this action is stretching my hand out while simultaneously bending back my wrist slightly. And I was keeping my hand in that position for several minutes at a time.
I’m submitting a feature request to the author of Syndirella to ask for an alternate, or user-configurable key combination. In the meantime, I’m trying to form a new habit of moving my left hand over and using the CTRL key on the right side of the keyboard, to reduce the stress on my hand. Hopefully the pain will begin to go away in a few days.
Of course, Dmitry (Syndirella’s author) couldn’t have forseen this. And my choice to stretch my hand out like that is probably not the norm among the program’s users. And I’d still recommend the program highly to anyone who is willing to suffer the huge .NET download required to run it.
A quick paraphrasing of President Bush’s speech last night: “Saddam has two days to get out of Bagdad, or I’m going to put him in a box.”
Hot diggity. Chris Nott finally updated his blog for the first time since November.
The latest meme making the rounds is World of Ends, an essay written by Doc Searls and David Weinberger.
“All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It’s not hard. The Net isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars’ worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You’re at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.”
There’s more. Much more. And it’s all good.
Made a minor update in the Car Tag Saga, including a link to a form where you can check the availability of a personalized tag from Alabama’s Motor Vehicle Division.