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Still healing, I'm dealing with what feel like small electric shocks which shoot from the right side up into my abdomen. While they cause me to cross my eyes and suck air (not every entertaining when that happens during a staff meeting) when they hit, they're much better than what I've lived with up to now.
While I was unable to actually use the templates and tricks that Greg pointed out to me last week, I have finally made the Whinery compatible with both IE6 and Netscape 6! There are still some dramatic differences but there are no more hidden graphics nor portions of the page that should be at the bottom hugging the top margin. Hurrah!
As you likely know by now, I believe that the current copyright laws are atrocious. While I'm not against copyright in general, I am against protecting a dead man's rights for 70 years after he died! While it's not dealing with the DMCA (see entry 19 and entry 32) directly, I read an article today which helps put the whole situation into perspective and even though it applies directly to the death +70/+90 years laws it also helps highlight some of the problems with fair use and the DMCA. You'll have to excuse me if I seem a bit scatter brained today as the Lortab I took last night is still fogging my brain. Basically, the article points out that copyright is only beneficial as long as it actually promotes invention as was intended by the Constitution. I really encourage you to read it as it is extremely easy to read and, as the author puts it, while copyright may not seem inherently compelling to non-specialists, the issues at stake in Eldred are vitally important to anyone who watches movies, listens to music, or reads books.
Speaking of last night, I started my Yoga practices again. That was a very good and a very bad thing. Let's get the bad out of the way. While I was down last week, a couple of green six foot long straps arrived at my home. For those of us who can't quite reach our feet to do forward bends and other similar stretching poses, the straps effectively lengthen your grip and therein lies the problem. Up until now, I've only been able to stretch myself forward or down; so, while I've been very sore after some practices, I've never pulled any muscles (turns out Yoga probably was not the cause of last week's pain BTW). Last night I pulled myself into a stretch and so pulled my lower back into extreme pain. Now for the good, having strained (severely) my lower back, I am already feeling as if three or four days have gone by even though I could hardly move this morning! Last night I was sure it would take at least a week of recuperating before I could attempt Yoga again, now I'm fairly sure that I'll be practicing tonight (on a very moderated level of course). With very little effort, my body is fitter than it's been in years and I've already lost five pounds (down to 165). Since my goal is to stay around 160 things, I'm quite happy with five pounds in two weeks. I've tried other fitness programs and I've always lost interest after one week but my experience with Yoga is completely different. I'm telling people about what I'm doing (Hi Carol!) with great enthusiasm and I can't wait to put one of my DVDs in the player and drift into the quite vitality of my Yoga practice (when I remember to stretch and not pull myself into poses!)
Quick note, my birthday is soon to burst upon us once again (the 21st) and if any of you are feeling particularly generous, you can visit my wishlist page and send me a present! :o-)
As we all know, Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. Take a look at this easy test and see if you really know what you think you do. Greg at Nodecam.com posted this link yesterday.
Ps: Post a comment and tell me what you think on this one!
I've done a bit more reading on Flight 77 and the Pentagon in doing so I found the following:
Arlington County, Va., Fire Chief Edward Plaugher said that investigators had located “a round section within the interior of the Pentagon that is the exact same shape as the fuselage of a jet. It's very obvious that is exactly where the remains of the craft are, and the sections that are left are not huge, but they can be identified.”
Still the photos in the test below and the stories still just don't sit well together in my mind.
I was reading Yoga: The Poetry of the Body
by Rodney Yee with Nina Zolotow and came across the following:
Can you fall out of your habits and recenter in new places? If you go the same way to work, try a different way — take the “long cut” for a change. If you are always late, show up fifteen minutes early. If you always talk, shut up and listen. If you always listen, speak up. Because falling can be synonymous with taking a chance or with allowing yourself to be completely spontaneous.
And what are some of your physical habits? When you are talking, do you cross your arms in front of your heart? Or hold your wrists behind your back? Or put your hands in your pockets? Try letting your arms dangle by your sides and feel the uneasiness that arises. The ability to deal with this uneasiness is an important aspect of breaking your habits and recentering. Besides, what's so scary about going to a physical place that's unknown — isn't that happening all the time?
Doing any of what he suggests forces one to move from observing the outside world to observing oneself. Doing this has helped me realize that it's actually very easy to get away from the rat race that is every day life in today's fast paced society. Leaving the rat race behind doesn't mean moving to some paradise where your every desire is met, it means simply continuing life as you did yesterday but instead of running with the rats, let them go on by you. Now, if I can only remember that I know that live will be much calmer!
Yoga, I just can't say enough good about it and I've started practicing during my lunch hour in my office. The only problem being that it's just a little too narrow for some of the poses. Of course, there's also the danger of someone walking in and finding me bare foot and standing in tree pose (Vrksasana). Reminds me of a conversation I had with a couple of fellow beta testers on 3000ad.com about the evils of static electricity and building computers. To make a long story short, we decided that the only way to guarantee no faults from static was to build machines while naked. We also figured that that would not fly well with management, go figure.
And now for something completely different! I really really want to throw a guilt trip on someone right now but I have too much respect for this person. A little over a month ago, this individual made a promise to me and although this person can now fulfill this promise, has yet to do so. Need a hint as to who you are? Is that a tear on your cheek or just another drop of water? Need a hint on what the promise might be? Find a green brick!
It would appear from this Newsweek article hosted by MSNBC, Locking Up Your Rights: Can it be illegal to give people the tools to break into their own property? The U.S. government thinks so, that the mainstream news media has finally realized that the impact of the DMCA is much wider than the general public originally thought. It's about time that more people start realizing that this issue is not about whether the DMCA will or will not take away our rights (which is where we currently stand with the SSSCA) rather this issue is about recovering our rights that Congress has already trivalized if not abolished by passing the DMCA.
Well, I've re-arranged my office furniture. There's not a lot of room, as I mentioned yesterday, so I couldn't do too much with it and just basically shifted everything south three feet (from one wall to the other). I've updated my office page with new shots showing the new look as it were.
I told Shan about the move and all she could say was WOW
. WOW, because I like change about as much as I like having someone knee me in the groin, usually; so knowing that I actually made such a move voluntarily and on my own initiative is definitely a WOW moment. So what could make me, he who hates change, do such a thing? Just let me say that my office is no longer too narrow for doing Yoga.
Well, I go in for a follow-up appointment to see how I'm recovering from the vileness of two weeks ago. I am sure that he'll suggest that I undergo a number of tests and I'm just not sure that I want to say yes.
Well, the doctor says that I'm doing well and that at this point he doesn't think that testing will be beneficial. I'm still on a low dose of Cipro and will be until the first week of April with the hope that it will kill off any remaining bacteria that might cause me trouble.
Jonathan, my oldest, came down with chicken pox last Saturday. He's doing well and since neither McKenna nor George have come down with it we are hoping that they have inherited Shanna's natural immunity. Poor McKenna, she seems to have her heart set on getting them though and seemed fairly upset this morning when Shanna told her that she still did not have them. If you've ever watched the Arthur episode where he catches chicken pox and DW wants to get sick too, you'll know exactly what going on in my house right now.
Shanna came out and watched my morning Yoga practice. I'm hoping that means she'll soon be joining me for at least part of my practice. This morning as I was in downward facing dog (adho mukha shvanasana) an amazing thing happened, I stepped my feet closer to my hands and my feet were actually flat. My left hip and lower back still twinge a bit from the bad pull last week but moving my feet (which I only managed twice this morning) made all the tightness go right away. I know that every time I write something here that Yoga gets thrown into the mix and so I'm starting to wonder if I should start another blog specifically for my Yoga.
There's a lot going on in the world right now and normally I would be very vociferous about it all (Rosie and gay parenting, Andrea Yates: Her conviction and the death penalty, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!) but for some reason none of it really phases me. After all, tonight the sun will set and tomorrow it will rise and in the mean time something terrible could happen and I'd be dead. Instead of focusing on those things over which I have no control, I choose to focus on things I can influence: Myself, my family, my neighborhood, my work. I don't turn a blind eye to the things I cannot control but until my sphere of influence actually includes such things, I don't do much more than notice them.
I'm working on Everyday Yoga, a daily journal of my Yoga practices, thoughts and experiences. First entry due out sometime this evening. I will also be pushing Blog and my page design skills a bit with this one. Stay tuned for developments.
Well, I have Everyday Yoga up and running now. It's still a little rough around the edges and somewhat unfriendly to people using 800x600 resolution or lower (thanks Microsoft, you twits). It'll be a couple of weeks before I'm happy with the layout, I'm sure and it'll probably take a week or two for me to settle into whatever it is I'm going to write over there.
On Sunday I was released as the ward Young Men's President. Although this is something that I've known was coming since January, it's still very depressing to know that even though I'll still laugh and joke with these fine young men, the relationship I've had with them as a spiritual leader has come to a close. Knowing this has left me very morose and nearly incapable of accomplishing much of anything. The depression that I've managed to avoid this winter (other than that entertaining stint in September) seems to have run me over with a horrendous intensity.
You may have noticed a couple of changes here at the Whinery. Entries are now listed in chronological order, I went back and tried to read some old entries and scrolling bottom to top to read the entries in order really stinks. I'm only posting the entries for the last two days on the main page and everything else can be found on the archive page for the month (archiving weekly was making my list of archive files far too long). Might I just mention that I love Blog, it took me longer to add the Everyday Yoga logo above than it did to republish all my archives in the new layout.
Let me give you a brief run down of what I did to make the Everyday Yoga pages. As is the case with the Whinery and WhatDoIKnow, E-Yoga uses no tables. All of the layout is accomplished using Cascading Style Sheets. I really wanted to create a scrolling window within the main page that had a static background. That's a concept that I've seen in a number of places but I had never taken the time to see how it was done. Here's what I did: I created two floating boxes of equal size and nested one within the other. The parent box (the bottom most layer) has a static background image (the light green om symbol) and the child box (the top most layer) has the reddish border and scroll bars turned on via the overflow style attribute. The resulting page works equally well in both IE 6 and Netscape 6 (thank you once again Greg). Normally Blog is set to publish the main page and the archive pages using the same format. I did not want that for E-Yoga. I wanted to load the main entries dynamically using a PHP include statement into my otherwise static index page. I knew how to do that easily enough, just have Blog spit out a basic text file instead of a full blown html page. The problem I still faced was how to archive the pages decently. Blog is able to publish the same journal entries to different sites in one fell swoop. I took advantage of this and created a second site pointing to the same location as my main Yoga journal. The second sight essentially creates a dummy main page and then uses that same template to create the archive pages. Again, I'm thrilled to have Blog to help in publishing the Whinery and now the Everyday Yoga sites.
Userfriendly's comic for yesterday and today were great. If you need some background on them, the Inquisitor is the DMCA and the SSSCA working to protect you from the evils of piracy.
I was taking a quick look at Greg's Weblog (check the Watering Holes), he mentioned taking an IQ test he had found linked at BlahBlog and while I was taking a look around there, I noticed a linked article about Synesthesia called The Man Who Lives in a Rainbow
. Synesthesia is a condition where an individual sees color when a normal person does not. Example: Words printed in black on white paper show up in color to these people but not just any color, each word or syllable or sometimes even the individual letters within a word are all different colors! Here's the opening of the article:
Black and white words on a page and the sounds of language explode into many colors in the mind of a middle-aged man. "Two" is blue, "2" is orange, "3" is pink and "traffic" is both blue and brown.
The man has synesthesia -- an altered perception in which printed words and numbers burst with color, flavors take on shapes and the spoken language turns into a mental rainbow.
Copyright © 2002 Associated Press
What a wonderful world this man sees! Forget the fact that the grass is greener on the other side, in this case the whole world is a symphony for the senses! Makes me wonder, does "Two" which this man sees as blue still look blue if printed red using a color printer?
Last Friday I took my final for my project management course. Fairly evil thing with a book that could be a major cure for the insomniacs of the world. I ended up with a B in the course. If I really wanted to argue and deal with a nightmare load of red tape I could probably have that raised to a B+ and possibly even an A-. One of the questions was so blatantly false that is wasn't even funny but since the professor thinks the answer is true, I marked that question wrong. The question quotes one sentence from the book word for word with one omission: The sentence in the book has the word "not" in it but the sentence on the test does not. Generally speaking, one would think that would make the test question false but in the alternate reality of my test that just isn't the case.
Well at 06:35 UTC-7 tomorrow the thirty-second year of my life will officially begin (IOW, I'll be 31). I'm not really sure whether I'm happy, sad or indifferent about the whole thing but since I know that I'm not sad about it and I'm not looking forward to tomorrow any more than I looked forward to today, I must say that I'm more indifferent about it than not.
Making changes to the site again. On the 19th I mentioned that I was changing the posting order from reverse chronological to chronological because the reversed order makes ready the archives a bit of a nightmare. Not having the most recent posts at the top of the main page is also a nightmare because most people are going to be reading yesterday's news and not realize that there's a newer post below the one they just read! Blog can't post the main page in reverse order and the archives not in reverse order automatically and I don't think that Fahim will have time to update Blog in the near future from what he's said over at the Developer's Corner. My brain was is high gear this morning and I realized that by simply manually publishing the archives (that just means selecting the dates to publish and hitting OK and Blog does the rest) and changing a couple of settings I can have my cake and eat it too without have to wait for any updates to Blog.
This morning the news reported that one man, Joshua Christensen, was/is responsible for 80% of the Ecstasy and GBH being sold here in Utah. The news went on to say that he has pled guilty to drug possession with intent to sell and so received a five year sentence. He'll likely only serve a year of two of that with the rest of the time on probation. Oh, by the way, prosecutors dropped seven other charges in exchange for the plea. Instead of really nailing this guy, they let him off easy by dropping the other charges and then have the nerve to say that the prison time was appropriate and that "We hope this deters Mr. Christensen and others and sends a message that this is unacceptable behavior, and it will be vigorously prosecuted and investigated." Vigorously investigated, yes but prosecuted? What a joke that is! Vigorously prosecuted would be taking all eight charges to trial. Let's see, exchange up to five years of your life for this:
Frequent jaunts to Las Vegas where he would drop up to $60,000 at the tables, weekends on his $1 million yacht and wild parties with exotic dancers. . . .
The profits from Christensen's illegal drug enterprises afforded him a plush $400,000 home, a $100,000 Porsche, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a Ford truck, a speedboat, several Jet Skis, a custom-made motorcycle and multiple snowmobiles. . . .
With $26 million plus stash in off shore holdings and that five year prison term is supposed to be a deterrent? Only in a delusional world is that even close to a deterrent. Crime doesn't pay right? Looking at this case I'd have to say, "Right, sure it doesn't."
Last Thursday was my 31st birthday and it was absolutely great. Shanna sent the kids to her folks' house to spend the night (I have wonderful in-laws). She cooked salmon (baked to perfection), potatoes and broccoli. We finished dinner and went out to see "The Time Machine." If I hadn't read the book or seen the first movie, it would have been OK. However, I have read the book and seen the movie. The new movie ignores what Wells implies about the problems created by a perfect have/have not society. As he says
This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.
. . . .
We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!
. . . .
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
The first statement above seems almost a perfect description of our own societal trends before the World Trade Center attack and how true that we are indeed kept keen by pain and necessity! Needless to say, when I read this story as a young teenager it held none of the deeper fascination that I find now in plumbing the depths of Mr. Wells imagination. Unfortunately, the new movie does little to give that experience to its viewers. If this movie had been touted as a remake of the original film, it would have been acceptable, I guess. Here are some of the basic problems which obscure the themes mentioned above:
Both the Eloi and the Morlocks only stood about four feet high, whereas in the movie they were all of fairly normal height. I won't go into more detail as I wouldn't want to spoil the book or movies for others.
One other thing I did note was that Wells predicted both global climate control and genetic engineering. He was fairly right about the one, I wonder about the other . . . .
I have come to a couple of conclusions. The first being that I simply have too many irons in the fire. I really need to evaluate everything I am doing and simply give some of it the boot. Items up for bid on the chopping block:
Things vying to be added to my list of irons
I have already take the first step in ameliorating the problem: I am not going to compose either the Whinery or Everyday Yoga while at the computer. Instead, I will post excerpts from the pages of my personal, handwritten journal.
Shanna called me at work to tell me that McKenna has a fresh outbreak of chicken pox and the both she and George are just covered with them. I have never seen McKenna (or George for that matter) look so very miserable. It just breaks my heart.
Tomorrow we'll go with Jonathan to a clinic in Salt Lake for yet another evaluation. Anyone want to lay bets on them just telling us the same thing that everyone else has? Speaking of Jonathan, he came home with two fours and four threes today. Each day his teacher rates four areas of behavior for both the morning and the afternoon (at our request). One means needs improvement (drastic improvement) and four is great. He has never had two fours (fours have been extremely rare); so, today's note was extremely pleasing. What made the difference? We stopped telling him what not to get (no more ones Jonathan) to telling him what we want him to get (I want to see at least three threes or at least one four each day). He beat all expectations today and we only made the shift in focus on Saturday. Obviously, it had a dramatic impact on this fine boy.
What a busy day! I was at work by 6:00 AM this morning so I would have time to prepare for the XHTML class that I am teaching. I also had to convince the General Manager that instead of just using old computers to upgrade our training room, it is time to purchase new computers or abandon our in house training programs. We should have the new machines running by tomorrow afternoon.
Shanna and I took Jonathan to see Floresha Redmond at the Primary Children's Counseling Center. She is a very kind intern who is completing her masters degree and seeing that last time Jonathan was formally evaluated was also by an intern, she referred us to one of their professional psychologists. I am somewhat more optimistic that we'll come away from this venture with something of lasting value; however, until we've met at least once with the psychologist I'm not holding my breath.
Although there is more, that's all for this evening as I really need to get to bed and my stomach feels like an over-wound elastic band.
Poor McKenna, she just cries and cries and says, "But it's so hard to not itch!" I've never seen her so miserable and I pray that I never see her this miserable again. My only hope is that she is somewhat improved when I get home this evening but that is a fairly faint hope.
When I came home this evening, I could see a marked improvement in both McKenna and George. Although it is obvious that they are both uncomfortable, it is equally clear that their hideous misery has come to an end.
I realized today that some of my pages online might just provide a great feeding ground for email harvesting robots. This may be especially true of the comments pages. I have done everything I can to prevent robots of any kind from performing any indexing in the comments area by using a robots.txt file and robot meta tags but I am afraid that only well behaved robots will follow those directives and it is unlikely that well behaved robots would harvest addresses in the first place. To further prevent harvesters ripping your address from this site, I'm looking into ways to allow you to either mangle or hide or both your email address when you post a comment. We'll see how well I do with this tomorrow.
I had to run over to Ned's (a family friend and chiropractor) tonight to do a bit of computer work for him (I take care of his home and office IT needs and he takes care of my family's chiropratic needs). Turned out to just be a simple driver problem, thankfully. It's usually the easy problems that turn into all nighter nightmares. Anyway, I just want to publicly point out that due to the skills of this man I have not had to endure any major sciatica (liquid fire running down your leg into a seething pool in your foot) for nearly three years. Thanks Ned!
Not much to write today. Politics are out in full swing at work and it would appear that I must do a little boat rocking tomorrow. Today was payday which translates, of course, into pay others day: Mortgage, car, phone company and all the rest. Oh well, at least someone is pulling in some dough from my labors.
McKenna and George's chicken pox have improved to the point where they can fight like cats and dogs and George will have the scars to prove it I'm afraid.
Busy, busy, busy day. Today I made travel arrangements for my trip to BorCon (Borland Conference) in May. I've been looking forward to this for a little over a year. It's a little nerve wracking for me because I've never traveled completely alone. I'm sure that I'll manage just fine but still, the first time I do anything it is always a bit unnerving for me.
I managed to get the comments file updated so your email address will only be exposed if you so choose. It took me a while to get the check boxes working correctly. I forgot that an HTML check box does not return a true or false value but returns either the value specified in the tag or a null string. Anyway, it works now just the way that I wanted it.
My mind is jumping all over. While I was setting up my travel for BorCon, I learned that Kurt (my supervisor) is also sending me to Phoenix next month. As for the politics of yesterday, they appear to have vanished overnight which is something I just love!
Speaking of things I love, as I sit here on the couch writing this in my journal, McKenna has been dancing for me. Makes me terribly happy to know that this is something special that she does just for me. It's great being a father and being showered with such love.
We took the kids down to the school yard for an Easter Egg hunt. It wasn't much of a hunt though as the eggs (plastic) were just scattered across the lawn but the kids (about 30 of them) had a blast anyway. While there, the Bishop asked if I would be willing to teach Sunday School to some of the youth. Needless to say, I said yes in a heartbeat.
Later this afternoon, we went back to the school yard and flew kites. I had forgotten what an absolute joy it is to fly a kite. Two of the girls and one boy from the neighborhood joined us and we all had a terribly good time.
The kids have made the usual haul of candy and clothes and Shanna is doing her ritual shutter dance. My favorite part of the Easter festivities is the boiled eggs, usually. This year it is playing tic-tac-toe with Jona and then having him come down and practice yoga with me.
It's been a fairly quiet and easy day. Sure, the kids have been a bit annoying because they want, want, want more candy but that's OK. I helped Jona to give his testimony in church today and an overpowering feeling of peace and joy filled me. My emotions ran so high that I could not speak. I know that on the morrow the sun will rise without fail and just as surely I know that Jesus is the Christ and rose from the tomb on the third day.
