Tuesday, October 09, 2001
Florida—What a state!
Mark used to work just a few buildings down from American Media Inc., the company where Robert Stevens contracted anthrax. First, voting irregularities in the 2000 Presidential Elections. Then the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center (and the Pentagon) may have been living in Delray Beach, Florida. And now this …
I bet the Florida State Board of Tourism is having fits over this.
Navigating a blog
Over the past few hours I've been working on the navigation code for this blog. And it isn't easy. I decided to forgoe adding navigation to the main page (while it's easy enough to find the previous seven days worth of entries, I don't think it's quite worth it yet to calculate the previous seven days entries but that may change) or to arbitrary ranges (that was hard enough to get right, and I still think there might be bugs in that code—not show stopping bugs, but there are probably some marginal cases where the code doesn't display what I think it should). I'm only handling the simple queries that bring back either a year's worth, month's worth, day's worth or the previous/next entry. Just to calculate the previous entry is a hundred lines of code. I could probably tighten that up a bit, but I'm still getting a handle on this, so I'll keep it verbose for now.
Network Polution
I finally got my invoice from Network Polutions for my domain,
conman.org. Or, as Network Polutions, uh, Verisign calls it, my
Web Address. Morons.
To make it worse, there's an ad for GreatDomains.com where I can get an appraisal of my domain. Just think, I could be sitting on a goldmine! Imbicils.
To make matters worse, they send me an invoice for US$70, which renews my domain for two years. I don't want to renew my domain, sorry, web address for two years—not with these idiots. But, I can renew online and well, will you look at that! If I renew online I get 10% off a two year renewal. But not if I renew by check (my preferred method of payment). And I get a choice of renewing for only a year. Words fail me.
I'd switch registrars, but with my domain up for renewal, I don't want to risk loosing it entirely if I decide to switch now (and I've already gotten junk snail mail offering just that. Sigh) and the potential for it to be totally munged up for weeks on end.
So I'm sending a check to renew for one year and once that clears, then I'm switching.
Mid-air save
LONDON (Reuters) - A British constable hurled himself off a cliff after a suicidal man, catching him in mid-air and saving his life, a police spokesman said on Friday.
A Sussex police spokesman said Constable Trevor Perks, who was strapped to a safety harness, managed to catch the man by the scruff of his neck as they both tumbled down the cliff side.
Spring sent me this one, as Trevor Perks is on a mailing list she's on. She was wondering why people were congratulating him and offering to make an action hero out of him.
Spring also said he volunteered last month to be pepper sprayed in order to test a new formula.
I guess some people just aren't satisified with sipping coffee and watching Survivor.
Earwormed
Of course, the technique isn't practical for all songs. For instance, composer John Cage's “As Slow as Possible,” which is currently being performed in Germany, begins with a silence that lasts 16 months, followed by a single chord to be played on Jan. 5, 2003, then another silence, then another chord on July 5, 2004, and the final chord in 639 years.
The Science Behind the Song Stuck in Your Head
Guess you won't have to worry about being earwormed by that song, but the article does go into depth as to why certain songs cause people to be earwormed. My Sharona!
