well, for some reason, the bottom of the right column (below the “powered by” tag) wants to shift to the left. That looks awful, and I don’t know why it’s doing it. So I have commented it out.
Month: November 2002
new book on the stack
I’m not really sure why I picked this one —
The Invisible Computer — up: I agree with the premise from what I see on the book jacket.
horticultural experiments
Roses are not difficult to grow from seed, if you do it right.
[ . . . . ]
First, be aware that each rose seedling is a new, never-before-seen variety.
Well, after reading
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View… and doing a little research in rose hips as seeds, I decided to see what kind of strange variants I could get from my rose bushes. I am fortunate in having three good sized hips (the size of a cherry) from three different roses. None of the plants are identified, though my garden mentor — my father — suspects one is a Queen Elizabeth. That’s the one I just worked on. It occurs to me now I should have used the digital camera, and I will on the next one I do (I have found no pictures of the process).
I simply followed the instructions on the page linked to above. We’ll see what happens, come the new year.
dumb money, smart money, Sherman money.
Lessons From the Man Who Sells to Buffett
“If you buy 50-cent dollars, over time, the good news should take care of itself,” he said.
the ultimate hosting machine
Yahoo! News – Blueprint for an Apple Xserve Rollout
“Xserve is like a BMW engine. It’s fast, safe and reliable,” Toker noted, adding that the company researched white papers and tested the Xserve against competitors, such as Dell and IBM. In the long run, especially from clients’ perspectives, the Xserve made more sense.
One of the most surprising things I read in this article was this: “a strong selling point is the tightly coupled integration between the Xserve’s OS and its hardware platform.”
So the open hardware standard we’ve heard touted for so long may not be as strong as the integrated approach used by Sun and Apple, the two companies most often cited as not offering a compelling reason to buy their products over their “open” rivals.
Perhaps the value of time spent debugging and devising workarounds for mismatched components is better understood these days.
The end of the “Bueller moment”
Handheld Instructional Technology
Their teachers reported the handhelds had a tremendous positive impact on student involvement. Using handhelds, students asked engaging questions and were more “on task” than usual, and were effective collaborators.
This article was linked to this one via waypath. This is getting better all the time.
scratching an itch with iCal
I have been doing more stuff with iCal and keep finding more to like about it. What really makes it work for me is phpiCalendar (look for in on SourceForge). I can publish calendars and share them in an interface that looks and works a lot like the iCal desktop application.
I have high hopes for the Mozilla calendar module to allow platform-neutral editing, but it’s not there quite yet (it’s still in beta, I realize). In fact, I had to open a bug against one problem I am having.
I do wish the date files were more easily readable (unlike so much of the other prefs files in OS X, there are not human-parsable XML, but some other format that doesn’t immediately make sense to me). But then again, the phpiCalendar parser is available as open source, so I can work out the logic from that, if need be.
Have I mentioned how cool I think this is?
just what I was looking for
If you want to list recent comments in moveable type, you have two choices more or less:
Very nice: see it in action just below the list to my resume on the main page.
no more blows against the empire
I am going to try to refrain from adding my voice to the anti-MSFT chorus in future. No compelling reason, other than boredom with the whole topic. There’s nothing new to talk about. How many times does anyone want to read or write about lousy business practices, shoddy design and implementation, an utter lack of regard for customer choice or desires, and an unwillingness to do anything about any of these things?
There are lots of other weblogs that link to the same bug reports, the same pithy attacks: the Waypath results I was getting helped me realize how unoriginal my gripes were, so I’m going to leave it to others to work those fields.
hard to tell if this works
First, how can you accurately diagnose yourself for developing kidney stones? Easy. Sit down and place one of your foot on your knee. There’s a small bone protruding out at the bottom of your ankles. Note the small semi- depressed area between that bone and your Achilles tendon toward the back of your foot. Use your thumb and with some pressure, push around that area. If you feel a strong reaction of some sort, that means you have stones. No reaction, no stones. The right foot corresponds to the right kidney. The left foot the left kidney. If you have even the slightest response, take HT-26. Within 2-3 days, the developing stones (size of grains of sand) will pass. If you have a strong reaction, it is recommended that HT-26 be taken for a longer period of time. When can one stop taking HT-26? When all pain or reactions from ‘pressing’ on the side of your foot/ankle is completely gone. This method for detecting kidney stones is very easy and accurate, so you can check every day to see your progress.
According to this, I’m stone free. I have my doubts about that, as much as I’d like to believe it.