September 12
Yesterday, for roughly 2 hours, I went into a sensory deprivation tank, and almost turned into a monkey. The experience was somewhere inbetween therapy and torture... in the same way that a deep tissue massage hurts a bit, but you feel better afterwards. I enjoyed floating, but closing one's eyes in a salt bath and you've got 80% of the experience... for 1/50th the price.
May 23
While Jason was driving around town I spotted two hot asses.
May 17
I went to my high school reunion this weekend and I had a great time. It was inconvenient to travel to New England, but definitely worth it. I hadn't seen some of my classmates since graduation... and my how we've grown. I'm pleased to say that all of my friends are studying worthwhile topics or engaging in exciting ventures and all of my adversaries are ridiculous.
I was most excited to see how my dormitory had changed. This past year Main Street had only 2 preps and 5 of their seniors were kicked out. It's disappointing to hear of seniors getting kicked out, hopefully they didn't cause anyone great harm and learned from their mistakes.
Lastly, I heard dorm grill was in the. Perhaps they should offer more appealing combo meals?! Here's what I sold my senior year and it seemed to work out:
| The Singaporean | 1 Hot Pocket, 1 Soda | $1.75 |
| The Fatass | 3 Slices of Cheese, 1 IBC, 1 Gusher | $4.15 |
| The Tiankai Liu | 1 Power Bar, 1 Soda | $1.75 |
| The Sampler | 1 Slice Cheese, 1 Slice 'Roni, 1 IBC | $3.00 |
| The All-Nighter | 1 Snickers, 1 Twix, 1 Hershey's | $1.75 |
| The Flip (very fruity) | 1 Gusher, 1 Fruit Snack, 1 Juicy Fruit, and 1 Soda | $1.50 |
Apr 26
I just had a bowl of snap peas that were delicious. In roughly 3 weeks I will have grown a strawberry!
I made this collage with PanoLab, an iPhone application Tom made.
April 6
I'm on Hulu, are ulu? Nova is adding all of it's content to Hulu and that includes The Great Robot Race which includes yours truly. My scruffy mug is only on the screen for a few seconds, but it's there nonetheless. Watching that video will explain what Red Team Racing was about and put the photos of me tooling around in a Hummer in context.
Feb 4
Are you using Selenium for functional testing and need an input value with whitespace? Try this:
selenium.getEval("getInputValue(this.browserbot.findElement('"+locator+"'))");
Dec 16
While chirping my boo, my mind drifted: What's the smartphone market going to look like in a year? Is the iPhone going to take over the market as the iPod did? What type of impact will Android make? I tried to answer those questions in this analysis.
Nov 30
Eye spy with my little eye, a conjunction of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter. They form a 3 degree triangle. Thanks for telling me about it mom!
Nov 29
After reading a book I was inspired and empowered. I made a tax calculator to show the hidden taxes that are behind everyone's earnings. You're getting hit with social security & medicare twice and inflation is a *****.
I'll revisit this project because it doesn't look the greatest in the ie's (boo hiss). Hopefully you use a real browser... check it out!
Nov 26
I just read The Revolution: A Manifesto. I try to underline a bit so I can review and to give the next owner of the book a piece of my mind! Here are two excerpts:
- Until the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq had never had a suicide terrorist attack in its entire history. (p20)
- Saddam Hussein missed every single airplane for 12 years as tens of thousands of sorties were being flown indicates the utter weakness of our enemy: an impoverished Third World nation that hacked an air force, antiaircraft weapons, and a navy. This was supposed to be the great threat that required urgent action. (p24)
- Iran, incidentally, may have noticed a pattern: if countries do have a nuclear wepon, they tend to be left alone, or possibly even given a subsidy. (...) With that kind of foreign policy, what country wouldn't want to pursue a nuclear weapon? (p28)
- For heaven's sake, what kind of debate is it in which all sides agree that America needs troops in 130 countries? (p38)
- Racism is a particularly odious form of collectivism whereby individuals are treated not by their merits but on the basis of group identity. (...) Government exacerbates racial thinking and undermines individualism because its very existance encourages people to organize along racial lines in order to lobby for benefits for their group. (p64)
- (...) the military draft, an institution based on the idea that the government owns its citizens and may direct their destinies against their will. The income tax implies the same thing: the government owns you, and graciously allows you to keep whatever percentage of the fruits of your labor it chooses. Such an idea is incompatible with the principles of a free society. (p78)
- The tax code excludes health insurance from taxation when purchased by an employer, but not when purchased by an individual. In addition, the HMO Act of 1973 forced all but the smallest employers to offer HMOs to their employees. The combined result was the illogical coupling of employment and health insurance. (p88)
- Failure of the federal war on drugs should be clear enough from one simple fact: our government has been unable to keep drugs even out of prisons, which are surrounded by armed guards. (p131)
- Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been found more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money. (p144)
- In order to meet our long-term entitlement obligations we would need double-digit growth rates for 75 consecutive years. When was the last time we had double digit growth for even one year? (p159)
Nov 24
I've gotten a lot better at gardening recently. I figured out what my problem was. Time. I've been hesitant to invest in this hobby because our roof is going to be inspected soon, but bold thoughs are brewing. My peas are really picking up and I learned that cucumbers are vines... who knew?!
Oct 30
I had to IE-ify a site for work, which is something I haven't spent too much time on before. I used this site as a testing ground to see how I'm going to have to customize basic layout for IE. It wasn't too difficult, but it has shown me what a crappy browser Internet Explorer is. Please, if you're using Internet Explorer you should get a better browser. Firefox is free, pages will load noticeably faster, and layout will be cleaner. Firefox is gaining in the browser wars, but catering to the half of users that run IE is unpleasant and unnecessary.
Oct 19
I participated in the Bike Kitchen Tour de Cupcakes and had a blast. I didn't have my race manifest so I had to use my manly chest... slashhh I'm really skinny. There are more pictures of the race at BikeForums.net
Oct 11
I've been growing a lot of sprouts. They're easy to grow, cheap, and quite nutritious. I can grown 2 bowls of sprouts every 4 days for roughly 25¢. I'll write a project lauding the benifits of sprouts soon.
Sept 27
So I'm biking along minding my own business and out of NOWHERE comes this curb. Here's the damage, note: it's a bit gory. I was bleeding pretty badly, but I kept biking all the way home. I didn't go to the hospital because I thought I knew what I needed to do... and it turns out I was pretty close. It didn't heal without a scar, but at least I didn't have to pay for universal healthcare.
Sept 21
I've been learning a ton of JavaScript and jQuery for work and I'm hooked. JavaScript is a client-side programming language, it lets me write code that runs when your browser loads my pages. A recent JavaScripty addtion is the lightbox that executes when you click on almost any of the images on this site. Hopefully you think lightboxes are attractive.
I've written a little about the roof garden I'm working on and the bridge that was necessary to get on the roof safely.
There is a new category for the collection of websites I've amassed. If you're interested in a website that is similar to anything I've created, let me know. I could probably could have hooked you up.
