Confound you Ewokaphobes!

My good friend Jeff sent me this link to the Star Wars Ewok Gospel. Funniest thing I've seen in a while. It's so funny I'm putting it here. Oh, and my brother Mike coined the term "ewokaphobes" to describe the Ewok Haters decried in this video.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did when I first saw it. (Of course it probably helps that I'm a huge fan of Star Wars, just like my Mom the Sunday School teacher really gets a kick out of the LOLCat Bible Translation project. The more familiar you are with the source, the funnier it is.)

New interface I'd like to see

I was just thinking that it would be really cool to have an interface on my PC that showed events and activities on a timeline like this one from MIT's SIMILE project. That team is already using it in their Seek faceted browsing extension for Thunderbird, so it's not like there's no precedent for this.

And for Linux users, it could provide a nice interface for the desktop search tools like Tracker or Beagle.

Updated laptop...

Just a quick note to let you all know I've updated my ideal laptop page.

Fun with trains...

Do you see the little train image in the header of the page? Well, I've got a script in place that moves it across the page depending on the time of day. The problem I'm trying to solve now is getting it to appear behind the building images. I can get it to do so fairly well on Firefox, but when I do, the "Main Content" link becomes unusable. I can't get it to work in IE7 at all. So I'll just have to figure out some solution.

May 9th, 2008 OK. Got the train image fixed. Just added it to the header SSI as an IMG tag rather than trying to put it on the Main Content skip link like I had planned yesterday. It even works the way I want it to in Firefox right out of the gate. Of course I still need to find out why IE7 isn't honoring the z-index I have specified, but that will have to wait for a bit.

Later on May 9th, 2008 Found out that my train image was appearing in odd places in IE7. Floating above the bridge or falling below it. Adjusting the margin-top CSS call didn't work, because when the window was resized the margin was set incorrectly. So I used something I haven't used in a while: CSS positioning. Using an absolute position seems to have solved the problem.

Ugh. -- March 10, 2008

Being sick sucks. It's strange, but for the first time in more than a decade I actually ran a fever. I wasn't all that clear on how to deal with it. See in my family the men usually don't get sick, we tend to suffer from mechanical problems: Heart attacks, kidney stones, that sort of thing. So being laid out by a bug is unusual. But on the upside, I was able to sleep through most of the snow that arrived. And when I was feeling better I went outside to drive some of the snow away. That's right everyone, my extreme temperature broke the snowfall at least a day earlier than it would've broken otherwise.

You're welcome.

Discovery Channel's new "Smash Lab" program

Smash Lab sucks and should be cancelled

Welcome

Please pardon the dust, but I'm working on changes to the site. Normally I would keep this under wraps, but somehow taking care of this in the public eye is more effective. I suppose it's because of the pressure I feel to get the job done so I don't disappoint the audience.

My Toshiba TabletPC had a problem with power. Here's how I fixed it.

More information about me can be found either on my resume or the detailed work history page.

Why are your page titles so weird?

Why are the page titles set up backwards?

The answer is simple: Search engines. Usually when you see a page title in Google's search results, it puts the title of the website first. This is useless. It doesn't tell you anything useful. So by reversing the page title, it's actually easier to see what the page is about. (I hope!)

What's the big idea?

Have you ever had an idea that you just couldn't get out of your head? One of those things where you think to yourself "Why hasn't anyone else thought about this?" Sure you have. Everyone has.

I have had these ideas myself, and I'm tired of them taking up space in my brain. For that reason, I've created a section of this site called Big Ideas. You can get to it from the navigation bar.

Here are some examples of what you'll find:

A few random questions

Speaking of big ideas, I wonder when medical equipment manufacturers will realize that they can use the USB interface to have an EKG or EEG that plugs into a port on a laptop or handheld computer? I mean then all they have to do is write a device driver to shift the heavy processing needs from the medical equipment to the laptop's CPU.

It really stinks that Seamonkey's mail client doesn't allow message filters to examine the content of an email message. That would be so convienient.

Is Open Source Software a modern example of a gift giving/potlatch culture?