BLDGBLOG (Building Blog) has a nice article about poison ivy becoming more virulent in high carbon dioxide environments, like what we’re heading towards. I’m especially glad now that I’m immune. Unfortunately Angela is higly allergic, so I don’t know how the twins will turn out.
Just some random thoughts…
I have been starting to notice how people use different modes of communication online. We have email, instant messaging, plus some website messaging tools. For instance, I don’t know (or at least can’t find) the email address for my friend Jesse Miller, but I know that he logs into www.boardgamegeek.com on a regular basis, so when I want to tell him something, I login there and shoot him a private message.
Facebook has really changed modes of communication, too. There are people that I message on Facebook regularly, even though I know their email address. Why? I don’t know, it just seems more convenient sometimes. Their Wall-to-Wall metric is what strikes me as very odd, though. You can see people’s entire conversations happen in your stream, since wall posts are public. That makes the conversation seem more like a public action, almost like the involved parties are on a stage in front of everyone, or at least talking loud enough that everyone else in the room can hear them.
I got mine:
I’m cool with you using it, though.
If you’d like to get your own (and figure out what I’m talking about), visit:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1155
I never got around to posting about this, but I’ve been using Kubuntu as my primary OS at home for a little while (Kubuntu is the KDE version of Ubuntu). Anyway, I took the time to perform the upgrade this weekend to the latest version, 7.0.4, Fiesty Fawn. Overall, the upgrade went well, with the exception that I lost wireless connectivity. Since this computer only has wireless available as a means to connect, this was actually a pretty big problem. I struggled with it for a while and after reading some posts on the Ubuntu forums, I was able to get it working again.
Lately I haven’t felt like doing anything, and before I always thought that was boredom. I’m starting to think that I’m just tired, and not wanting to do anything is a sign that I should go to sleep.
After packing up we got into the vans around 9:00am Friday morning. John told us that we had a surprise stop which turned out to be a swamp tour at Zam’s. The boat ride through the Bayou/swamp was interesting, although we didn’t see any very large alligators. Most of them were only four feet long, at the most. After the tour, we had lunch at a local restaurant and the journey began in earnest.
One of the students was in some pain, since she had pulled her hip on Thursday. She already had an injury, so this made her situation a little more severe than it might have for someone else. I don’t think she wanted to make things bad for anyone else, though, so she didn’t let on how much discomfort she was in. By dinner time, however, it was more obvious that this was a serious problem, and that something might have to be done. Later that evening, things would get worse for everyone. At about 1:00am we decided to pull off at the next exit and almost immediately one of the vans got a flat tire. We all sat on the side of the road trying to figure out what was going on. We eventually decided that the big van and the other two minivans should get to the gas station while the truck stayed with the wounded van to put on the spare.
Once we were all together again we discussed the situation and John decided that we should push on to Chattanooga, which was about 90 miles away, where we would have better luck getting the tire fixed and could take Emily (the hurt student) to the hospital. He asked me if the spare would make it further, and I said that I wouldn’t push it (it was rated for 100 miles). The big van went ahead while the rest of us drove up the highway at around 45mph. I volunteered to ride in the wounded van, so that there would be “an adult” in the convoy. We got the Chattanooga and found the hospital around 3:30 or 4:00am. The decision was made to leave the wounded van there, along with Emily and enough drivers to get it repaired once something was open and then catch up with us later on. The rest of us piled into the remaining vans and kept going.
After breakfast I took over driving. Thanks to a long breakfast and rest stops the other van was able to catch up with us at lunch time. I was happy to see my new friends again and learn that Emily was feeling at least a little better. I continued driving until around 4:00 or 5:00 and then Mira took over for the final haul into Carlisle. At was a relief to get out of the van, but I then had to drive the 40 minutes from campus to home, only to find that Angela’s car was stuck in the driveway. We carried our things the rest of the way up the hill and threw everything in the kitchen to be dealt with later. I wish I could say that I got to rest, but there were kids that wanted attention and a driveway that needed plowed. There is apparently no rest for the weary at the Steel house.
I installed the Widgets plugin and a couple of widgets. There are now del.icio.us links and Flickr photos on the right hand side. Pretty cool.
time: 20m
I upgraded this site to WP2.1.
time: 5m
I’m going to try to get back into blogging. I don’t anticipate that people will actually read it, though. I might try to experiment with some time tracking ideas, as well. The idea is that when I do something that I want to make a note of, I’ll put a line at the bottom indicating how much time it took. After a little while, I’ll write a script that will go through the posts and tabulate how much time was reported for each category.
We’ll see how well it works.
time:5m
Some notes about my experiences with IE7:
That’s all I’ve found so far. I’ll update with more things as I find them.
