While I’m certain it is just coincidence, running the monthly severe weather alert siren about an hour after a squall with pea sized hail just about made me jump out of my skin.
Category Archives: General - Page 3
Bad test!
Posted by Cavorter
on June 6, 2007
1 comment
Not kidding
Posted by Cavorter
on May 3, 2007
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Words I never would have thought being strung together, much less to describe an actual physical product:
1in3Trinity is the first & only Christian Faith Based Energy Drink.
X Marks the Spot
Posted by Cavorter
on May 2, 2007
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One of my favorite web comics, XKCD, has a really incredibly cool comic/map up today. I’m trying to decide where cavort.org lies in The Blogipegilo.
How to properly finance a big building project for a venue
Posted by Cavorter
on May 1, 2007
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Not that I have any hope of any of the assholes at any of the local major sports organizations to pay any attention to this, but you would think that it would be possible to use tidbits like the Minnesota Orchestra privately financing a $90 million renovation for Orchestra Hall and Peavey Plaza in downtown Minneapolis to refute their continually idiotic requests for more public money for their monopolies. I personally get a whole lot more use out of that structure than I do out of any damned sports arena those fucking millionaires want me to help pay for, which is why I will probably be making a voluntary donation to this project at some point.
Shared Viewing
Posted by Cavorter
on May 1, 2007
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There isn’t any word on when/if it will be deployed but there is some very interesting information about the direction that Netflix is heading with their Watch Now feature. Of particular interest to several people I know at about 7min into the presentation they show a shared movie viewing interface that allows you to sync up movie viewing with people that are, presumably, on your Netflix Friends list. There is also a built in IM client for chat.
A few of the other things that they show off are Firefox and Macintosh compatibility as well as support for Chapters and Subtitles which are all extremely welcome additions.
Something else that is not stated, but I think is at least somewhat implicit is that since the new player is built on Microsoft’s Silverlight (formerly WPF/e) technology it should be relatively easy to create a Media Center plug-in that can run the player. I’m hoping that is part of their design plans but I’m not quite holding my breath just yet.
All that said I have to say that I actually think that the existing implementation is an excellent start. There have been a couple of occasions when I was between movie shipments and wanted to watch something that I was able to use Watch Now to see a few things, including all of Red Dwarf Series 2 and 3. While it is not nearly as comfortable to watch things at my desk as it is from my couch, the convenience was still nice.
Fuel for thought
Posted by Cavorter
on April 21, 2007
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I’m playing around with the publishing features on Google Spreadsheets and thought it would be fun to embed a couple of items from my mileage tracking spreadsheet.
Here’s the averages bar, which I use as a kind of dashboard for overall historical information:
I tried to get some of the new charts to publish, but it wasn’t working. Then I tried to get a link to a sheet that I made a couple of charts on, and that wasn’t quite working either. So, go look for yourselves if you’re really curious.
So much for that brilliant idea…
Posted by Cavorter
on April 16, 2007
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Normally I don’t post about things like this, but it’s pretty irritating and I think some people might care. Fair warning: discussion about my body and it’s reactions to medications follows.
So today I have determined that not only can I not take anything from the Aspirin family for muscle pain but I can also not take naproxen sodium either. In the last two years I finally linked the incidence of a particularly troublesome type of stomach spasm to taking ketoprofen (Orudis KT) for some occasional back muscle pain. Specifically an intense stinging pain starts at what I think is probably the esophageal sphincter and runs up the length of my esophagus to the back of the throat but I feel no need to vomit and actually feels quite a bit more painful than the symptoms related to vomiting. Since then I’ve tried ibuprofen, aspirin, and now naproxen sodium and they all have varying intensities of the exact same symptom, none of which are particularly tolerable but I think this pretty much rules out all of the OTC NSAIDs that I’m aware of. I never had much luck using acetaminophen (Tylenol, etc) for muscle pain but I think I may just have to use it and deal with the much lower effectiveness on the muscle pain.
Oh, and if anyone ever ends up taking me to a hospital it’s probably a good idea to remember that I probably shouldn’t get any of this stuff orally given other options. (And I need to remember to get this added to my medical chart, or at least figure out how to do so…)
Anyone want a mostly unused bottle of Target house brand naproxen?
Sour cows
Posted by Cavorter
on April 14, 2007
2 comments
In the category of things that would be a lot of fun to do, but I probably will never get around to actually doing anything about participating in: I’ve recently found two different races that I’ve thought it would be fairly entertaining to take part in. Yes, actual car racing, of sorts.
The first one is actually a reality show on Spike TV called BullRun. I ran across it the first time when they posted the series premiere to the Xbox Live Marketplace for free. It’s basically a long distance road rally with pretty crazy special stages and a classic reality show elimination system. How could that not be fun? Well, besides the TV cameras and the manufactured drama and etc? Besides, my TDi would beat the pants off of most of the competition in mileage and me and whoever I partnered with (ideally my brother) would only have to make a few modifications to make it competitive in the special stages and unlike the team that got eliminated in that series premiere who also had decent mileage, I can navigate.
The second one I actually just heard about today and is The 24 Hours of LeMons which has the entertaining requirement that the vehicle in each entry must cost less than $500. Plus it has events named things like: Personal-Injury-Lawyer Anti-Slalom, the Marxist-Valet Parking Challenge, and the Wide Open Throttle Rodthrowapalooza. Almost tempting to head to Detroit in September for the second event of the “season”.
Retaliation
Posted by Cavorter
on March 26, 2007
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Namespace exploration
Posted by Cavorter
on March 16, 2007
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I’ve been enjoying all sorts of stuff from Infodoodads this week but this one is probably the most interesting to a broad audience: Graphically explore the popularity of baby names over time with real census data.