Axodys

I’ve got a couple different weblog projects that I’m working on right now and my appreciation for “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org just keeps growing the more I use it. Thanks to the experience I gained while setting up Axodys and the simple WordPress install process I was able to migrate “Mary’s classroom weblog”:http://mrsgilman.net over from an old version using MovableType in less than an hour. I still need to set up her events calendar, but it looks like it will be pretty easy to do thanks to the “Event Calendar 3.0 plugin”:http://blog.firetree.net/2005/07/18/eventcalendar-30/ that a quick google search turned up last night.

Once we have the basic functionality on “mrsgilman.net”:http://mrsgilman.net set up the next phase will be to give it a theme that is more customized to Mary’s liking than the default theme. Yesterday morning I sent her a link to the “Word Press Theme Browser”:http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/theme_browser.php at “alexking.org”:http://alexking.org and had her look through the themes and pick things she likes as a starting point. It sounds like she’s already picked out a few different ones that she likes.

Besides Mary’s weblog, I’ve also got a bigger weblog project that I’ve had in mind for a while. It’s still strictly in the formative stages, but I’m hoping to have something rolled out for by the beginning of September. Now that my kayak is functional and I’ve scaled back my efforts on it I’m going to put a lot of my efforts into the the new project. Stay tuned for more information.

The Sneeze has a “great interview”:http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000408.php with Adam Savage from the Discovery Channel’s hit show “Mythbusters”:http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/mythbusters.html.

bq. *Adam, why is it so entertaining to watch you get hurt?*
(LAUGHING) Well, I think it’s a function of exactly why the show is entertaining. Jamie and I are not scientists. We’re not experts in any field. But we have a lot of curiosity, and an uncommon ability to really throw ourselves in just about any corner of science, and really seek out what’s going on. And when I get hurt, I think people like to watch it because they identify with us. We’re not white lab coats, we’re not, you know, boring doctors, we’re just like anybody else, maybe with a few more skills. And everyone get hurts when they’re building stuff^1^. Even Jamie occasionally. Although, that never ends up on camera.

I still can’t believe that Adam pierced his tongue for one of the shows that I saw recently simply for the sake of an experiment on the effects of piercings on lightning strikes. It would have been one thing if he had actually wanted to have his tongue pierced, but based on the fact that he took it out at the end of the show (and he was happy to finally be able to remove it) it seemed like a pretty drastic thing to do in the name of science and television. Then again maybe that’s the kind of thing that makes me enjoy the show as much as I do.

*1* As the scars on my lefthand demonstrate, that statement definitely held true for me over the course of building my kayak.

Google Talk talk is “everywhere”:http://www.smashsworld.com/2005/08/im-on-google-talk-right-now.php tonight. Their jabber server is running (I know because like half the blogosphere I was able to connect to talk.google.com via Adium), but I haven’t seen any sign of an official announcement yet. I also tried going to “google.com/talk”:http://google.com/talk to see if I could download the Windows chat client for my XP machine, but as of Tuesday evening at just after 9:20 PM it didn’t work.

Apparently once Google Talk is officially available tomorrow the Windows client will also support Voice over IP which is fairly cool. I haven’t been much of an instant messaging user for close to five years now, which not coincidentally, is about the same length of time that Mary and I have been married. Since Mary was the primary person I IMed with any regularity it shouldn’t be a surprise that I didn’t keep it up.

Interestingly enough, my friend Jesse Jones and I experimented with the venerable unix “talk”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk command line utility quite a bit back when we were in college, but found the technology a bit rough at the time. With laggy network connections, weird overwriting glitches and a tendency to hold two distinct converations at the same time the technology was definitely in its infancy back then, but it was still a pretty fun way to communicate. I can’t speak for Jesse, but it’s interesting to me that I never really embraced Instant Messaging in quite the same way. Maybe with the advent of ICQ and AIM it just got too mainstream for me. Or probably more likely, I just never got in the habit of running my chat client in the background at all times.

“Engadget 1985″:http://features.engadget.com/entry/1234000430055334/ is by far the funniest piece of computer geek humor that I’ve read all day. It took me right back to the day I got my first modem– which was actually back in 1991. Cell phones have definitely come along ways since their brief case-sized ancestors debuted. And thank goodness GPS receivers have come down in size and price. Gadgets that cost more than your house just don’t seem like a wise investment no matter how cool. Catch it all and the trendytapecast over at “Engadget”:http://engadget.com.

Well, after “Robert’s ringing endorsement”:http://www.bump.net/2005/08/plans-for-resilience.html I had to hear Plans for myself and… wow. It took me a couple listens to really start to assimilate things, but once it started settle in I was blown away. As good as “Death Cab for Cutie’s”:http://deathcabforcutie.com first single Soul Meets Body is, I think there are at least six or seven songs on the album that I liked better.

As a point of reference, I really, really liked DCFC’s last album, “Transatlanticism”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlanticism. But I have to admit that there are a few songs on that album that I regularly skip. It’s not so much that they’re bad songs, it’s just that they don’t really reach me on the same emotional level that the rest of the songs do. And in DCFC’s defense when they hit such a home run for me as they did with the album’s title track I can accept a few ground outs. Well, baseball analogies aside, I can honestly say that they’ve taken it to a whole ‘nother level and succeeded on every single song on Plans. I’ve been listening to it straight through repeatedly all weekend. Albums this solid just don’t come around very often.

Since missing my planned deadline a week and a half ago I’ve scaled things back a bit on my kayak building. I worked on the coaming roughly every other day this week and devoted quite a bit more time on it today as well. Even though I’ve generally taken my time I’ve still made a few more mistakes than I would prefer. It hasn’t been a big deal though because the vinyl coated polyester I’ve been using to make the skin and coaming is very easy to work with and fix mistakes.

As of this moment the kayak is finished enough to safely launch and I think we’re actually going to finally take it for a spin at a nearby lake tomorrow afternoon. The coaming needs a little bit of additional work between now and then, but it’s mostly just for some additional reinforcement and general aesthetic improvement– it’s already totally functional.

I’m excited to finally take my “Sea Raider”:http://yostwerks.com/SeaRaiderLCChuck.html (that’s the design not the actual kayak’s name) out and see how it does. It’s been a long, but fun journey building it and I’m really curious to see how it performs.

h4. Arrival

Yesterday Mary called me out of the blue to to ask me about a small package had been dropped off on our doorstep commando style. That is to say, a DHL delivery person jumped out of an unmarked van ran it up our front steps, dropped it off without ringing the doorbell and took off. I knew my new glasses were coming via DHL, but I was expecting them sometime around the middle of next week. Mary was a little bit weirded out, but I reassured her that the package had to be my new glasses and gave her the okay to open things up and confirm that everything had arrived in order.

Mary opened the package while I listened and immediately seemed impressed with the quality of the standard case and the glasses within. She even decided to try the glasses on to get a feel for what they looked like even though her vision is pretty close to 20/20. Everything seemed to be in order so I thanked her and we got off the phone so I could get back to work.

By the time I got home from work last night I had completely forgotten that the glasses had arrived. After a few minutes of catching up with Eawyn and the dogs I came to my senses and started looking around the house for them. Mary directed me to their location on the kitchen counter and I grabbed them and headed for the bathroom to remove my contacts.

h4. Initial Review

At first glance the “Palermo”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/3005_Black.html model frames seemed pretty similar to my “previous Eddie Bauer pair”:http://axodys.com/1999/02/11/new-glasses, but I discovered that they’re actually quite a bit different on closer inspection. The material on the new frames was more of a shiny brown metal than the more natural bronze patina of my EB pair. Plastic only covers about half of the ear pieces while on my old EB’s the plastic ran all the way to the hinges. The “Palermo”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/3005_Black.html lenses are similar in size to the EB’s, but streched a little wider horizontally and slightly narrow vertically with outer edges and corners that while rounded are much squarer than my EB’s were.

Overall I’m really happy with the look and feel of the “Palermo”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/3005_Black.html model I chose. They’re a nice change from my previous glasses, yet the difference is so subtle that I felt completely comfortable with them the moment I put them on. The over all quality of the frame and lenses seems quite good and the delivery time was completely awesome. It’s alway taken at least a week for my glasses to arrive when I ordered them directly from my eye doctor.

h4. Conclusion

If you’re looking to order quality prescription eye glasses with the best value possible I heartily recommend “39dollarglasses.com”:http://39dollarglasses.com. They have a nice selection of “plastic”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/12000.html and “rimless”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/14000.html frames as well. You can even get “tinted prescription sunglasses”:http://www.39dollarglasses.com/rx_sunglasses.htmlfor just under $50 (which I may buy next summer). The ordering process is easy and painless if you know your prescription and delivery time was surprisingly fast for the $5 standard ground. I received my glasses 3 days after placing my order despite living on the opposite side of the country from their New York location.

“Robert”:http://bump.net (who has never steered me wrong with his musical reviews) says that “Plans”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plans_%28album%29, “Death Cab For Cutie”:http://www.deathcabforcutie.com/’s new album coming in September is the best album he’s heard this year. I’m really looking forward to it myself since “Transatlanticism”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlanticism and Ben Gibbard’s side project “Give Up”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postal_Service#Give_Up have gotten massive airplay on my iPod this year. “Ben Gibbard”:http://www.bengibbard.com/ is a lyric writing laureate as far as I’m concerned. On top of that, I just like seeing bands from the Northwest do well and it looks like “DCFC”:http://www.deathcabforcutie.com/ is poised for a real breakout.

I just noticed that “WordPress 1.5.2″:http://wordpress.org/development/2005/08/one-five-two/ has been released. I guess I should check the WordPress dashboard a little more regularly. It sounds like it’s a straightforward upgrade, although it’s kind of a pain to have to copy over the entire installation. I wonder if there’s a list somewhere that states exactly which files have changed since version 1.5.1.3?

Here’s a nice explanation of the “WordPress 1.5.2 changes in plain English”:http://asymptomatic.net/wp/2005/08/14/1887/wordpress-152-changes-plain-english/, but that isn’t exactly what I was looking for. Time to dig a little bit further.

Okay here are the file changes I found for 1.5.2:

wp-comments-rss2.php
wp-settings.php
xmplrc.php
wp-admin/
     users.php
     post.php
     edit-page-form.php
     categories.php
     upload.php
wp-includes/
     version.php
     template-functions-category.php
     pluggable-functions.php
     comment-functions.php

I just changed the above files and everything in WordPress seems to still be functioning normally. I don’t understand why this information isn’t provided standard with the upgrades.

Back when in I was in elementary and middle school I loved to draw on graph paper. It was perfect for creating plans for underground caves/dungeons, giant spaceships and everything else that captured my imagination at the time. The biggest hangup I ran into was acquiring more graph paper when I ran out. It was more expensive than regular paper and sometimes hard to find. Luckily, twenty years later our friend technology has pretty much eliminated that problem if you know where to look.

Kevin MacLeod at “incompetech.com”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/ has created free downloadable pdfs of just about every kind of graph paper type imaginable and tools to generate customized versions as well! Kevin also provides some really esoteric graph and lined paper designs as well including “hex”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/hexagonalGraphPaper/hex.html, “tumbling block trapezoid”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/hexagonalGraphPaper/tbgp.html, “dots”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/hexGraphPaper/squareDots.pl, “musical staff”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/linedGraphPaper/staff.html, “writing and penmanship”:http://www.incompetech.com/beta/linedGraphPaper/writing.html, and much more.