A teeeny update, since, well, most updates have been living on the main blog. And by teeny, I mean, haul over to the main blog to get some nerdery about Windows 7. And nerdery on dinosaurs and such. Because, you know, they're awesome.

And besides, who wouldn't want to follow me there and get cool stuff like the Tuesday Tetrapod?

Follow up the links if you want to know what that is! (Another bonus: easier to code there, as I put in a bunch of CSS shortcuts)

So I've been posting with increasing regularity on my "official blog", mostly because, well, I've been posting "pertinent" stuff there -- news, science stuff, etc, and not so much personal stuff anywhere. I suppose my personal life has been a combination of routine and bursts of not-so-pleasant, meaning poor LJ-fodder.

However, Natasha pointed out that my latest entry on my real blog about the "Stick Figure Science" competition would actually make pretty decent LJ-material. I encourage anyone that's interested in either drawing comics in any way or interested in science in any way to take a crack at it. I mean, it'll be fun, something cool to share among us, and hey, won't it be snazzy if your comic ends up being used by the NCSE? The idea is by forcing everyone to do stick figures, it should put everyone on fairly even footing.

More details, etc, are at the blog link above (including a PDF of the comic -- it was done in Illustrator, so it's a vector graphic. I have some teeny details on the "cladogram" in particular), but for LJ, I've put a copy of mine below the cut.

Enjoy!

So, this is something interesting to post on my LJ -- most of my posts of late have been on my "Real Blog" and sciency and such. Still trying to reserve this space for things more speculative, personal, etc.

I will find out shortly how the paper submission process over at JVP ends up! I'm not sure if I should be worried or excited or jazzed, and right now my stomach can't quite figure out which it wants to feel:

Here's hoping!

This article about the Washington atheist sign at the capitol building is fun reading. Apparently, they're protesting the "hate speech" of declaring that:

"religion is but myth and superstition"

The ironic part? The same folks are holding signs that say "Atheists go to hell" and have preachers saying "It is time to chase out of the house of God all the unbelievers and evildoers". Well, not to mention there is certainly a credible case to be made that if saying "religion is a myth" is hate speech (untrue), then saying "unbelievers go to hell" is certainly a stronger form of hate speech.

(To be clear, I don't think it is ... I just think its brainwashing. It becomes hate speech when they think that unbelievers *should* go to hell).

Oh fundies. Always a source of entertainment.

Well, I sent an email to some of my friends asking them to write letters, too, maybe hoping that well, enough voices might influence some third level aid and have some itty bitty effect. When Peter sent me this reply:

"Sorry, but I've heard that nuclear power generates nuclear waste, and even after processing it must lie underneath the ground for ~8000 years to become safe. Thus, I don't really trust nuclear power.

Care to convince me otherwise?"

I chose to follow up with this:

( Why waste is not the issue )

Now, waiting for House to download ...

A simple screenshot for now:

Taken on Liz this evening.

Voted!

I swear, I've slowly been warming up to Rob's sort of politics -- minimal interventionism. All measures got "No" votes from me with the exception of 11 (redistricting) and WW (park bonds). A part of me kinda hopes the train bill passes, though, but I'm not sure how well it will work.

Now, CBEST this evening, then watching election returns -- hopefully I'm back by 7 for the Daily Show!

Newsweek has a superb article on Sarah Palin, which I think everyone should read. She is grossly incompetant, and as I have alluded to in other places, my vote this November will not be for or against any other candidate; my vote will only be against Sarah Palin.

I strongly encourage everyone who reads this blog to take a look at Sciencedebate 2008 and Nature's science interview (John McCain declined; his previous stances are listed, however).

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Deadline for CA registration is 10/20. Vote!

I despise NVidia. It just removed my 750 gig from my computer, and its taken over Windows' disk initialization. This means that even if my data is safe, I can't even get windows to acknowledge a drive is there until NVidia puts it into a raid, which tells Windows its blank, which means it won't access it till its formatted ....

ARGH!

So, Google Chrome is out, and I must say, its a very attractive browser.

It also doubles FF3's Sunspider javascript benchmark speed, nearly triples Opera 9.52's, and nearly quadruples IE8's. Very slim browser with an installation routine that is under 500 kb and the whole install takes well under a minute, and installs cleanly -- doesn't ask for admin privledges.



On a technical basis, it has uses a tweaked WebKit renderer (after Safari) but doesn't do Safari's horrible proprietary font-smoothing; copies IE8's tab process isolation (thus, if one tab crashes only that tab crashes, not the browser); has a startup page very similar to Opera's speed dial (but lacking Opera's wand feature and speed-dial shortcuts); largely matches Vista's UI conventions in Vista (big plus); renders SVGs like Opera (see if this will render in your browser, and see what happens when you zoom).



Gotta say, I really like it. We'll see if it becomes browser of choice over Opera for speed, or if Opera will end up winning with its extra keyboard and mouse shortcuts.

[	Tags	|	computers, internet	]
[	coordinates	|	Berkeley	]
[	thoughts	|	amused	]
[	audio signal	|	"Canon in D" -- Pachelbel	]

I took about 300 photos of my room and we got this:



(if the embed doesn't work, try going to here.

Whoo!

Apparently some spambot got ahold of my blog and spammed the same comment on all the entries.

Sigh, I'll remove it after I find a countermeasure. There's got to be a plug in for it ...

You know what sucks? Being woken up a couple hours early by all the hums you're sleeping with turning off, the chirper outside starting to beep, and your battery backup starting to beep. Argh.

Taking the 840 bus this morning ~_~

I kind of suspect Comcast skews their tests for known speedtest sites:

A little snippet from the class I'll be teaching, by way of reference material for something the kids will do:

Woot! I have managed to fix most of the back end problems and cross-browser odditry (yes, I made that word up) on the evolution site. The better part of today was spent hacking CSS to get it to work across various browsers. Its a pity that Opera doesn't have a leading market share -- I had to remove two features because of Moz/IE buggy or nonexistent implementation of the :before and :after psueo-elements and the "content" and "counter" functions. I was also going to try to get the title to look nice by CSS, so I wouldn't have an image that scales badly. For example, look at



You can see that while the CSS that was quickly done looks as good as the image at standard resolutions, the zoom/nonstandard resolution favors the vector fonts. I was working on getting the placement debugged when I realized that only Opera (again) supports the CSS text-shadow property. *sigh*. I might just try to make it look good in CSS and better when it all works.


Other coding hiccups I ran into today included the fact that my server was running PHP4, which meant:

1) try{} and catch{} statements don't work.
2) include() and require() cannot pass variables by RETURN $FOO;
3) include() and require() will not access global-level functions if the file extension is *.php, and must be *.inc instead
4) import faliures return verbose warnings rather than TRUE or FALSE

Alas, I am hungry, but there are no spaghetti-o's, West Coasts, or Nude Sushis down here.

Tomorrow, send out LHS emails for critters we'll need for Adapt or Die, and more website work. Also need to fix the problem with IE7 rendering image colours differently than the hex value. Its a known issue, but I forget the work-around.




Thus ends a computer update.

At 4am, half asleep, I have to post this because its too damn rediculous. So, I leave the house today to go down to SoCal for a visit. About halfway to the BART station, I realized that I left my contact lens container and my glasses at home. Whatever, I thought -- I can live for a week with just contacts, and I have another lens container in my backpack.

Fast forward to tonight. I search my backpack for my spare lens container its not there. I have no idea what happened to it, but OK, whatever; I had two spares living in my drawer down in SoCal. I search my drawer, and nada. Did it get moved to Tasha's drawer? I check. There I find it, but deceased: its bottom part, the part that , well, holds the lenses, was broken off. WTH? OK, well, that's OK. THere's an unopened OptiClean whatever on the counter. They come with lens cases. I open that up, and nada -- it is empy. Well, I think, that's OK. I have a whole box of peroxide lens solutoin in one of my bags that I brought down from Berk. I dig around, find the bag, find the box, and its been re-sealed shut with tape, and there is no lens case to be had. OK, so, this is getting interesting. I sneak into my folks' bathroom to steal a lens case from my mom. I grab gthe first one I touch, and go to my bathroom, in which I notice, it, too, has been cannabalized. WTH? So I sneak back into my folks' bathroom and this time quietly shut the door, turn on the light, and dig around for a lens case. Finally I find a cheap two compartment one. That'll do.

Whoever thought taking off contacts could be such an adventure?

This blind writer begs forgivness for typos above; I'm not going to kiss Liz's screen just to seek out spelling errors.

Bedtime.