Some weekends are very lazy. Sometimes I hardly leave my apartment. This is not one of those weekends. For your easy reading I present “What Keeps Me Busy” in a convenient bullet format:
- I got a new mattress. To say that this was needed would be a gross understatement. I would not be surprised to find out that someone had used this very set after a hard day of deliberating over this new document they are calling the “Declaration of Independence”. Even if that isn’t true, it hailed from a time slightly further back in history than the recommended 5-8 year life span. If it gives you any indication, the mattress had the price printed on it standing at a cool $86.50. They are not that cheap anymore, nor are they as thin. Seriously, what happened with mattresses in the last couple decades? The outgoing sleeping surface, mattress and box springs, was about 16in, thick. The new mattress alone is thicker than that. Here’s hoping this will improve my ability to actually sleep.
- I pet a baby manatee, in the wild, in the back yard! Yeah, that’s right South Carolina, down here in Florida have manatees in people’s back yards. We have big ones and little ones, old ones and young ones, but all of them have hair lips and drink from the garden hose. What kind of world am I living it that you grab the garden hose and water the aquatic mammals in the backyard.
- Magnetic toys + the lady friend = a good time had by all, because some times you just have to be a kid for a little while. Since I am on the subject of being a kid, the VeggieTales movie, The Lord of the Bean should be seen by fans of either talking food or Tolkien.
Joseph, as we all know, had an amazing technicolored dreamcoat. Amazing, as defined by Mr. Webber, is actually a very specific and esoteric collection of 29 colors. Have you ever wondered what all those colors look like together? More importantly, have you ever wondered to yourself what color the coat would be if you made the coat from an equal number of evenly spaced individual threads of each of those colors? Look no further.
A couple of people have asked me about the plugins I use for firefox. I will take this opportunity to tell you that if you are doing something silly like using Internet Explorer, then you should get firefox immediately, and then return here for addon goodness. Otherwise, here is the majority of the addons that I am running. Some of them require a bit of option tweaking before I use them, but you can probably figure that out.
- Add Bookmark Here – This simply adds a link to the bottom of each bookmark menu to give you direct access to add a link at that location. This is particularly helpful in my bookmark system, which I will have to explain another time.
- Tab Mix Plus – Lets you do all kinds of things with tabs and windows. In particular, this lets you revert back to the old way firefox did the close button for tabs (ie. one button on the right instead of the unnecessary button on each tab.)
- Download Statusbar – Shows the download progress in the status bar instead of a separate window. This just makes download less intrusive.
- IE Tab – The unfortunate reality is that some web designers are stupid and intentionally block any browser that isn’t internet explorer. This lets you switch to the IE renderer, thus making those certain pages work, while still staying in the firefox browser. Use with caution however since using IE inside of firefox is just as unsafe as using IE by itself.
- Locationbar – This does some nifty stuff with the location bar like highlighting the domain and making section of the address clickable. This is a preview of sorts of features that will be added to the browser in firefox 3.
- Resizeable Textarea – This lets you make the text area bigger on any webpage you visit, like those annoying blog comment boxes that are way to small.
- Stop-or-Reload – This is admitably a minor cosmetic thing, but it gives you one button for stop and reload instead of two. I like all the screen space I can get.
- Better GCal – If you use Google Calendar, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Better Gmail -If you use Google Mail, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Better GReader – If you use Google Reader, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Google Bookmarks Button – This is one that is indispensable for myself, but probably not useful to that many people out there. Given the fact that in a given day I work on 3 different computers (work, home, and laptop) I find it useful to share a good number of bookmarks between them. This system is far from perfect, but it does me just fine.
- Web Developer – This is an absolute must if you do any designing of web sites. If that fits you and you don’t have this add-on, just go get it.
- Firebug – Here again this is for web designers. It has some overlap with web developer, but I use them both regularly.
Any yet another instance of something I have been saying for a long time becoming a reality, Best Buy is going completely away from mandatory work hours/location for its work force. The new system means employees are entirely judged by the work they get done not being in a certain place for a certain number of hours on certain days. I can only hope the world in general moves towards this.
There is only one problem with Pixar as I see it. Just as they release one movie that I have been anxiously awaiting, they release a trailer for the next movie that leaves me once again anxiously awaiting.
I have not conducted any formal survey nor do I have any research to back up my claims, but if I took it upon myself to rank kitchen utensils in order of there ability to cause harm and/or pain they are it would probably go something like this:
- Knife
- Cheese Grater
- Fork
- Ice cream scoop
- Spatula
- Spoon
I doubt anyone will argue with me much on the items I have listed here. There could be some contention as to the exact order, but that is not incredible relevant. The fact that number 6 exists where it does is what concerns us here today. The simple fact of the matter is that I have gone through most of my life believing that the spoon was a harmless instrument of food consumption: a belief that was actually incorrect.
A couple of months ago I bought some new silverware to replace a rather hog-pog collection of flimsy and entirely “not me” flatware that I had been using since college. Most of the pieces I removed from the packaging and have been using just fine since then. One of each time of utensil however was strapped quite firmly to the front of the box as a display of what was contained within. In a fit of apathy, I left those few items in the box untouched until last week when I decided that it was time for them to be freed. With a sharp knife in hand, I proceeded to free the included knife, two forks, and a soup spoon. All of this happened without incident. Then when removing the last spoon, without a knife anywhere near, the injury occurred. Somehow, and defying all possible explanation, I succeeded in cutting my thumb open with a dinner spoon. This was no small knick either. It bled profusely for several minutes, from a spoon cut! Has the phrase “spoon cut” ever even appeared in the English language? That I don’t know. What I do know is that as it has healed I am left with distinct possible of going through life with a scare that I can attribute to a spoon. So how do I deal with the embarrassment of injuring myself with the most docile of eating utensils? I share it with the world. Sigh.
I had reason to see my family this past week, and each member at some point or another verbally admonished me for not being a frequent updater. This isn’t to say they have much room to talk. Three of the four don’t even have sites, and the other one doesn’t do much better than I do. That being said, I aim to please, and so I am now announcing my intention to change. It has begun with updating the back-end code to the latest version. A new design will present itself forthwith.
Also a side note to my family: I made it home alive.