While we didn't get hit by Hurricane Hannah, the DC metroplex certainly felt her wrath late Friday and all day Saturday. I don't want to say that it was raining cats and dogs but not long after waking up on Saturday morning I saw a squadron of squirrels wearing what appeared to be miniature SWAT gear high-tailing it through rain blowing at a forty-five degree angle toward a nondescript white van in the parking lot. Unfortunately, they've moved back in and are busily digging in the coffee and aloe vera plants on the balcony, Lyssa tells me.
I've been trying to figure out how to write this post. I've tried the poetic way, the emotional way, and a few other tactics that just don't seem to work, so I'm going to go with the honest way:
An old friend of mine, Dee Mikula, is shipping out soon. She isn't in the military, but works as an EMT in Seattle and is registered with the Red Cross as a first responder in disaster situations. In 2004, she worked in central Florida during hurricane season, and on Tuesday, the ninth of September she's flying down to the Gulf to …
It's been said that the killer app that made the Net as ubiquitous as it is today is the web browser, with e-mail running a close second. Just about everyone uses a browser in some capacity or another to access news, information, and e-mail, possibly moreso than dedicated applications (such as e-mail readers, RSS readers, or database searching applications). As great as they are, web browsers have their own unique sets of problems and vulnerabilities that have to be taken into account, especially if privacy is of concern to you.
Firefox, in my considered opinion, is an excellent web browser …
If you haven't been paying attention this weekend (like me, actually), hurricane Gustav is headed toward the coast, and Louisiana is once again squarely in the line of fire. I've heard that Gustav is currently a category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, and it's expected to hit category 4 at some point.
If you normally browse my website directly (i.e., not using an RSS feed aggregator of some kind) you'll see that I made some major changes to the front page late last night. For the past couple of days I've been profiling load times and such like, and discovered that I could improve the code and structure markedly with some changes. I've been using the Firebug and YSlow plugins to see where the bottlenecks were, and as a result I removed a half-dozen or so badges from weblog directories that did little else but add to the page loading time …
A couple of months back there was quite a bit of hype (which vanished rapidly as people forgot all about it when the next new thing came around) about the NIA brain-computer interface from OCZ Technology (which is also known for its build-your-own-laptop kits). Ostensibly, it's a consumer-grade, non-invasive EEG that you strap across your forehead and jack into a small interface unit which then plugs into a USB port on your computer. The unit comes with drivers that can map certain inputs from the dermatrodes (good call, Mr. Gibson) to keyboard and mouse events defined by the user.. the …
One of the main reasons that I've been hanging out at HacDC lately is the fact that they've got a pretty well stocked electronics lab in the loft. There are shelves on the walls holding parts for sale and parts that have been salvaged from discarded equipment, boxes and boxes of spare everything you can imagine, and a couple of racks of power tools and other sundry equipment... in short, all stuff I don't have at my apartment.
More the point, the HacDC loft is a place where I can safely work on projects and not mess up the environment …
Time's getting down to the wire and there's no escaping it. The wedding is now two solid months away and Lyssa and I are scrambling to get our plans in motion. Last week the invitations came back from the printer, the directory of local hotels came back from Kinko's (I'll mirror them here to make it easier), and the custom printed stamps that my mother had made up for were put to use. Last week, parts of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were spent writing names and addresses, stuffing envelopes, and sticking things together. I spent a goodly amount of Friday …
I haven't been writing much about what's been going on in my life lately because there's been so much of it. Working out wedding plans, picking out tuxedos, trips to the HacDC loft to work on stuff, hanging out with Zapheus from Brass Goggles, shopping, keeping the apartment picked up.. I haven't had time to write about things like that. Most of the posts I've been putting up lately I actually wrote offline over a period of days in a catch-as-catch-can manner and then cut and pasted them into entries.
I haven't forgotten anyone, and I'll get posts up as …
