In my "to post about" queue for a couple of days but certainly not forgotten has been a recent development in Washington, DC which Lyssa pointed out to me not too long ago. It seems that things are going far too smoothly in the nation's capital, so the decision has been made to randomly search the belongings of people traveling on the DC Metrorail or Metrobus lines, effective 28 October 2008 (registration may be required, BugMeNot for the win), which happens to be the day the new measures were announced. They're citing the upcoming presidential election as their reason for …
Lately, I've been noticing commercials on television (in particular The Food Network) claiming that high fructose corn syrup is actually good for you, and that you should buy products containing it to keep the corn farmers in business. A few of us speculate that this is in part a reaction to the growing community of organic farmers and consumers. On the Metro to DC on Tuesday, Lyssa and I saw this poster that subtly suggests that the use of fertilizers in agriculture are a good thing and that organic foods are somehow undesirable or inferior by implication. Using an image …
I roused myself from bed far earlier than I'm accustomed to on Saturday morning, around 0800 EST5EDT or so, for what is traditionally the most memorable event prior to one's wedding.. the bachelor's party. While most of the groomsmen weren't able to attend on Saturday due to their lack of proximity (most of them live at least one state, and usually more than that away from the DC area), the festivities were well attended by close friends from nearby. Shortly before 0900 local time most everyone had assembled on the doorstep: Jason and Jarin arrived first, followed by Grant and …
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.
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 …
Last weekend wound up a bit in the air due to an emergency at the last minute - one of Lyssa's relatives died unexpectedly and the family was hastily reconvened for her funeral, which was held on Saturday. because I'd been on the road the weekend before, I didn't have to make the trek back to Pennsylvania, much to my relief. Grant picked up Lyssa sometime on Friday while I was at work and returned to their homestead, which left me with some time on my hands. The first thing I did was move my car maintenance appointment back to Saturday …
Work's had me running around a bit more than usual lately, which has put a serious crimp in my time to write, let alone keep up with current events. I don't know how much time I'll have this week because I have wedding-type running around to take care of, on top of getting ready to travel to the city that never sleeps - good old New York City to attend what could be the last HOPE conference organized and thrown by 2600 Magazine. As one might expect, available time allocated to sleeping, resting up, or getting other stuff done has been …
One thing about writing posts with Google Docs: You can't divide posts into a header and the part-behind-the-cut with it.
With the advent of June in the DC area comes summer, and temperatures that one would expect of the South: hot, sunny, too damned bright, and damned hot. If you factor in the high humidity which tends to come with summer, call it "hot enough to not want to get out of the shower, let alone leave the house" and you've got it right. Temperatures on Friday were around 100 degrees Fahrenheit if you factored in the humidity (the 'heat …
