From the Mouths of Babes

Tonight, Scott and I went out to dinner with my Aunt Patti and surprise guest Grace. Eating out with Grace is an experience, to say the least. When we placed our orders, she piped up decisively to the waitress when it came to be her turn that she wanted a cup of soup like mine in addition to the grilled cheese sandwich our aunt ordered for her.

When the soup arrived, Grace was thrilled: It had big mushrooms in it! Grace, though only four, has a decided preference for foods most kids would turn up their noses at, such as any and all meats, seafood (including straight-up imitation crab), cheeses and veggies like mushrooms and black olives. Also, the only beverages she likes are plain water and Arby's Jamocha shakes. However, she doesn't like bread much -- go figure.

Anyway, after eating her soup mostly with her fingers for a while, she noticed that Scott had not ordered a cup as well.

"Scottie, why didn't you get any soup?" she asked.

We told her that he'd gotten a salad instead. But a salad just didn't cut the mustard for Grace.

"But don't you want something delicious to eat while you're on this date?" she asked. And then she took a big spoonful of her soup and stuck it in Scott's mouth.

"How romantic," I said.

So Shines a Good Deed in a Naughty World

Heard Friday in the t-shirts section of Steve and Barry's, from a teenage boy speaking to his friends:

"These shirts aren't funny. They make fun of women."

Sad

Now PETA is planning an ad campaign featuring a picture of Ronald Reagan with the claim that "Animal fats DOUBLE your risk of Alzheimer's." Only problem? They don't, at least as far as scientists know. It's an unsubstantiated claim -- as Alzheimer's researcher Dr. Gary Small says in Newsweek, diet may play a role, but there's no proof animal fats double your risk. Nancy Reagan, of course, is very upset about her husband's image being so abused. A question for PETA: Is vegetarianism such a poor cause that you have to scare people into it with lies?

Failure

What a deceptive headline AND lead. Not until the fifth paragraph do we learn that the boos were not for Paul Hamm, in the midst of controversy over his all-around gold, but for the poor score the judges gave four-time gold medalist Alexei Nemov, who preceded Hamm. That's a horrible bit of misleading the reader, stirring up controversy where none exists. Isn't the truth enough in this case?

And as for the South Koreans, they don't deserve to get any gold medal for the all-around at this point. Yes, their gymnast was scored wrong on the high bar. But you know what? Gymnastics has rules about protesting scoring errors. Had anyone bothered to check the scoreboard and make a protest before the competition ended, the South Korean team could have rectified the mistake and given their gymnast the score he deserved and, possibly, the gold medal. But someone (presumably, the team coach) was not on the job, and it's not at all sportsmanlike to try to change the rules you agreed to going in to get the gold for yourself. The judges may have made an error, but the team did, too. And lest we forget, dozens of other gymnasts left the competition with squat -- not a bronze medal, even one that appeared to disgust its winner even the night of.

Paul Hamm Waits Out Boos Then Wins Silver

The Healthy Diet of Swimmers

NBCOlympics.com: "With the announcement, Phelps is finished swimming at these Games. And he didn't hesitate when asked what he would like to do after competing in 17 races over the last seven days.

'It's McDonald's time,' he said. 'Time to have some fries and some Big Macs maybe. Definitely an apple pie for sure.'"

It's the Little Things

How eight pixels cost Microsoft millions: "Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between 'not specified,' 'male' or 'bitch,' because of an unfortunate error in translation."

Despite this particularly boneheaded example, the article is also notable for how it shows how Microsoft ends up a victim of exceedingly touchy geographic disputes. Who'd have thought people cared quite this much about maps (especially after having gone through most of my school career with maps showing us the vast U.S.S.R.).

Holy Crap

ESPN.com: "He cruised to the Olympic arena, his iPod plugged into his ears. A few hours later, after his sneeze on the pommel horse, he went from first place to 12th with only two events left. It was a huge choke. Somewhere, Scott Norwood looked up Hamm's phone number in Milwaukee for consolation.

But then something curious happened: Hamm stepped up to the parallel bars, jostled and spun, landed as softly as if he'd jumped off a curb, and pumped his fist in the air."

That was the most amazing comeback I've ever seen (if you saw his vault into the judges, I'm sure you agree). Congratulations to Paul.

Hiatus

Just to keep anyone wondering clued in, our internet service has been out since Thursday night. We're currently going online only sporadically using AOL's dial-up service (it's the only service you're bound to have connection software for when you can't download anything). Adelphia did not repair our service when a technician came out today, so we're just hoping they'll find a way to fix it tomorrow.

Unofficial Works

I can almost use the new Blogger interface in the Camino unofficial build. I still seem unable to use Compose mode, but Edit HTML mode seems to work all right. It's definitely an improvement to be able to switch modes at all.

Happy Days Are Here Again

BBC NEWS | Health: "Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation's drinking water, it has been revealed.

An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater."

Foxy

Much better than the previous update. Firefox on Mac is starting to look good enough to give Camino a run for its money again. Camino not working with Blogger now is definitely hurting the browser in my view. But still, this family competition is unfortunate.

But you know, Firefox 1.0 is scheduled for release on Sept. 14 -- which just so happenes to be somebody's 22nd birthday! (Of course, not for Mac, though.)

Technical Jiggery Pokery: Mac Firefox Icon Update

Software Search

I'd like to create a cookbook of sorts. Not really an original cookbook but more like a collection of all the recipes I like. I've been doing this in part by recording my own recipes, recipes I find online and a few cookbook recipes in a number of Word files, with the idea that I could print them out and put them in a binder eventually. However, I don't like the idea of printing them because it would require a great deal of paper and ink, something I can't justify without at least having a laser printer (per page, it's immensely cheaper than an ink jet and produces better-looking results with text to boot).

I'd like to find a way to store them more efficiently on my computer. Using Word files makes the recipes more difficult to search (there's no table of contents generated, and different categories of food are in different files), plus Word is a pain to use for formatting. Probably because I don't do it right. I've never learned how the styles system in the program works (I never had to worry about them in other word processors), and for some reason it's exceedingly intrusive in Word, sometimes reformatting something for me based on a style I used for that kind of heading when I first created the document but later thought better of. I'm sure there's some AutoComplete feature I could turn off to fix this but I've never dedicated the time to look for it since it's really only annoying (or noticeable) in these particular documents.

I tried using a database before I started using Word. I created a template for entering recipes in AppleWorks' database module, and I put in a few recipes. While this system had the advantage of being sortable, it suffered from formatting issues. Pasting stuff in from web sites would retain the site formatting rather than conforming to the look of the database. Plus, recipes (and especially, ingredient lists) often were too long to fit in the text fields I had created. (I don't remember if you could even scroll through them -- but who wants to scroll with a list of ingredients, anyway?)

I've also tried using Blogger to record recipes, but Blogger doesn't allow you to assign categories like Movable Type does, so it's like pasting everything into one long Word document. Being able to sort by date isn't helpful for a cookbook. Movable Type isn't an option, as it requires a server that gives you special CGI access, which you generally have to pay for.

I also tried Blosxom a bit. Blosxom is a blogging system as well, built with Mac OS X in mind (although it works on other systems). It has the clever idea that rather than using a database system (like SQL) to sort your entries, it can use the ultimate database system -- your hard drive's file system. Basically, this means you save your entries into folders based on how you want them sorted into categories (Blosxom can pick up the date from the file itself). Blosxom uses information in the blog's URL then to determine which folders of files to display. However, since it does this all with text-file entries, it's not great for recipes. Unlike Blogger, Blosxom doesn't convert line breaks out of the box. Thus, to get a hard return, you have to type the HTML for "line break." Hand coding HTML isn't much fun when your blogging or creating a database.

I have Windows cookbook software. Fat lot of good it does me now. If I looked, I might find some OS 9 cookbook software in the basement. Rather, OS 7.5. Too old and slow to be useful. OS X cookbook programs seem to run about $20 and seem mostly to have questionable designs or, at best, to be self-running FileMaker databases. I'm considering iBlog or BlogWave Studio, but one seems buggy and the other seems to require .Mac. And both cost money anyway.

What to do?

Bread With a Side of Bread

Tom Felton.com: "What is my favourite food?
I like plain food with no spices or herbs or onions! Favourite foods are cream crackers, chocolate ice cream without any bits, pepperoni pizzas without onions, chicken, mum's Shepherd's Pie, Tesco's frozen plain sausages, pancakes and of course chocolate!"

Poor Draco. It must be such a boring (and stereotypically British) life to eat only bland foods. He's what, 16 now? 15, maybe? Surely his tastebuds have mellowed since he last ate an onion. He's probably never tried a caramelized onion, either. Onions have to be the sweetest vegetable out there when treated right.

And of course, his several raptures about Emma Watson on the site are cute.

Hi-Larious

The Onion | CIA Asks Bush To Discontinue Blog: "'I know so many people, but I'm way too busy to keep in touch with all of them,' Bush said. 'Whether I'm talking about our strategies in Gitmo or my dogs down in Crawford, the blog is an easy way to let everyone know what's been up with me. If I've just had a really good lunch at a new restaurant, or something funny happens in a briefing from the NSA, I want to let my friends and family know about it.'"

Taking Back the Web

If you'd like to show your support for Firefox (and encourage others to download it), why not add one of their promotional buttons to your site?

Ramblings, I Guess

I just updated my Friendster profile, how about that? I haven't really used the service at all since I signed up, and I'm of little use to my Friendster connections really unless they want to meet me in particular since I seem to have few friends who don't already know each other anyway. Oh well. I mostly updated it now so that my usable web site address was posted in it rather than the bloggedup dead one.

Although, I recently discovered that I still have a bloggedup account, even if they deleted my site. Last I visited, they had stopped taking new accounts, including new paid accounts. I figure that those with paid accounts there will find their sites are not long for this world (despite the company's promises to the contrary -- can these people really be trusted?), and perhaps as evidence of my point, should you visit their home page at the moment, you'll find they've all but disappeared. However, back when I last visited, I attempted to log in to see if I could, and lo and behold, the site still recognized me. My web space is still gone, but apparently I still have the ability to raise support tickets. Why I would, I don't know.

Everyone should take this opportunity now to make sure that their bookmark for my site says "http://www.alzubra.com" rather than "http://colleenfischer.blogspot.com" -- not that I'm planning on jumping ship soon, but when I do put down the cash for my own hosting service, I'd hate for everyone to not know where to find my site, especially if I continue to use Blogger only via FTP. If I start sending my entries that way, then this blogspot page could very well disappear suddenly.

On the other hand, Blogger doesn't work in my browser now, so maybe I won't be using it. We'll see.

So Who's With Me?

Who else thinks "Kerry Edwards" is a better name than either "John Kerry" or "John Edwards," from a purely aesthetic point of view?

Hehe

Little Yurt on the Steppe: "By 1984, the Contras and I controlled exactly the same number of villages in Nicaragua. It took $150 million in U.S. aid for the Contras to enjoy that success, whereas I was but an infant operating exclusively out of my California nursery with only childproof toys and limited motor skills."