melinthropy

Measurably
Excellent
Literature
In
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Relatively
Odd
Ponderings
Yeah! 
Well, actually, it doesn’t really stand for anything.  That was an example of a backronym.  I recommend following that link to the wikipedia article because for some reason, I found the article highly amusing. 

I heard about Sheldon Comics from a co-worker, and I’ve been reading it ever since.  It’s got people, animals, and a character who can only say “squee.”  What more could you want?  I enjoyed a couple recent ones. First read this one: 

Sheldon Jan25 
Pretty amusing.  And I figured that was it. But, wait, there’s more! 

Sheldon Jan26
Anyways, this has been my cartoon appreciation post for the week. 

A friend of mine posted a link to this geek test.  I thought it was pretty amusing, and I got to take a stroll down memory lane of my geekiness past and present.  My score was 45.16765%, which makes me a Super Geek!  Woohoo!  One of my geekier things that wasn’t in the list was that I was nominated for “Most Intellectual” in highschool.  (I was one of three, but I wasn’t the winner.  The valedictorian won it, which kind of makes sense.  We had a photo shoot at Phipps with all the nominees.) Oh, and I like to count on my fingers in binary.  If you take the test, add a comment with your score, and something geeky about you that wasn’t on the test!

Come on, Nintendo.

The Wii has been out for OVER A YEAR. Why is it so hard to find one? Even on-line! Don’t you understand I really want to play the new Zelda game over the holiday break?

What gives?

[Update: I broke down and ordered one! I got it as a bundle with extra games and accessories, which was more than I really wanted to spend for a gaming system, but I put my fudge website money towards it and justified the rest as John and my Christmas present for each other... Wiiiii!

If you are looking for a Wii, I recommend this site: http://www.xpbargains.com/wii_locator.php I found a few other places that were out of date, but this one seems to be on top of it. They have a nice xml feed that shows you the latest availabilities. Now I'm going to immediately take that xml feed off my google page before I see one that's cheaper!]

Or as some would say, “Fudge Renaissance”

I’ve just finished a month-long project to build a website for a colleague of mine and his wife to sell fudge! Check it out here: Renaissance Fudge Company

My violin practicing got cut pretty much completely — I would work for 8 hours at my main job (instead of my usual 9 or 10!), then come home and work on the site until midnight, plus a few solid weekends. But the site went live today! And my customer was happy. And Rails is pretty darn cool.

Fudge. It’s what’s for breakfast! (and lunch and dinner.) Eat more fudge!

(Actually, I haven’t even tried the fudge, given my severe food allergies. I’m going to work with them and figure out what flavors are safe for me to eat. But I’m sure it’s good!)

I thought this was an interesting article about languages that are nearing extinction. The article talks about how “More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to die out by the end of the century, often taking with them irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world”.

I thought it was a little weird that the knowledge about plants and animals and culture would necessarily die with the language. The article talks about how the languages usually die slowly as children decide that another language is more popular to learn and don’t learn the old language. But they still learn enough of it to mostly communicate with their elders. Then the next generation learns less of the language, and so on. But it would seem to me that the knowledge of the medicines and plants would still be passed down to the generations that only “kind of” learn the language. Then those children would be able to assimilate that knowlege into whatever the more popular language is, and continue to pass it down in the more popular, surviving language.

But, I guess it just doesn’t work like that. Maybe when children reject a language as not being worth learning, they are also rejecting the culture that goes with it, so that would be why that knowledge dies with the language.

My violin teacher recommended Naxos Classical Music to me last week as a place where I could listen to recordings of the pieces I am working on. It looks like for US$19.95 (or EUR€19.95 ?? Was someone too lazy to do the currency conversion? Or do the intertubes cost more in Europe?) you can get a year’s subscription to them where you can download all the classical music you want to listen to. It sounds like they also have Historical, Film Music, Jazz/Blues, Nostalgia, and World/New Age, but I’m not sure to what extent. You can also get a free subscription where you hear 25% of each track. I’m thinking of doing that to see what kind of selection they have. I think it would be great for someone like me who has a very limited classical and jazz cd collection, but would like to start listening to more without spending hundreds of dollars.

[Update: I don't know if it will work on my MacBook, and the search capability is a little crummy. Also, maybe the service is cheaper in the US since it apparently does not include the Jazz Legends recordings, which is a bummer.]

Just a quick update on Mr. Fish (aka Shadow). Apparently he felt his little fishy life was complete after such a great song was written for him. He has left us to swim the fishy heavens. And for the record, I cleaned his tank last weekend just like I said I would.

I thought this was an interesting article about how germs that were taken into space come back stronger than germs that were not taken into space.

So are we more susceptible to germs while we’re in space than we are here? Does our gravity actually help keep germs weaker than they would be in low-grav environments? Should astronauts be quarantined when they come back? Is our entire civilization going to one day be destroyed by… SPACE BUGS??? (Or have I been reading too much sci-fi?)

As I always mention, I’m very happy with my MacBook. Also, I know of at least 2 people in my office other than me (and I only hear from about 30 people or so) that have recently puchased Macs. So I predict that the market share for Mac is going to start going up and up and everyone realizes how cool it is and how they really don’t need to run Microsoft Word (and that they actually could if they really wanted to. Infact, Excel for Mac seems even better for Excel for Windows according to my husband.)

So now is the time to become a Mac Programmer! Everything seems to be prettier on the Mac, actually. Even websites that look kind of crummy by themselves look nicer on the Mac since each window has a drop shadow, and it makes the website look a little 3d. Apparently, the reason everything looks nice and consistent is the Cocoa toolkit. I did a tutorial with xcode when I installed xcode in order to get gcc. It was fun, and I created a Hello World window in Cocoa, but I didn’t really understand what was going on, especially since I had never even seen Objective C before.

Anyways, I recently came across this article from someone who made the switch, and it seems like a pretty interesting thing to try out! Maybe in all my spare time