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La Alma de Fuego…: My first step into the world of health
Consisted of me getting violently ill. It’s lovely to have the grunge swamp sickness that kids always get and then proceed to pass on to everybody they know in the first weeks of school. Of *course* there’s nothing you can do to cure this grunge swamp sickness except let it run its course. And of […] [Link]
Patrick's Journal: MinimalismAndMeaning at Mon Oct 6 15:48:58 2008
I just stripped the semantically redundant parts out of this blog (As I write this, I hear Statler and Waldorf guffaw "Well, that didn't work. He's still posting!"). Article border White space and the next article's combination of header name and permalink already separate articles. Background image While it detracted from the primary content, it did serve to balance the images I drop into posts. Which implies that I just need to decide on a format for blog pictures and automate that with an imagemagick script. Reduced width and color weight of horizontal rules Useful for delineating comments, they just don't need much prominence, as comments have enough whitespace and semantic difference already. However, at times a reassuring divide can quickly resolve ambiguity (especially when you use lynx). Less used => less emphasis. Color weight rationalization We have titles, unvisited links, visited links, article, and comments: titles and unvisited links indicate the new and should have color prominence; the article should follow next; while comments and visited links also need visibility. I find it useful to periodically go through something and rip out everything that doesn't look necessary and see whether it still works or not. More Statler and Waldorf? 
Nice, very minimalistic. I'm a fan of minimalism. You probably can't tell from my own blog, but it's true. - Cal [Link]
Patrick's Journal: MinimalismAndMeaning at Sun Oct 5 22:08:36 2008
I just stripped the semantically redundant parts out of this blog (As I write this, I hear Statler and Waldorf guffaw "Well, that didn't work. He's still posting!"). Article border White space and the next article's combination of header name and permalink already separate articles. Background image While it detracted from the primary content, it did serve to balance the images I drop into posts. Which implies that I just need to decide on a format for blog pictures and automate that with an imagemagick script. Reduced width and color weight of horizontal rules Useful for delineating comments, they just don't need much prominence, as comments have enough whitespace and semantic difference already. However, at times a reassuring divide can quickly resolve ambiguity (especially when you use lynx). Less used => less emphasis. Color weight rationalization We have titles, unvisited links, visited links, article, and comments: titles and unvisited links indicate the new and should have color prominence; the article should follow next; while comments and visited links also need visibility. I find it useful to periodically go through something and rip out everything that doesn't look necessary and see whether it still works or not. More Statler and Waldorf? [Link]
riley: autumn
so far autumn has meant more blankets, wearing more brown, drinking whiskey and apple cider, fires in the backyard to keep warm in the evenings, lorosi smelling cold, listening to celebration and beirut again, paying closer attention to daily political news, potentially major (and for the moment very exciting) life changes, and…. CANNING! this is the first year i've had a garden with enough food to can for the winter (mostly thanks to philip's hard work). we still have a few tomato filled canning days to come. a few weeks ago we made tomato sauce, two types of ketchup, salsa, two loaves of bread, basil garlic paste to freeze and butternut squash soup (because we had about 12 squashes before some insects killed the plant). we only canned the sauce, ketchup and soup. on thursday as i was headed downtown i stopped by the infamous persimmon tree and there were loads of smushed persimmons on the concrete. i found a few that weren't flat and also collected a few handfuls from the tree. when i got home i cleaned them and left them to dry. later on i put them in a mesh sieve, smashing them with a wooden spoon. i was kind of worn out after pushing all the pulp through (and i was a bit anxious to sit down and watch the VP debate) so i put the pulp in jars for the night. yesterday i made cookies. edit:::woah, some things never change. [Link]
La Alma de Fuego…: It’s the end of the world as we know it…
It’s The End Of The World As We Know It by REM And I feel fine… [Link]
La Alma de Fuego…: Embracing Life
I’ve never been much of an athlete–but I’ve always loved to move my body. As I’ve discussed in other posts, there’s been a lot of problems with fulfilling my love of movement lately. But I’m feeling better now, ready to remember my body and be friends with it. Ready to move–twirl, twist and feel […] [Link]
Patrick's Journal: FacesOfLife at Sat Oct 4 16:42:04 2008
I have difficulty reading people; part of this may arise from incongruities between facial expressions and what they say. Theoretically, facial expressions are one of the great universalities shared by our species. So, you'd think it'd be easy (unless you were trying to teach a computer to do it ;). For starters, perspective matters. In Japanese Noh theater, the actors wear non-malleable masks ; they convey emotion by changing the inclination of their face relative to the audience (this tells you something about the layout of Noh theaters ;). Since computer facial recognition has the interest of governments and security companies, we have free training databases of faces such as FERET . I just shipped in my email to get access to it and see what it has. I hope that it has a range of emotions displayed throughout. The Japanese Female Facial Expression yields 6 emotions per person over a smaller database. What I'd like to do is create an emotional IQ reading test online like the color IQ test. Basically, you'd get asked to sort a bunch of images into happy/sad/neither, or angry/fearful/neither, or pleased/disgusted/neither ranges. You'd get back a comparison of your reads versus all previous reads. Ultimately, I'd like to see online testing across the range of metacommunicative competence . CIO has a small training test for microexpressions ( Paul Ekman's work = time for an amazon order ;). Time to find some more online…. Update: 2008-10-04 Received my FERET username and password yesterday for a application processing lag of 18 days. NIST says they automated the process; did they automate the delay as well? [Link]
Patrick's Journal: PageReadability at Fri Oct 3 15:45:38 2008
Recently, I've been reading about page layout and readability. Many web twits hold forth about various rules of thumb: alphabet and a half = 39 characters, newspaper article width = 50-60 characters, 20 times font height, I typeset my website by hand and only have enough type for 44 characters, etc. Reading speed serves as a good proxy for readability (the more readable something is, the faster you can read it). Wichita State University ran a study on reading speed of various width lines (35, 55, 75, 95 characters per line). Guess which won? The 95. That tells me that the biggest hindrance to reading is the eyeball carriage return. Less carriage returns means fewer number of eyeball bounces back to the beginning of the line. Is that why there is no formatting in the comments? If we can't insert a break, the lines go on forever…:p — Nathan Actually, it was all part of a longitudinal usability study. Theoretically, the last CSS update fixed all that and pre-formatting works. Setting white-space to pre-wrap should allow comments to have paragraphs and code in them, wrapping the paragraphs automagically, while preserving the display of tabs and spaces… # huffman coding python… def say(*strings): print ' '.join(strings) [Link]
Patrick's Journal: PageReadability at Fri Oct 3 15:31:51 2008
Recently, I've been reading about page layout and readability. Many web twits hold forth about various rules of thumb: alphabet and a half = 39 characters, newspaper article width = 50-60 characters, 20 times font height, I typeset my website by hand and only have enough type for 44 characters, etc. Reading speed serves as a good proxy for readability (the more readable something is, the faster you can read it). Wichita State University ran a study on reading speed of various width lines (35, 55, 75, 95 characters per line). Guess which won? The 95. That tells me that the biggest hindrance to reading is the eyeball carriage return. Less carriage returns means fewer number of eyeball bounces back to the beginning of the line. Is that why there is no formatting in the comments? If we can't insert a break, the lines go on forever…:p — Nathan [Link]
Patrick's Journal: PageReadability at Fri Oct 3 09:53:37 2008
Recently, I've been reading about page layout and readability. Many web twits hold forth about various rules of thumb: alphabet and a half = 39 characters, newspaper article width = 50-60 characters, 20 times font height, I typeset my website by hand and only have enough type for 44 characters, etc. Reading speed serves as a good proxy for readability (the more readable something is, the faster you can read it). Wichita State University ran a study on reading speed of various width lines (35, 55, 75, 95 characters per line). Guess which won? The 95. That tells me that the biggest hindrance to reading is the eyeball carriage return. Less carriage returns means fewer number of eyeball bounces back to the beginning of the line. Is that why there is no formatting in the comments? If we can't insert a break, the lines go on forever…:p — Nathan [Link]
Patrick's Journal: PageReadability at Fri Oct 3 06:54:11 2008
Recently, I've been reading about page layout and readability. Many web twits hold forth about various rules of thumb: alphabet and a half = 39 characters, newspaper article width = 50-60 characters, 20 times font height, I typeset my website by hand and only have enough type for 44 characters, etc. Reading speed serves as a good proxy for readability (the more readable something is, the faster you can read it). Wichita State University ran a study on reading speed of various width lines (35, 55, 75, 95 characters per line). Guess which won? The 95. That tells me that the biggest hindrance to reading is the eyeball carriage return. Less carriage returns means fewer number of eyeball bounces back to the beginning of the line. [Link]
La Alma de Fuego…: Palin/Biden debate.
Who do you think won and why? My thoughts? Joe Biden won simply because he didn’t pull any of the folksy bullshit. I HATE when people pull the “I’m from the breadbasket middle america good ol’ small town values loving joe six pack hockey mom mini van driving world simply because I smile and wink and […] [Link]
La Alma de Fuego…: Demand NOW support McKinney/Clemente presidential campaign
found on a listserve Green Party National Women’s Caucus challenges NOW to support the historic McKinney/Clemente presidential campaign Monday, 29 September 2008 19:38 Distributed by the Green Party of the United States http://www.gp.org National Women’s Caucus of the Green Party of the United States http://greens.org/gp-uswomen/ For Immediate Release Monday, September 29, 2008 Contact: Morgen D’Arc, Spokesperson, 207-761-7797, morgenizer@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from […] [Link]
La Alma de Fuego…: The Mood=Sweet
I’m not a big fan of Sarah McLachlan, in fact, she pretty much irritates me. But I do like this song. And it’s even better that this song makes me very happy on a day like today, when the sun is shining bright, the leaves are swirling, there’s a bit of a nip in […] [Link]
La Alma de Fuego…: Messing around at home…
So, now that I’m able to access my blog again, I’m feeling the need to redecorate. I don’t think I’m going to keep what I have, but I’m definitly having fun messing with it so far. If you notice anything odd, please be forewarned! (and for heaven’s sake, just because I’m redecorating doesn’t mean you […] [Link]
La Alma de Fuego…: tu solo tu,
I originally posted this over at elle, phd. Dr. Elle so kindly welcomed me into her space while I was blogless, for that I thank her deeply!!! The other day somebody asked me, “What is it that inspires you to blog?” Usually, when people ask me questions like that, I have no idea what to say. […] [Link]
La Alma de Fuego…: I’m back! Hooray!
In case you all hadn’t noticed, I sorta disappeared there for a while. Well, this time, it wasn’t by choice. My blog shut down and wouldn’t let me log in. And of course, being the techie wizard that I am, all I could do is clear my browser cookies and then sit and stare at […] [Link]
Ibn Bint Jbeil: TENADELEYK !!
On the occasion of this happy Eid, one cannot but look forward towards a hopeful tomorrow, when future generations of Arab-Americans will evolve into a more synthesized community of Arab + American, when they will become a truer hybrid (!) of the two cultures. Some presumed new elements of this new culture will be things like new hybrid foods, fashion, and language. While many of these phenomena [Link]
Shannon - MySpace Blog: My English Friend: Louise (Loo)
September 20, 2008Over the years I've spent behind bars, I've had many pen pal friendships. Most last only a short time. Some last a year or so.One particular friendship has continued for more than … [Link]
Shannon - MySpace Blog: Correctional Practical Nurse Care
September 19, 2008Today I saw a new low in medical care, human compassion and bedside manner by an ADOC nurse.The orangeman that lives in the cubical next to Tony and I has been sick for a couple of… [Link]
news
HeraldTimesOnline.com: Jail death ruled a suicide
The Lawrence County Coroner today has ruled an inmate's death as a suicide. Lester Tipton, Jr., 33, died Saturday at 12:50 a… [Link]
HeraldTimesOnline.com: Voters turning out early today
Today was the first day to vote early, and Bloomingtonians took advantage. Shortly after noon, about a dozen people stood in line … [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: On tape, Stevens professes innocence, worries about jail
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors played secretly recorded conversations from 2006 that showed an occasionally profane Sen. Ted Stevens, irritated with the investigation that led to charges this summer that he took more than $250,000 in gifts — chiefly from Veco Corp. — and lied about them on his Senate financial-disclosure forms. [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: Proper disposal of old drugs is changing
Hoping to keep streams and groundwater cleaner, the people who run sewage plants around California want to change the way we get rid of old medicines. The toilet is out. The hazardous-waste site is in. Except where it's not. [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: Valley ground zero in Latino vote war
A legal war is being waged in the valley to give Latino voters more power. [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: Florida schools struggle to get kids active
When the talk turns to physical education, several things probably come to mind: running, jumping jacks, team sports, sweat. [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: Tight times in Macon: tips shrinking
You know the economy has gone South when folks around in Macon are going to restaurants and not ordering sweet tea. [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: Miami rides a green wave toward a 'bike friendly' city
A: It's the traffic, stupid! [Link]
NYT > NYTimes.com Home: City Room: Truck Fire Closes B.Q.E. to Traffic
The fire was reported around 1:15 p.m., and its causes were not immediately clear. [Link]
HeraldTimesOnline.com: Motorcycle, car collide at Walnut and Rhorer
Bloomington Police are at the scene of an accident at this hour on the corner of Walnut Street and Rhorer Roads. Initial reports o… [Link]
NYT > NYTimes.com Home: Citigroup Lays Out Wachovia Claims
In a complaint filed in New York Supreme Court, Citigroup seeks a total of $60 billion in damages from Wachovia and Wells Fargo and their directors. [Link]
NYT > NYTimes.com Home: Lilly to Buy ImClone for $6.5 Billion
The bid by Lilly for the biotechnology company beat out an offer from Bristol-Myers Squibb, which markets ImClone’s cancer drug Erbitux in the United States along with ImClone. [Link]
NYT > NYTimes.com Home: Paper Cuts: The Bad Title Club
The title of Neal Stephenson's latest work of speculative fiction, "Anathem," struck me as an unfortunate one, at least on first (and second) glance, for three reasons: it looks like a typo for "Anthem"; we can't be entirely sure how to pronounce it; and most of us have no idea what it means. Still, it's […]. [Link]
NYT > NYTimes.com Home: Lehman Managers Portrayed as Irresponsible
As Lehman pleaded for a bailout, it approved millions for its executives, a Congressional committee was told. [Link]
NYT > NYTimes.com Home: Well: A Conversation About Height and Health
A conversation with economics professor John Komlos of the University of Munich, who has studied the link between height and health. [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: Campaign takes negative turn as candidates seek edge
Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign has launched a more negative assault on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the stump and in ads, trying to pump up his ties to a 1960s radical and a convicted former donor to raise questions about his character. [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: Florida congressman earmarked funds for campaign donor
Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart has procured millions in federal funding to benefit a small Miami-Dade defense-contracting group that has donated tens of thousands of dollars to his political campaign and that of his brother, fellow U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart. [Link]
mcclatchydc.com: Homepage: Citi seeks $60 billion payout from Wachovia, Wells Fargo
Citigroup said today that it is seeking $60 billion in damages from Wachovia and Wells Fargo, alleging that Wells Fargo wrongly interfered with Citi's agreement to buy Wachovia. [Link]
NYT > NYTimes.com Home: Fed Takes Steps Under Bailout Bill
The Federal Reserve said that it would begin paying interest on commercial banks’ reserves and would expand its loan program to squeezed banks by billions of dollars. [Link]
NYT > NYTimes.com Home: Amid Crisis, a Deal for BNP Paribas
BNP Paribas agreed to buy much of the troubled lender Fortis Bank, just days after the firm was the target of a government-led rescue. [Link]