Bleh.

Organizing my thoughts on a sheet of 5-square graph paper. Letting iTunes run on the iBook so that the iBbattery will run down so that I can recharge it; it won't recharge if it's not below 95%. (Yes, I've done Power Management foo and upgraded the OS (10.2.8 right now); the techs at the Apple Store think it's the battery itself.) Procrastinating, just like my supervisor. Looking forward to being here until 5 or 6 tonight.

[EDIT: The situation's been clarified.]

I went to the gym yesterday, and actually feel better for it today. My knees want to foment an armed rebellion, though. I've been reading Feynman's Rainbow on the treadmill; it's a good read¹, and the text is large enough that I don't have trouble following it while I'm walking. I need to get a pair of earplugs² and a visor, though, to eliminate distractions - specifically, the TV screens that are lined up in a row in front of the cardiovascular machines (treadmill, stationary bike, elliptical, &c.). Something flashes and catches my eye, and it takes me a good 30 or 40 seconds to get back into the book³.

Still have a cold, but just barely. I'm a little stuffed, have a mild sore throat, and aches in my sinuses and down my neck and shoulders.

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¹ tisana, I thought of you during the last chapter I read yesterday, about a grad student and a professor trying to food on a weekend and ending up mooching off of the buffet at an on-campus wedding: "Are you on the bride's side or the groom's side?" "Neither. We represent the physics department."

² Well, another pair; I already have one, but I like to keep it with my drums so that it's always handy and I don't have to go hunting and run the risk of getting distracted before I can play.

³ I wish I could find more good books on CD. I don't like buying books on CD, because I'm less likely to listen to them more than once than I am to read a physical book more than once. But my library's selection is limited at best.

Okay, yes, I'm a total dork

...for implementing footnotes in my last post. But, seriously, that paragraph before footnotes? Totally unreadable.

Anyway, to make up for my total dorkiness, here's Angry Flower Veterans for Truth. What's more disturbing than Bob (sorry, Robert) in a suit is that he looks good in a suit.

Joel on Software

What do web browsers do if they don't find any Content-Type, either in the http headers or the meta tag? Internet Explorer actually does something quite interesting: it tries to guess, based on the frequency in which various bytes appear in typical text in typical encodings of various languages, what language and encoding was used. Because the various old 8 byte code pages tended to put their national letters in different ranges between 128 and 255, and because every human language has a different characteristic histogram of letter usage, this actually has a chance of working. It's truly weird, but it does seem to work often enough that naïve web-page writers who never knew they needed a Content-Type header look at their page in a web browser and it looks ok, until one day, they write something that doesn't exactly conform to the letter-frequency-distribution of their native language, and Internet Explorer decides it's Korean and displays it thusly, proving, I think, the point that Postel's Law about being "conservative in what you emit and liberal in what you accept" is quite frankly not a good engineering principle. Anyway, what does the poor reader of this website, which was written in Bulgarian but appears to be Korean (and not even cohesive Korean), do? He uses the View | Encoding menu and tries a bunch of different encodings (there are at least a dozen for Eastern European languages) until the picture comes in clearer. If he knew to do that, which most people don't.

Tonight

Tonight is Secret Project Q night.

If you see me online, tell me to get back offline. (I may tell you "Hey, SPQ is done, I can do whatever I want." If that's true, I should be at the gym or reading, so kick me off anyway.)

I'll see all you crazy cats tomorrow. Don't get into too much trouble while I'm gone!

Augh.

Tomorrow. Afternoon. I promise. I'm 2,500 words away, and the last 500 words I've written have sucked so much that they're threatening to turn into a black hole and swallow the whole rest of the project, and I can't fix it because I'm too tired.

Tomorrow.

Also, I was outside for, like, two seconds, and now my entire arm itches. Screw you, mosqi maskit mosquee bugs.