Friday, 16. May 2008, 04:22:22
Internet Explorer, font, website, guas website
...

IE can't render worth crap. I know this. And yet, I did not fully anticipate it. I finally thought today to check how the
new GUAS website looked in IE, and it was really bad. I had to change the font back from courier to times new roman, which I hate. I might compromise with perpetua, but I don't know if that will work. For now it stays tnr. It was a little bit traumatizing, especially because the site looked so good in Opera. To make up for the trauma, I give you one photo from
the album I made the other day of Mister Bones playing with the starfish toy L--- gave him. Speaking of Mister Bones, he still is strange about feet. Today he woke up, saw my feet, and walked
very quickly out of the room. Our only theory is that maybe, before he ended up at the shelter and before we adopted him, in between being starved and kept in a tiny cage he may have been kicked. He isn't weird about his own feet anymore - now my parents play this game with him where they tickle the fur that sticks out between the pads on the bottoms of his feet. Somehow, watching
South Park just now reminded me that I need to check how the GUAS website shows up in Firefox...
Wednesday, 14. May 2008, 23:35:38
professor, astronomy, Mister Bones, work
...
That's what it says in the spot where my fourth grade should be - just NR. NR = Not Reported. This sort of worries me - that was the one where I got an extension, and then went over the extension a little bit. On the other hand, my professor never emailed me to tell me something was wrong. I also know that professors are generally expected to have a seventy two hour turn around on final grades. For a test, this seems okay. But for fifteen to twenty essays, which are themselves fifteen to twenty pages, this seems unfair. Three days to read and grade 225 to 400 pages seems like it would take a herculean effort. And that's just for one class, not multiple classes. In this class, the essay is half of our grade. Three days seems a little aspirational, at the least.

I didn't feel like raising GUAS from the ashes today either. Last night I was watching television because I couldn't stand to look at my computer screen any longer. I spent about nine or ten hours yesterday working on the
website and the listproc. Unlike some people who are silly heads who live in Bronxian stomping grounds, I actually like the new site better, and not just because I made it. It has fewer colours and photos, but in my mind that adds up to visually and aesthetically simpler, and therefore more desirable. Take that Joe! Just kidding. I agree that the last site was quite good. For this one, we have no choice but to use a template, and the template is not very customizable. I expect that this is to make it simpler for people who don't build websites, and even out the playing ground for all the professors, departments, organizations, etc. THe only real customization I can do besides the header is with html in the text, and by embedding photos and videos. Even the photos can't be hosted on the site though - the only way it works is by putting them on a flickr stream and using the code. That's strange, but okay. I might just set up a flickr stream for the organization to make it simpler.

The first photo is of Mister Bones helping with the dishes. Mostly he helps by getting in the way or by licking plates as they're loaded into the dishwasher. He looks confused and sad here, because I had just thrown out food instead of giving it to him. Mister Bones doesn't believe in the concept of food going bad, and therefore not being suitable for eating. The second photo is of Mister Bones helping me blog. As you can see, he helps me blog by sitting on my bed and touching my nose with his nose. He slept all day today, until my parents pulled into the driveway in their hippie car, and then he woke up and ran to the front door to meet them when they came in. This morning we made more progress with chomping and dragging. After a round of chomp chomp I showed him how to chomp on my dad's arm and then drag my dad towards me. Then he did it all by himself. Yay for progress! Much like Mister Bones, I also slept all day. I think the sleep deprivation from finals has caught up to me, and I've run out of adrenaline. That's fine - after I sleep it off I'll feel better and return to a normal schedule. Today was a day of being a bum, and it was great. Now I'm going to go continue reading
Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster. I bought it months ago, but was too busy with school to start it until I got on the plane home.
Wednesday, 14. May 2008, 03:54:27
science, catholic church, club, catholicism
...
So I am at home now. One of the comforts of home that I can enjoy this summer is television. My parents switched cable providers in my absence, and now we have more channels.
Earlier I watched about five or seven minutes of Queer as Folk on LOGO, as a sort of anthropological experiment. It was very dated and contrived; I felt like I was watching Saved by the Bell.
There is a guy on The Daily Show discussing Obama's preacher in context, but not really in context. From what I hear, some of the religious figures McCain associates with are crazier.
Now I've been distracted from The Daily Show by the Science channel. They have a silly logo that is meant to look like a periodic table box with an atomic symbol. The program is about the Solar System, and totally more interesting to me than The Colbert Report. I'm fairly sure that fact means I'm supposed to be having some kind of college-student-quarter-life-crisis-identity-freak-out right now. Oh well.
Today was actually rather productive. I finished tweaking the brand new GUAS website, and I'm rather proud of myself. I've never actually done anything like that before, beyond the occasional HTML markups on this blog. Except that they aren't really HTML, because they use []'s instead of <>'s and slightly different tags. Anyway, I am particularly pleased with the header; this makes up for some nagging technical issues that aren't currently in my power to fix. Joe and I figured out the error problem on the GUAS listproc, so now I'm the only person who gets them, and after today I won't have to send out anymore spam test messages. There is one more thing I want to test, but it can wait.
I am almost done with the first season of 30 Rock. And because now on the Solar System program they are discussing the possibility of water on other planets (and therefore carbon based life forms) I will link to this AP write up of an interview by Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, S.J. with L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's newspaper. Rev. Funes is the director of the Vatican Observatory, and discusses the implications of the possibilities of extraterrestrial life for Catholic teachings. Apparently this (aliens) is also one of those things that people get irrationally worked up about.
I seem to be particularly enamored of the bold tag today.
EDIT - Today for breakfast I had scrambled eggs, wheat toast with butter and grape jelly, bacon, and orange juice. This is notable because the eggs tasted like eggs, the toast tasted like toast, the bacon tasted like bacon, and the orange juice tasted like orange juice. Eating non institutional food is like eating for the first time. Everything tastes delicious. Kraft Mac & Cheese is even better when you have fresh grated cheese to toss into it.
EDIT EDIT - I have made this entire post courier new. Because I felt like it. And that might be my favourite font right now - see the GUAS website header.
Thursday, 31. January 2008, 02:08:18
writing, photo album, Georgetown, iphoto
...
I have added new photos, in appreciation of blogging and also iphoto.
I was assigned a blog post for a class, due this morning at midnight. This would be the same class for which I wrote my worst paper in recent memory. I wrote the blog post in a vacuum, and then posted it and saw that it was very unlike all the other posts on the blog. This worried me as I am somewhat out of my depth in this class - not with the subject matter or the reading, but the type of writing [in that I am still relatively new to humanities writing in my opinion, and therefore still unsure of what exactly I'm doing]. Turns out it was fine after all, which makes me happy because I was excited about the opportunity to link to one of my favourite bloggers -
Twisty Faster. She is infinitely better at blogging than I am, in that she actually writes posts which are interesting for other people to read and are about Things and also because she is infinitely better at blogging than I am. Yes, I wrote that sentence that way on purpose - I do not think the way you do.
Yay for having not as much immediately-due homework today - I am exhausted and welcome the opportunity to relax tonight before diving into papers and reading tomorrow night.
Meeting in an hour and twenty four minutes. It will be interesting.
No photo for this post, because: new(!) photos!
Sunday, 20. January 2008, 23:41:24
room, Tondorf, observatory, macbook
...
And fortunately, except for a meeting in the morning, I have nothing tomorrow (day off from class and work) so I can spend lots of time freaking out over it! Also, it has been named: Silent Cal Coolidge. Because dead president nicknames are the bestest ever.
I was considering taking up recreational lock-picking, but apparently it's a felony or some such nonsense to possess lock-picks within the district. Whatev. I got a job instead. For ten-ish hours a week I get paid to listen to my ipod. And also re-shelve books, but mostly listen to my ipod. It's good, as I require some sort of external motivation to get up at the same time every day, and now I have to do that on weekdays.
Finally went to the grocery store today (yay!) and have also finally gotten in touch with some of the people that I hadn't yet gotten in touch with. Dinner in fifteen minutes with Jon, zB. Observatory things seem to be progressing alright, and are not taking over my life as I feared. I was more concerned about that after I decided I felt like getting a job.
On a side note - isn't the point of job interviews that
you know you want the job, but
they don't know if they want
you for the job? It totally didn't work that way at all. Not that I'm really complaining, I'm just a bit confused.
I do need to get homework done, but the reason that hasn't been done isn't to do with my cushy library job or the observatory - it's because I finally decorated my room. The only thing left to do is fold some cranes and hang them from the ceiling above my bed. I think I'll tackle that next weekend. And yes some of the posters and whatnot are supposed to be crooked/upside down/sideways/not entirely attached. It looks like a habitable place for civilised people to live now (in my admittedly slightly odd opinion), and it was totally worth the several hours I spent.
The photo is Fr. Tondorf in the observatory with his pet Seismograph. Apparently the acquisition of this seismograph was so exciting the NYT wrote an article about it. Or they didn't have anything better to write about at the time. Or Fr. Tondorf's
obsession enthusiasm was contagious.