Moving Day!

I have decided that my new weblog, Everyday, is ready for prime-time! It is, of course, a work in progress (which will probably be the topic of many an entry), but I think it is useable enough to go live. I have many, many features to add. You may find that clicking on a link will lead you nowhere, I am working on it. You may find yourself wanting to add comments, I am working on it. You may find yourself wishing that you could sort posts by category, I am working on it. I have decided to go live because it has the basic feature set of a weblog, I can post entries and they show up on the main page. So wish me luck and change your bookmarks to:

http://weblog.celerity-designs.com

My new weblog (update)

I finally figured out how to use the local time for new blog entries! The company hosting the weblog is in the Eastern US, so if I posted at 10:00 PM in California, my weblog would state that I had posted at 4:00 AM the next day! I used a little JavaScript to populate the date in a textbox to get it to work right. The trick was to have JavaScript format the date correctly so that it could be inserted into a SQL database.

function setdatetime(){
var localDate = new Date();
var utcDate = localDate.toLocaleString();
document.Form1.TextBox_Date.value = utcDate;
}

So now I need to finalize the administration of the individual weblog entries (edit posts, delete posts) and figure out the categories, still...

Sony Ericsson W800

Sony Ericsson will be launching the rather sweet W800 on August 26th. Unfortunately, it will cost $499. This phone pretty much has it all, except for tight integration with my PC, like my Motorola MPx220 does.

Cave Thinkers

Cave Thinkers
How evolutionary psychology gets evolution wrong.
By Amanda Schaffer

I don't think people get evolution, or biology at all. This article points to flaws in some jack-hole New York Times columnists article that claims that Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is the driving force behind human behavior. That men must be more competitive than women because they, the men, win more Scrabble competitions? WTF? My main concern with this is that other people will read the New York Times article and accept it. The fact that more men win Scrabble championships than women has nothing to do with competition. I do find the fact odd though. I understand that women are usually more adept at language based skills than men. Perhaps Scrabble is more memory based than language based, but I digress.

I, for one, am of the belief that our biology is the primary driving force behind what we do. I tend to look to a biological reason for societal and individual behavior. That doesn't mean that I am totally nature vs. nurture though. I also believe that the human mind is an incredibly flexible and adaptable machine. That what we are taught has enormous ramifications in regards to our future behavior.

Oh god, please make it so...

Depeche Mode has a new album coming out in October! The new single, "Precious", is encouraging. DM's latest effort, while not bad by any means, was not as good as I had hoped it could be.

Song titles on the new album are:

• A Pain That I'm Used To
• John The Revelator
• Suffer Well
• The Sinner In Me
• Precious
• Macrovision
• I Want It All
• Nothing's Impossible
• Introspectre
• Damaged People
• Lillian
• The Darkest Star

Information from depechemode.com/news

Inconspicuous Warning

I was walking around a community college campus today, when I came across the above placard. It was not prominently placed, just affixed to the wall in a seemingly random place. It was a mere 6" by 4". After I read it, and my laughter subsided, I noticed that there were a number of them placed on the buildings in the area. I found it particularly amusing because it serves no purpose. Should you find yourself inside of this building during a major earthquake, the knowledge that the building is aged and may collapse will probably not ease the terror you will experience when the walls come crashing down upon you. All this sign does is give a person one more thing to worry about while they are taking a test.

What I'm Listening To

PJ Harvey's Uh Huh Her, the album is phenomenal. I absolutely love her voice. I particularly enjoy "The Letter", fantastic guitar sound and of course amazing singing. I highly suggest picking this album up. If you don't have any PJ Harvey yet, this would be a good place to start, you will get hooked.

Woodworking

I have started building a desk. So far so good (no lost appendages). I will post some pictures of the completed desk, assuming it isn't hideous, when I am finished. It is crafted from Birch to match the existing furniture in the room, which came from Ikea.

Lost Wishes

The Cure's Lost Wishes E.P.

1. Uyea Sound
2. Cloudberry
3. Off To Sleep
4. The Three Sisters

Autolust

Every time I see an Infiniti G35 Sport Coupe on the road, I begin to salivate. This is the most beautiful car on the road today, period. If I were to win the lottery tommorow, I would buy 3 of them. One heavily modified for the track. One moderately modified for the street. One luxuriously appointed for comfortable cruising.

Less is more

Apparently, less is more. Nike engineers have been hard at work on creating a better running shoe since the days when they were selling shoes out of the back of a van. After countless hours and millions of dollars of engineering effort, it turns out that the best shoe, is no shoe at all. They have studied the movements of the unshod runner and have found that they have more agility and have a considerably larger range of motion in their foot. Damn, you would think that after all of that work we could easily outdo (a. millions of years of evolution, b. some deity's infinite greatness). The point of all of this, well now you can buy a new shoe from Nike (Nike Free) that gives you the best of both worlds. You will be able to protect your feet from goatheads and at the same time be able to run a 4.4-40. These shoes look pretty cool as well. I like the fact that Nike has continually pushed the envelope of athletic engineering, now if they could just find a way to manufacture these shoes without exploiting impoverished brown people.

Whose Fish?

NOTE: riddle from Coudal Partners

By Albert Einstein (maybe)

This brainteaser, reportedly written by Einstein is difficult and Einstein said that 98% of the people in the world could not figure it out. Which percentage are you in?

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.

The question is-- who owns the fish? Feel free to post a comment with your answer.

Hints:
1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

There are no tricks, pure logic will get you the correct answer. And yes, there is enough information to arrive at the one and only correct answer.

If you get the correct answer, congratulations, you are one of the exclusive group of 121,348,731 people in the world who can.

PHP

I want to learn PHP & MySQL. Perhaps this will be a good alternative to ASP.NET which, for me at least, has past the point of being interesting. There are a number of shortcomings in the current feature set that I am considering abandoning it altogether. Of course everything that I am looking for will be available in the next version, assuming I want to shell out the mega bucks for Visual Studio again, and again, and again.