Pinky Gone Driving Little tidbits not meant for human consumption

The Thanksgiving holiday is over and I am both sad and happy at the same time. We had so many good people here and I am sad that they are gone. On the flip side, we had a lot of people visiting and it took some energy to interact with all of them, and keep on top of Rose's needs. It was a wonderful time though. Here's some highlights

Jordan and Megan kicked the week off on Saturday with a visit from Nashville. It was great to see them again in our place. They had been here last fall, almost exactly a year ago and while much was different, the important parts were still the same. On Sunday we cleared brush and weeds from around the house and even had a bonfire that night. Oh yeah, and they got to meet Rose:

Sara and Clark were next, arriving on Sunday night. We hung out with the four of them on Monday during the day and Jordan and Megan left that afternoon. After Rose fell asleep that night, a raging game of Pinochle broke out with Sara and I challenging Lara and Clark, but we had to give it up so they could make it to the new Harry Potter movie.

My parents and brother came over on Tuesday and we hung out with them and my Grandpa Kenny on Tuesday for a late lunch and a restful day. Wednesday we hung out with Sara and Clark and Sara's mom Elaine as well as my parents. Brent (Sara's brother) and Connie made it in by dinner and our visitor collection was complete. Thursday was turkey day and we had dinner at my uncle Tim and Aunt Judy's. With 14 people (including Rose) it was about the most fun I could imagine. Kudos to Elaine for leading us into "What I am Thankful For" after dinner.

It was great to see family and friends together enjoying themselves and sharing in our lives. I was deeply touched by the love and kindness that everyone showed to each other. Next year though, we're crashing someone else's thanksgiving.

A friend's blog. Tres mild right now, but picante to come...

visit Mild Mannered Blogger

This site is totally hilarious. As a knitter, I feel both for the people who make these things and those who review them. I really like the attitudes of the authors. (WARNING: Contains some profanity.)

This guy was in a potted plant that had been out on our back deck for the nice warm late summer. We brought all the plants in (after a couple of frosts [oops!]) and it tooks me a little while to notice that he was there. I thought he was pretty cute and was glad that I managed to get such a nice picture of him. Lara thinks that Rose is a born animal charmer and called this fellow over.

I worked up a new default theme for the site, based loosely on the old one, but I thought I would try for something in the light-on-dark genre with colors tending toward blue. Let me know what you think. If anyone at all comments about the old theme being better, I'll be glad to bring it back.

The 23-inch Apple Cinema Display that sits on my desk is the nicest monitor that I've ever used. It's incredibly crisp, has great, bright colors and runs at 1900x1200 resolution. And for over a year, this has been great by me, but the other day, I looked on the back of the box and saw that the graphics card had a second DVI port. This thing could dual-head. I pondered how to get another monitor for about a weekend and thought of bringing in an old CRT, but I don't really have the desk space for it.

Then this morning, I realized that there was a 21-inch Dell 2000FP LCD just sitting on the floor in my office. So I hooked it up, spent some time calibrating and now the two monitors are running side-by-side. It's ridiculous. Seriously. Ridiculous. I basically have to invent things to put on the second monitor. The Dell runs at 1600x120 resolution so that comes to (1900+1600)*1200 = 4.2×10⁶ pixels of screen real estate in one really wide strip. Here's a picture taken with the iSight:

I posted this inquiry at 12:20 this afternoon and received a pointer to this response six minutes later. I got around to it 4 hours later and it took me five minutes to make the change work. And I didn't have to edit any core Drupal code. Every change made was internal to my theme (of course in other themes, the formatting characters will still appear).

I was looking at the work of Edward Tufte this morning. It is amazing to me to see so many people on his site who care so deeply about the display of information. Some of them have made me rethink things that I have been doing regularly to display data.

Perhaps most interesting is his idea of sparklines, which are word-shaped graphics that are to be embedded in the flow of text, as with this example of the Laker's 2004 championship season which can be easily contrasted with their 2005 season . More interesting examples of baseball seasons are on the Tufte site here.