The whitehouse.org website was recently pointed out to me. It might be offensive to many, but the heading on the Bush biography page that reads "Courage-Passion-Faith-Petroleum-Xenophobia" is just too funny not to mention.
And on a completely different note, the live concerts available at the Live Music Archive and bt.etree.org have been rocking my world recently. Free, legal downloadable music with incredible musicianship and that live music energy.
This one is also not one of our cats, but here's Atari, Anna and Casey's cat. He's a big puffball and just the slightest bit neurotic. Sometimes he can't decide if he does or doesn't want to be petted. But here he is looking fluffy and cute.
I'm selling some of the pens that I don't use anymore on Pentrace. In fact, I have sold them already. They're mostly cheaper pens that I got when I was very new to the fountain pen thing, just to try out some different things. Now that I've tried some more pens out and know what I like, I'm selling these to raise a little bit of money for some new cleats.
I uploaded a bunch of new pictures to our Photo Gallery. There's a ton of stuff in there from about the past 8 months or so. Everything from hiking and camping pictures to baby showers; including this gem right here
We found our little love muffin a pediatrician: Carrboro Pediatrics and Internal Medicine. It's really close to home and they are an old-style family practice where you really get to know your doctor and they take the time to really get to know you. At least that was the way it felt during our hour-long get-to-know-you chat with one of the doctors. She was very personable and the fact that she took that much time to talk with us was heartening. Each doctor even has their own personal pager that they always carry with them--and they let their patients call any time. I was pretty amazed, but the doctors seem really committed to doing medicine in a different way than the current mainstream. Bravo to them.
Here's a cat-blog to get back on track for Fridays and looking forward to a relaxing weekend. Maybe I'll paint our bedroom our sell a car or something. Oh yeah, I really am going to do those things.
Any way, this is Mekon, one of Lara's mom's cats. She's got some siblings who might appear here in the future.
Professor David Adalsteinsson won himself an Apple Design Award for his program DataTank, a program for processing and visualizing scientific data. I use it every day and while it is hard to get the hang of, it can do some pretty cool stuff. Here's a little sip of the kind of stuff one can do. This award should be good exposure for the work he's been doing.
Andrew Choi who is famous (?) for his port of GNU Emacs to Mac OS 9 and X has now done the same for XEmacs. It is available here as a patch against xemacs 21.5.20. I have been using it for the past day or so and I am very impressed. It uses the native anti-aliased fonts, which was the main failing of his Carbon port of Emacs (which is no longer maintained by him, although it has landed on the Emacs mainline).
It took me a while to convert my .emacs over to XEmacs syntax and get the appropriate colors set up the way I like them and I found the experience of changing flavors of Emacs to be surprisingly easy and pleasant. I was impressed that XEmacs had faced up to the difficulties of separating out the scads of bundled Elisp code into packages, including a pretty decent package management system built into XEmacs. Many other projects have avoided the hard work necessary to create a working package management system and I have to applaud the XEmacs developers for biting the bullet and hopefully reaping the rewards.
The only thing that I can't get working is gnuclient/gnuserv, which is too bad, because I've been using Emacs as the external editor in mutt and now I have to wait for a new instance of XEmacs to start up every time I want to send an email. Setting up gnuserv/gnuclient in the normal way results in a tty process that won't take any input at all, not even Ctrl-Z. I read the gnuclient source, but it looks like all of the action takes place inside of XEmacs and I'm not quite yet ready to wade in there.
If anyone knows how to make gnuserv/gnuclient work with Carbon XEmacs, let me know.
I think that it happens to all geeks eventually, but this article convinced me to try the Dvorak keyboard layout. In fact, I am using it right now--very slowly. I think that all of this week's blog posts will be written using this layout. They say that you should learn something new every year.
I got back last week from my trip to Utah and Colorado for business and pleasure. It was a great time and when I came back, I had plenty to do! We celebrated my birthday, had a baby shower and saw lots and lots of good friends. I also saw my thesis advisors in
Boulder and we completed our first paper together and submitted it for publication in Physics of Fluids. That was pretty exciting for me and we will see how the peer review process goes.
We also took lots of pictures, so hopefully those will be up soon on our gallery at http://www.undersea.com/~nburrell/gallery. Here's a taste of what we've got for you. This is our friend Robyn with her dog Copper (and her fiancé Will behind the camera)
