Author: Gary

My sense of balance is pretty much back to normal now. I can notice some effects when driving and I turn my head to view traffic, but that is about it. I also get some dizzyness brushing my teeth. I’d say on a scale of 1 to 10 I’m at about a 2 now. I really hope this never comes back.

I’ll be back on campus tomorrow.

I have no idea what is going to happen to my semester. Finals are only a few weeks away and I’ve pretty much shot myself in the ass missing two weeks of school. I haven’t gotten less than an A- in any classroom course and if this semester gets hosed then I’m seriously going to have to reconsider continuning with academia. What sucks is that its not as if I don’t get what is happening in class. I conceptually understand pretty much everything, its all a matter of doing the busy work and jumping through the hoops. I do believe I have hit a point where I have a strong enough background in math and science to learn most things on my own, from journal articles and/or textbooks.

This couldn’t have happened at a worse time academically.

Other things:

• Please vote for Chris “Christmas” Rodriguez.
• Koyaanisqatsi
• 43Things.com is a neat site. Bietz pointed out that its owned by Amazon so they might be tracking stuff, but I really don’t care.
• Nated asked for people to fill out a survey for one of his MBA classes. It doesn’t collect anything personal and its quick.

Also, I’ve changed my AIM and MSN account names. You can’t reach me via my old IM addresses anymore. Contact me if you want my new IM. (I also have accounts for Yahoo, ICQ, and Google. Trillian is nice)

MIT has recently had a bit to do about their $100 laptop, which was designed to be a cheap computer for people in 3rd World Countries. From their FAQ page:

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. This rugged laptop will be WiFi-enabled and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

This I think is a good thing. In fact, I know I’m not alone in saying that I’d want to have one of these. I know lots of college students that would like one of these. $100 is the cost of the parts and does not assume a $100 street price for consumers.

When they first announced the project, they said they were not going to offer the laptop to the public, which I thought was really dumb. In the press conference I’m watching while I write this, Nicholas Negroponte and with Kofi Annan (Macalester 61′), said that they would offer the laptop to commercial companies so the public can buy it, most probably for more than $100 (maybe $150-200). This is smart.

To make this gadget successful they need to do two things: 1) they need to create a large base of applications that are easy to use and designed for this product, and easy to translate. 2) They need to keep pushing the costs for the components down and the only way you can do that is through volume. Letting users in developed nations pay for that volume is a win-win. They will also be able to create a slew of applications and addons that will be able to be used by users in 3rd World Countries.

I got 2 iOpeners when they came out off of eBay. I’d easily get one of these for similar reasons. You could buy 3 of these for the cost of an xBox. Many of the PSP hacks that are floating around could much more easily be adopted for a tool like this.

Assuming this works, its cool. I don’t think that they are going to solve all the worlds problems with this. There is way too much opportunity for corruption. I could easily see these selling for $50 on eBay when people steal them wholesale and try to resell them. The idea of everyone in the world having a laptop is compelling, but I think there are far too many political roadblocks to this being a huge success.

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the last week, I’m not dead. I haven’t been online much and haven’t been on campus since a week from yesterday.

On Nov. 7th, I was sitting in my structure geology lab when I started to feel really light headed and dizzy. Sometimes this happens and it passes so I didn’t think much of it. This time it didn’t go away. I managed to get through the day, drove home and literally stumbled into my house. I could barely walk. It was just like how you stumble if you get really really drunk or when you get off an amusement park ride.

The next day wasn’t so bad, but on Thursday it got worse. On Saturday it got so bad that I went to the emergency room. I would literally get nauseous turning my head. I puked in the ER and was stumbling as they had me sit and fill out forms.

They ran some tests and the doctor in the ER figures it is some sort of inner ear inbalance. I’m fine so long as I don’t move around. I can lay in bed, or sit sort of reclined at my computer, but walking around is akward. The nausea seems to be gone, but I haven’t been moving around a lot. I’m not sure if my balance is coming back or if I’m just getting used to it….or if there is even a difference.

They guy in ER said I just need to adjust to whatever happened to my inner ear. It could have been a small hair that detects the fluid in my ear that came loose, it could be the fluid itself, or it could be some sort of small sand grain sized thing in my ear that formed and dislodged.

I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do about school. I don’t want to be running around and have this come back while I’m there, then have to have someone drive me home.

So I installed this new theme for wordpress and when I was at school looking at my website, I noticed that I had color along the right column where the links are. I didn’t notice color on my computer at home. The right hand column was totally white.

I start playing with my computer and noticed that I can see the images and the color when I looked at the page on my 2nd monitor (LCD) but not my main monitor (CRT). I monkeyed with the brightness and contrast and nothing. Then I went into the video card settings and monkeyed with the brightness and contrast and finally got it to work.

If you don’t see a green square to the left of the title for this post, it seems that the contrast on your computer isn’t set correctly. There was literally a point where once the contrast crossed it, it would appear. Really weird. It wasn’t a browser issue as I had the same problem with IE, Firefox, and Flock.

Oddly enough, now everything looks better on my computer. I didn’t have anything to reference before to know what the settings should be. I had my brightness turned up too high the entire time.

As you can see, I’ve changed the site.

Visually, I just moved to a new, cleaner theme and removed a bunch of the junk links I had up. I’ve increased the version number to 4.5.

On the back end, I did a bunch of stuff:

• Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2
• Incorporated the Akismet Spam filter. I didn’t get much comment spam to begin with, and this should eliminate what little would sneak through.
• Installed a lighter version of the main admin page. The old one would grab stuff from the WordPress site and would take forever to load.
• Installed a plug-in on the admin side that will let me insert Flickr images easily to posts.

The header photo up top is the generic one that came with this theme, so I’m going to replace it with photos I’ve taken.

Most of the pulg-ins and themes I got I discoverd by just typing “wordpress” into the search field at Digg.com. I really need to spend more time figuring out how stylesheets and css works. I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be productive.

Also, as I was going through my comments trying to clear out the spam that was there, I ran across a comment I haven’t seen from March from Robin Alciatore. She is a pianist whose music I’ve downloaded from the old mp3.com. It was neat to see she actually read my post and left a comment. She’s probably has done as good a job as any classical musician in promoting herself online. I see she has her music for sale on iTunes, so I’ll have to throw her a few bucks.