IE 6 never asked for permission to monitor my activities, nor has Firefox, nor has Opera. What is IE 7 (beta 2) up to???

Choosing Deny doesn't seem to be getting in the way of my browsing experience either, which makes me all the more suspicious....

I thought the never-ending project that I am working on was going to kill me; however, there's new data which seems to indicate that it's merely going to result in my going completely insane. I'm sitting here, desperately trying to concentrate, with not one, but two songs stuck in my head: I'm Just a Bill and Don't Fence Me In. How did these songs get here? I couldn't tell you. What's worse is that the result goes something like this:

I'm just a bill, yeah a bill, here on Capitol Hill, don't fence me in!

I kid you not.... You try to meet deadlines with this playing in YOUR head!

I figured it was time to own a digital camera for those occasions when something photograph-worthy crosses my path. Here's what I bought yesterday. Looks like fun!

I have an idea for an MS Word add-in that I think would be useful in conjunction with some other software we use in my field, and I'm willing to give it a try as a proof-of-concept. But, alas, I cannot find any good how-tos on the subject.

Based on my stats, which indicate that most of you have found me in your quest for the Smurfageddon video or uncyclopedia, I'm not holding out much hope. But if you happen to be reading this and happen to know of a good how-to, please let me know. And thanks much!!

It seems that AOL has decided to block/bounce mail sent from my company -- or rather my company's provider. I suppose that is a side effect of working for a small private non-profit that contracts with a large email and web hosting provider out of sheer economy. Still, is it reasonable for AOL to require me to beg for permission to get on some sort of whitelist so that I can respond to a question I received from one of their customers? I don't think so.

I considered sending a note to our company's lone IT guy -- who really isn't an IT guy, but winds up wearing that hat -- and asking him to find some time to pursue this with our provider, who would in turn have to beg AOL for some sort of special dispensation. But I don't think that it is reasonable for them to have to do this either.

AOL users: You are being protected from receiving valid email: email that you might be waiting for; email that you will never see because AOL doesn't deem the sender worthy. Is that what you want from your ISP??? If so, then find some other way to communicate with me because I don't have the time to play AOL's games.

Of course, I shouldn't be all that surprised by this turn of events. This is the same company that is blasting the television-viewing world with the sunshiney claim that, in their infinite benevolence, they are "making it easier to switch" from their dial-up service to their DSL service -- while conveniently failing to mention that the way in which they are facilitating this process is by raising the price of dial-up to be the same as DSL.

AOL is evil.

I think the pill pusher and I need to have another talk....

I've been taking my Rozerem faithfully every night for around 3 weeks and sleeping a lot more. But I'm dizzy in the morning and pretty wiped the rest of the day, I still have some headaches, I'm having occasional heart palpitations.... And now I read this:

A six-year study Kripke headed up of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep. The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times or more a month was not much less than the risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, he says.

Oh good.... And Kripke "suspects that people who sleep less than average make more money and are more successful."

My vote's for living longer and being rich. Sorry Doc!

Read the rest of the story at Yahoo news.

Amusing juxtaposition of headlines on Yahoo News:

It's not "healthy yogurt" -- which I really don't want to eat, but will because I want a flatter stomach. Nope. It's "breakfast pudding"!

This just in from the Some-Things-Will-Never-Change Department:

An Afghan man who recently admitted he converted to Christianity faces the death penalty under the country's strict Islamic legal system...

Abdul Rahman, 40, was arrested last month, accused of converting to Christianity.

Under Afghanistan's new constitution, minority religious rights are protected but Muslims are still subject to strict Islamic laws.

And so, officially, Muslim-born Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and not for practicing Christianity...

Officials say his family, who remain observant Muslims, turned him over to the authorities...

Prosecuting attorney Abdul Wasi told the judge that the punishment should fit the crime. He says Rahman is a traitor to Islam and is like a cancer inside Afghanistan. Under Islamic law and under the Afghan constitution, he says, the defendant should be executed.

Unbelievable!

I am not a supporter of invading other countries and attempting to force them to become democratic -- especially not when we have plenty of things we need to attend to right here at home. That said, if we're going to do it, I wish we'd do it right.... How is this situation an improvement over the Taliban?

Read the whole article at Voice of America News. Via Memeorandum.

I was listening to Vegcast and learned a new word: Flexitarian. According to Wikipedia:

Flexitarianism is the practice of being flexible about the degree one practices vegetarianism or veganism. A flexitarian might make only vegetarian dishes at home, but eat dishes including meat at the home of family or friends. In 2003, the American Dialect Society voted flexitarian as the year's most useful word, and defined it as "a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat."

These folks might also be partially responsible for society's confusion about what vegetarians will and will not eat.

Flexitarians of the world, embrace this label (or at least please stop calling yourself "vegetarians with exceptions").

It just hit me: Perhaps the confusion about whether or not vegetarians eat fish is the fault of the Catholic church. After all it's Lent, and what does that mean for the faithful? On "no-meat Fridays" you eat fish.* Therefore fish is not meat. Therefore vegetarians eat fish. Q.E.D.

*(unless St. Patty's day happens to fall on a Friday, in which case you get a dispensation and should eat your non-meaty fish on some other day that week)

So if fish isn't meat, what is it?

According to PersonalDNA.com, I am a cautious inventor. I also scored 0% on the empathy scale. Yikes!! And what does a girl have to do to be "feminine"???

I found out about this test via Dave Winer, who is an animated inventor and almost -- but not quite -- as unempathetic as I am. Are you an inventor too? How empathetic are you? Did the test at least get the gender attributes right?? Give it a try.

Wes Clark has started podcasting:

The ClarkCast is a weekly podcast from SecuringAmerica.com and Wes Clark, discussing and seeking solutions to the challenges of democracy in our modern world. In this inaugural edition, General Clark shares his thoughts on the traditional view of America as a beacon of hope throughout the world. Does that view remain today, or has the beacon faded with failing leadership? What action will be necessary in the years ahead to restore that hopeful and optimistic image? Listen, then share your thoughts with the Clark Community at http://securingamerica.com/ccn/.

Here's the feed. Subscribed!

However, I hope in future "editions," General Clark will do more talking and less reading -- or at least do a better job of disguising the fact that he is reading (e.g. edit out the sound of pages being switched ).

When Clark came to Nashua during the last presidential campaign, I heard him speak. He's a dynamic guy, and an excellent speaker, with a lot of great ideas. I'd like to see that energy in the ClarkCast.

Today is the birthday of a very dear friend of mine. I blog anonymously, and my friend is a rather private individual, so all I will say is:

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday, Dear WF!
Happy Birthday to you!

Today is Douglas Adams' birthday. He'd be 54.

I have Adams to thank (or perhaps blame) for my blog's description. From Life, the Universe, and Everything:

Chapter 24

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

For instance, there was once an insanely aggressive race of people called the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax. That was just the name of their race. The name of their army was something quite horrific. Luckily they lived even farther back in Galactic history than anything we have so far encountered - twenty billion years ago - when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea worth fighting for was a new one.

And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were good at, and being good at it, they did it a lot. They fought their enemies (i.e. everybody else), they fought each other...

The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend of Striterax was just to be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way of life, one might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of energy. The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him in a room on his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.

Eventually they realized that this was something they were going to have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggression.

For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead.

This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things, and they all got very excited at the prospect of their first major war for weeks...

With everything going on in the world today, one might wonder if there are piles of sacks of dead potatoes rotting away in a government warehouse somewhere...

Anyway, happy birthday Douglas Adams, wherever you are (or aren't)!

My side effects:

• Strange heart sensations, including palpitations
• Dizziness
• General weakness
• Tremors and chills upon stopping it after only 4 days!

Other people's side effects:

• Sleep Driving

That's gotta suck.

...hurts your legs. I guess I need to increase the incline on my treadmill. And use the treadmill too!

SiteAdvisor describes itself as:

a consumer software company founded in April 2005 by a group of MIT engineers who wanted to make the Web safer for their family and friends. Having spent one too many holiday breaks trying to clean a mess of spam, adware, and spyware from our families' computers, we decided to take action.

[...]

To address this challenge, we built a system of automated testers which continually patrol the Web to browse sites, download files, and enter information on sign-up forms. We document all these results and supplement them with feedback from our users, comments from Web site owners, and analysis from our own employees.

Our easy to use software for Internet Explorer and Firefox summarizes our safety results into intuitive red, yellow and green ratings to help Web users stay safe as they search, browse and transact online.

SiteAdvisor presents the rating information for the current page via a toolbar button which you can press to obtain more specific information. In addition, it displays ratings directly within search results pages for the major engines so you know what you may be getting yourself into before you decide to go there. For instance, a quick Yahoo! search for vegetarian recipes turned up these results:

Note the yellow and green ratings. Hover the mouse over them for more info:

If I had any desire to check out the South Beach Diet site, I certainly wouldn't give them anything other than a "throw away" email address. 24 emails per week, yikes!

This free utility looks like it might be a winner. Check it out.

Via [Geeks are Sexy].

Because I've had varying degrees of luck with Technorati successfully indexing my entries, I've gotten into the habit of checking after each post. In doing so with my latest entry, I came across this interesting chart:

Apparently something significant and beer-related occurred on February 13th. To confirm that the absence of beer-related discussion during the other 29 days in that period wasn't just a fluke, I expanded the view to 180 days:

It seems that it was not a fluke. So what was it about February 13th that caused a significant increase in the beer-related posts? I have no way of knowing without doing some digging. And, let's face it, given the choice of researching the origin of the beer-post spike or drinking more beer....

In all seriousness, it's too bad that you cannot click within a Technorati chart to quickly find out what bloggers were saying about a particular subject on a particular day.

In fact, it's quite good. Beer Advocate says so, and so do I.

Good Morning!!!

Yes, I realize that is an illogical thing to say on a blog. But it is, after all, MY blog. Besides, it's relevant in this case.

Yesterday I went to my regular pill pusher appointment to get a fresh supply of Ritalin. The appointment took an interesting turn from the norm. He still asked about how I was sleeping, but this time he had a new pill to try. I was a little reluctant, and justifiably so I'd argue: The Sonata didn't work; the Ambien made my heart and head feel odd when I took it, with chills and tremors being added to the mix when I stopped it -- and I only took it for 4 nights! But the doctor insisted that there were no side effects at all with Rozerem. Apparently it works by magic. Okay, according to the official web site, it works by "selectively binding to receptors in the SCN," or suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is where the "internal master clock" that regulates sleep resides. As you can see, magic is both easier to say and easier to understand. Anyway....

Since the doctor was being especially pleasant and seemed to be genuinely interested in my sleeping better, I figured what the heck. It can't be worse than the Ambien experience. So I took it last night around 11:15 and the last time I recall being awake was 11:45. I woke up at 6:30 AM this morning, listened to NPR in bed until 7 AM, and then felt like getting up. It's 9 AM now, and I've already showered and dressed, had breakfast, done laundry, learned two new things from "Only a Game" (They play baseball in South Africa, and bowling is an NCAA sport.), written this entry, and am about ready to get cracking on some stuff I need to do for this never-ending project I'm involved in at work. Yeah, yeah, I know: Who cares about the stupid little details of my morning? They are only interesting when compared to what has become my routine: I normally don't fall asleep until 2 or 3 AM. On a weekday I drag my sleepy self out of bed around 8:30 AM (thank goodness for telecommuting!); on a weekend, it's closer to 10 AM. I skip breakfast and suck down nearly a pot of coffee, which eventually kicks in -- but never to the degree that I could claim that I was "ready to get cracking." Heck, last night I was dreading this morning because I really didn't feel like working on the weekend even though I know I need to in order to move this project along. But now, I'm actually looking forward to having a productive day. Go figure.

Of course, this could all be the placebo effect, but I don't think so. The doctor said it would probably take a week or so for the Rozerem to kick in, and, to be honest, I was convinced it wouldn't work anyway. So with any luck, this will be the answer. You insomniacs out there, stay tuned!

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work I go!

---
Day 2 Update: Took it around midnight, fell asleep within 20 minutes, slept 11 hours! Guess I had some missed z's to catch up on (and an alarm to set on weekdays!)

Days 3, 4, 5 Update: Getting more sleep than before, which is good. But I'm pretty wiped all day, which is bad. I'm also waking up with headaches. I can't tell if they're migraines (my migraines are more about weird neurological stuff than about actual pain), or if this is simply a headache plus grogginess plus adjusting to a new sleeping pill.... I think it's the latter....

Days 6 and 7 Update: Still sleeping more, headaches have gone down, but I'm still groggy for most of the day. I hope this will work itself out soon. At least it's better than Ambien. My side effects were bad enough, but at least I'm not Sleep Driving!