Just a head’s up for regular visitors. I’m totally swamped at work, this is my busiest time of year. Hence the lack of updates. Things will clear up work-wise in a few weeks, after which I should be back on a more regular posting schedule.

Though it is generally positive. Basically my blood sugars are entirely under control at this point, I got a 4.9 on my latest A1c, the previous one from 3 months ago was 5.1 and that was already good enough. Three cheers for careful, healthy eating and regular exercise.

On the downside the cholesterol situation got a little worse, meaning back to medications to deal. The doctor has concluded that there’s nothing more I can do on the diet or exercise end of things to address the elevated cholesterol, we have to use medication to treat it.

Fortunately we’re starting with over the counter Niacin at high doses instead of going back to lipitor or one of the other statins. I had such huge pain issues with those that he knows I desperately want to stay off of them. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Niacin causes flushing/hot flashes as a side effect, so I spent the weekend doing my best impersonation of a women entering menopause. It wasn’t pleasant, I flushed as red as a lobster from the shoulders up and in big blotches over most of my body as well. It felt like instant sunburn and caused prickly itching sensations as well. The symptoms only last about an hour or so after I take the pill, but damn did they suck. There’s hope as time passes that the side effects will reduce as my system acclimates to mass dosages of Niacin, and already it does feel like they’re getting less severe. Let’s hope that remains true and that they bring the cholesterol down. I’ll know more in the middle of September when I go back in for tests. The one other possible downside is that Niacin in increased dosages can cause liver problem, which is the other reason I have to go back in in September. Sigh. Still, all in all I’m pleased with the latest results. I’m something of a star at the docs office too, he’s brought me around to show off to the staff the last two times I’ve been in and this time he was trying to encourage me to keep an accurate journal with an eye towards possible publication. I was a little surprised by that but I am thinking it over. I might add a section to this site specifically to cover the health issues instead of interspersing it in here as a way to meet him in the middle

This will have to pass for my cool link of the day, I caught this off of metafilter. Check out these awesome topo maps of the entire U.S., free for the scoping and taking.

…sort of. Check out the poot at her best during playtime with my sister. You might recall a few weeks ago she became deathly ill. She’s still not entirely out of the woods I guess, and she’s still suffering aftereffects of the whole ordeal, but it seems like her spirits are back to where they were before all this started. Keep keeping those fingers crossed that she makes a full recovery

To protect the delicate sensibilities of my reading public, I’ll refrain from actually stating what’s at this link, but if you’re a guy you A) want to rush over and read it and B) go get busy!

I think I’ve posted this one before, but there are new images to be had on the hubble image gallery page. Great great shots of the far reaches of space taken from the Hubble Telescope. My only wish is that they would post them at higher resolution so I could use them as desktop backdrops. Still, cool stuff.

Check out this mouse mod this guy put together. Builtin palm cooling for those clan deathmatches that go on for an hour and a half. Sweet!

Fantastic news on the work front. We just got a ~$100k grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to extend work on the zen gardens site that I’ve put so much time into over the last several years. It has a new look since the last time I’ve mentioned this site, which is largely due to my friend Kevin and a recent redesign that site went through, (which is a large contributor to our succesful grant application - major kudos to kevin on that one) but my fingerprints are also all over that site. I’m extremely proud.

To give you a sense of how prestigious this is, the NEA very very rarely works with institutions like ours, generally they are focused on big famous institutions like the Metropolitan Museum in NY. The fact that they agreed to fund us is just absolutely fantastic. And the 100k they granted us means with matching funds and the NEA name we should be able to push the total grants for continued work up north of $250k. It also means new staff, at least three positions, for at least 12-18 months. And of course it means very interesting new features for the Zen Gardens site. Next focus is on interactivity - allowing the user to come in and build their own gardens and then have them assessed on some level. Thing legos for zen gardens, but ‘organic’ legos that morph over time - bushes that grow, ground cover plants that slowly creep across the landscape, that sort of thing. Stay tuned

In case anyone should be interested, I’ve got some new auctions up on ebay. If you’re looking for some cool games for your playstation 2 or xbox, I’m your man, get bidding!

Today’s link: visually stunning desktop backgrounds from Tazl. I’ve been using his desktops for years, but today I discovered that he’s put a website together with many of them on it, you can check it out here: tazl-desktops.com. Today I’m grooving on the industrial wasteland pics, who knew rust came in such varied colors

I spent the weekend working on my new media box, which will sit in the living room attached to the home theater system. It’s a Shuttle mini-itx system (SN45g) with a radeon 7500 AIW, lots of HD space and fast ram in it. Check out how cramped everything is once you get all the components in.

I’ll post a shot of the back of the home theater system later once I have this thing partly wired in. Its addition has significantly complicated the wiring situation.

This is going to look really small as a thumbnail, but check out this composite shot I put together from a recent bike ride. Once again evidence of why I love Maine so much

This is taken at Winslow Park, which is about 6-7 miles from my house, a nice bike ride through the woods to get there too. You can swim, camp, or launch your kayak or boat off of their boatramp. The image is fairly large when you pull up the full version, be warned that it’s around 400-500k.

…Lives on. God, how many hours did I spend playing this game on my trusty commodore 64? Now you too can experience the joy that is Fargoal all over again.

It’s pretty cool how many of the old classics end up being remade with modern tools these days. In truth Fargoal is way far of the ‘too simple’ side by today’s standards, and you’d be better off playing Tales of Middle Earth or some other rogue-like if you enjoy games of this nature, but still, a walk down nostalgia lane is worth a 2 second download. At least it was for me.

Why? Because I would love to buy the entire collection of these indescribably cool miniaturized versions of the original TSR Advanced Dungeons and Dragons manuals. They’re about $10 a pop and produced by an italian company under license from Wizards of the Coast. Very cool. Why? Well, they’re mini of course! I could fit the whole library in a corner of one of my shelves.

Everyone, and I mean everyone with a PC needs to go grab a copy of feed demon. I am going to keep harping about how valuable RSS aggregators are until everyone is using one. Once again - simplify your internet experience and increase exponentially the amount of data you can cram into your head. Get started with aggregators, once you have the ‘ah HA!’ moment and realize how useful a tool they are you’ll never want to be stuck manually visiting your favorite news and info sites again.

Mac users are still fine with NetWireNews, nothing’s come out that’s remotely close.

newsmonster is another interesting cross platform (requires mozilla) solution, it’s coolest feature is how it is trying to tie the USE of content into a ranking system, ie it’s trying to help you figure out which content is worth looking into. I’m giving them more time to finish though, right now the concept is stronger than the implementation.

I’ll close with yet another appeal - go get started with aggregators. How many times in the past 15 years have I succesfully promoted techs that ended up being useful to the folks who read this weblog, from email to web browsers to instant messenging, even to 3d accelerators for crying out loud. This is the next ‘thing.’ Trust me, and go get one and actually spend the time to learn how it works, your head will be better off for it.

This site will probably be offline on the 6th of July. A hacking group has issued a global challenge to all hackers to take down as many webservers internationally as they can on Sunday July 6th. I’m pretty good about keeping my box up to date and I watch the security postings but rather than deal with a gazillion hackers poking on my bandwidth on the 6th trying to crack my server, I’m just going to shut it down. Go fuck yourselves you bandwidth sapping twerps, I have better things to do with my pipes

Want to rock your taste bud’s world? Do you like fish? This is probably a little late for today’s barbecue, but trust me, you want to cook this for yourself.

Go buy a nice fresh (FRESH, not previously frozen) halibut steak, say 1.5 pounds or so - make sure it is an inch or so thick, no skinny steaks. Take about 6 tablespoons of Soy sauce, 1/2 tablespoon of sesame oil, 1 tablespoon of minced fresh ginger, a pinch of garlic powder, and pour it all in a glass baking dish. Stir it up. Plop your halibut steak in there and let it marinate for maybe 2 hours tops, flipping the steak every half hour or so. Go preheat your grill, get it nice and hot. Plop that steak on there after it’s marinated and let it cook for about 8-9 minutes on one side, then flip it and give it about 6-8 minutes on the other side. You can tell it’s done when the meat is starting to separate from the bone and flaking. Do not overcook it, if so you will be bummed that you turned your $15 steak into dried out shoe leather. Serve with some sauteed mushrooms and zuchinni, ta da! Best meal you will eat this summer.

Well, it was for me anyway. And I invented that for myself last night, damned tasty.

Today is a very bad day for Microsoft. If you haven’t been following the news, a group of Austrian hackers worked out a buffer overflow (or under run, not sure yet but the particulars don’t really matter) that allows anyone to run unsigned code on their xbox. This means that shortly the xbox will be ‘owned’ in the same way that the Sega Dreamcast was - anyone will be able to run cracked games, linux, BSD, whatever they want, on their xbox, without having to install a mod chip or make other hardware modifications to their system.

Can you guess my reaction to this? I’m cackling gleefully! Firstly because I love to see MS take one on the chin, secondly because I had been considering dropping ~$100 on parts to mod my xbox so I could get it to play media files of all flavors (.ogg, DivX and so on) and stream music across my lan to the stereo system. Now I don’t have to pay for the right to install whatever software I want on my machine.

It will be interesting to see what steps microsoft will take. Certainly they’ll be trying to sue the hell out of the Austrians for releasing the hack to the public, that’s a given. But what will they do to try and save the xbox? If anyone can run cracked games the third party software developers will start abandoning the platform like crazy, just like the did on the Dreamcast. MS can presumably release a hardware update to the platform to fix the exploit, but that won’t help with the 6-9 million xboxes already sold, and at this stage in the platform’s life that’s probably more than half the xboxes that will be sold during the product’s lifespan. They can try and use Xbox live access to control who’s running the hack or to try and ‘fix’ hacked boxes, but that reminds me of the code war the sattelite TV companies have been waging with hackers for a decade - you can stop some of hacked hardware some of the time, but not all of it.

Interesting, interesting times for the xbox. Glad I grabbed an early model before any hardware updates are fashioned. If you had been considering picking up an xbox, now might be the time to do it. Of course it’s also possible MS’s reaction will be a slow ‘fuck! we’re fucked! Time to cut our losses and bail,’ which would lead to $100 xboxes by next spring, but I really doubt this is the route they’ll go, they have too much money tied up in the success of the xbox (literally billions) to cut and run, not to mention the loss in credibility they’d suffer.

It will also be really interesting to see what happens with the software developers - EA in particular has been pissed at MS for a while now, it’s not beyond the pale to imagine them saying ‘no more software for xbox’ - if that happens the cascade effect will be brutal, most developers will follow suit.

I’ll post followups as they occur, and I guarantee I’ll have my xbox booting linux within the next month or two.

Oh, if you’re interested in a summary of all this, check out zdnet’s article on the subject.