Plaidophile

So I appear to have bought a car.

Finally saw the doctor today, and described my symptoms. "You'd might as well be reading the list of symptoms from a textbook," he said. He put me on Zegerid (time-release omeprazole with an additional antacid) that works as both an antacid and an acid controller, and also takes care of the ulcer (by starving the extremeophile bacteria of the acid it so craves), and said that if that doesn't help after a couple weeks he could schedule me for endoscopy but he wasn't too concerned.

While I was there he also went over the results of my labwork from my checkup last year. My cholesterol is a little elevated but nothing to worry about, especially in light of the fact that both of my remaining grandparents are close to turning 99 and I have a family history of high cholesterol. He said that a few patients before me he saw someone whose cholesterol was over 1000. Holy crap.

Anyway, now to decide whether to spend the 45 minutes to get back to work just to keep reading boring API docs for a couple hours. I am thinking "no."

So, a while ago I switched to Chrome, because I got sick of how unstable Firefox had gotten on all of my systems (even after a full profile purge and removing all extensions and so on). For the most part I like it a lot, and most of the niggling UI things I've gotten used to, but I still don't like how it's missing some of Firefox's awesomebar functionality.

In particular, in Firefox, you can have multiple-keyword search that spans both URLs and page titles within a history, with very tiny fragments, while in Chrome, it seems to only work if you give it the full domain name, and even then it's inconsistent.

On my site I have several backend scripts that I use regularly. The two big ones are the Movable Type publication interface and my comic buffer validation script, which in Firefox I was able to access by typing "be mt" and "be va," respectively. With Chrome, the best I've managed to get is typing "be" brings up Movable Type as the default option, but in order to get the buffer validation I try typing different things which never end up bringing it up consistently, and in the end it ends up being quicker to just type the whole URL. Obviously I could set a bookmark, but bookmarks are kind of silly nowadays.

I know Chrome supports multiple address bar search backends, but I've yet to find anything which basically just does a grep on the history sorted by access frequency. I'm also not interested in learning yet another damn API to write my own.

Any ideas?

Yes, it's an ugly word and a neologism, and yes it should probably be avoided in favor of "irrespective." However, it is not necessarily the case that it is a double negative; the ir/in/im prefix isn't only a negative! It also means "upon" (irrigate, irritate, irradiate, irrupt, impugn) or "toward" (invigorate), and can be an emphatic (inflammable, indeed).

It's a less common usage of the prefix, granted, but that doesn't make it invalid.

"Irregardless" is a perfectly cromulent word.

A lot of my work involves writing C++ code which uses fairly low-level C APIs which require stateful initialization and cleanup at various points (for example, binding a resource, performing an operation, and then unbinding the resource when it's done). The usual approach to this sort of thing is like this: This is a bit annoying to deal with, especially if the unbind procedure is fairly complex. What's even worse is if you have multiple resources which get bound and need to be unbound, especially if there are multiple steps between those resource bindings. So here is a way to simplify this sort of thing.

You are missing out on one or more friends-only entries. Please log in, if you have an account.

Here is me wishing that I weren't put into confrontational situations by merit of being one of the owners of this building, when the commercial space's tenant's son is belligerent about whether it's okay for him to wash his car in our driveway or not (spoiler alert: it isn't, but he's been doing it for 18 years and he feels entitled).

I love this neighborhood but holy cow do I hate this particular building sometimes.

You'd think an Internet company like Yahoo would know better than to do this crap. I tried logging in today and it prompted me to set two password-recovery questions. Its advice on the question and answer is:

Make sure your answer is private, memorable and does not change over time.

And yet, none of the questions allow that!

My home network had an outage pretty much all day because my UPS failed shortly after I left for work today. Is it ironic that it is only because of the UPS that I had any downtime?

On that note, any good recommendations for cheap UPSes?

I am in this week's Song Fight!. I enter as Sockpuppet. Please listen to the songs and vote for the ones you like.

Now that Unity is over and I've gotten tired of drawing journal comics, please allow me to introduce my new series that you have most certainly never seen before, de^x/dx.