The $15,000 dishwasher (rant, random)
My kitchen is almost done being rebuilt. So I'd might as well write up why it took a kitchen rebuild to get a working dishwasher again.
My kitchen is almost done being rebuilt. So I'd might as well write up why it took a kitchen rebuild to get a working dishwasher again.
The decreased activity in response to faces seemed to occur in those who achieved literacy during childhood (it was one of the only differences between them and adult learners). The authors suggest that the area that responds to faces normally expands with age, and learning to read may limit this expansion by putting nearby brain areas to other uses.According to my mom, I taught myself to read at a very very early age (she says that at 18 months I got obsessed with letterforms and reading the cereal box and so on, and I certainly remember being able to read at the age of 3 and wondering why all the other kids needed the teacher to read storytime books out loud), and I am also profoundly bad at facial recognition. So, while an anecdote is no substitute for data, it's certainly something to think about.This isn't to say that you're going to be worse with faces if you know how to read well, although the authors indicate they're going to look into that to find out. But it does indicate that literacy involves a new specialization in some areas of the visual system, which ensure that the centers involved with processing language become just as active as if they had heard the words spoken.
Frankly, I feel that it's been a reasonable tradeoff for me.
One particularly nasty thread on the support issue also finally motivated several people (including the person who started all this) to start preferring "it" as their personal pronoun (as I have for years, at least in an online context).
Tonight I finally tracked down where it was coming from: the transformer on the cheap PS3 Move charging station I bought. Which was especially maddening since I had it unplugged from the charging station itself (to turn off the obnoxiously-bright obligatory blue LEDs) which only made it even louder. And it's at pretty much the exact same frequency as my tinnitus, making it really hard to track down or even tell if there's a difference between it on or off (because if I plug my ears, of course the tinnitus gets relatively-louder).
Also, as it turns out, when I have the Move controllers docked on it with it unplugged, it drains the Move controllers' batteries. So much for convenience.
Basically, I can't really recommend the CTA four-port Move charging station, especially if you have really good treble hearing, a case of tinnitus, and an aversion to REALLY BRIGHT LIGHTS.
My criteria:
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."
It's a less common usage of the prefix, granted, but that doesn't make it invalid.
"Irregardless" is a perfectly cromulent word.
I used to have a pretty good ear for languages, but I can't really tell what this is. My gut says it's either Hebrew or Farsi but I'm probably way off.
Hopefully this doesn't turn into the Somalian thing all over again (although since this call originated from the US I can at least expect it to not happen in the wee hours of the night).

While I was there I wandered around the exhibit a bit (very briefly, since it was getting crowded due to the signing — I will definitely go back later to actually explore the museum in the future, possibly this weekend), and on my way out I ended up chatting a bit with Andrew Farago. Unfortunately, all I could really think to talk about was his wife's comics, and also hamfistedly thanked him for accepting my stuff into the exhibit. (I think I come across as a bit of a jerk and/or creepy weirdo when I'm overcompensating for nervousness due to my whole "uncomfortable when not with at least one friend" thing.)
Anyway, Andrew did mention thinking about having some sort of group thing for local web cartoonists, so hopefully that will give me another avenue for my social life.
So a month later (i.e. just now), I thought it would be nice if I could find my noise-canceling headphones, which have similarly been rather hard to find for quite some time. I started looking for them, and thought, "Wait, I shouldn't do that, because the law of irony states that if I do, I will immediately come across my missing right wrist brace."
But I thought that was silly, so I started rooting around for the noise-canceling headphones...
and immediately found my missing right wrist brace.
Apparently, in most of California (and in most states in general), jury summons work by them saying exactly what day and time you'll be reporting on, and you may or may not go before a selection committee. San Francisco works a bit differently, however; you are given a summons for a particular week and a group number, and the night before every business day there is a lottery for which groups must report the next day, so potential jurors have to check a website or call in to find out if their group has been called for the next day.
anyway i am definitely dumping the juice (except I would hope that they'd have wanted to test it for botulism toxin or something)
so if you do't see me post to twitter for a while you'll probably know why (i hope this isn't my last entry)
The higher CO2 levels make the grass grow longer, faster, so the people who insist on having lawns run their lawnmowers more, which generates heat and uses more fuel and puts even more CO2 in the atmosphere (as well as other nasty emissions because lawnmower engines aren't at all clean).
The more we struggle to keep comfortable, the harder it will become.
Anyway, this led me to find an online test (made by actual real prosopagnosia researchers so it's not like a Myspace WHAT COLOR IS YOUR INNER FURRY thing or whatever), which I scored 67% on (65% is their threshold for "you are almost certainly faceblind"), and there's probably enough of a margin of error that I am comfortable saying that this shows I'm probably faceblind. Hooray.
So, of course, while I was waiting for the numbing agent to kick in, I had "Be A Dentist" from Little Shop of Horrors stuck in my head. And then a little bit later, a photo came up of some weird plant which looked rather a lot like Audrey II.