Thoughts in the dentist chair

  • Is it just because I have a short soft pallete, or do other people find it nearly impossible to breathe when they have their head back and somebody forcing their mouth open and spraying stuff in it?
  • If we were really intelligently designed, wouldn’t the nasal passages connect to the lungs and the mouth connect to the stomach, with no interconnection between them?
  • Maybe it’s supposed to be like a four barrel carburetor where you open the mouth to get more air when you really need it?
  • I wonder if that thing they use to clean off the scale is called a “sonic screwdriver”?
  • Is that thing set to the resonant frequency of your skull on purpose, or is that just a lucky coincidence?
  • My hand has gone numb. I guess I’m clenching them a bit. No surprises there.

New Years Resolutions

1600×1200, 1080p, … sorry, I’m a geek, what can I say?

Real resolutions:
– break 20 minutes in the Baycreek time trial
– finish the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta long race (9 miles)
– figure out if I want to continue flying or not.
– develop an ajax web site, using either GWT or jquery or ruby on rails or something
– diet
– exercise
– get a better job
– once more subject myself to the psychological torture of trying to get more treatment for my pain

Update: Today’s discovery is that if you use the WordPress “Publish on a later date” to queue up a post like this, the LiveJournal Crossposter plugin doesn’t see it.

What happened there?

StackOverflow reputation tracker

Somehow overnight, I got 80 new points from votes, but somehow my net reputation went down 133 points without any of my other questions or answers getting any down votes. I have no idea how that happened, but I don’t like it.

Update: It turns out that Jeff Atwood decided to implement some “fraud detection” and removed what he thought were “suspicious” upvotes. I should consider myself lucky – Konrad, who had the second most points on the system, lost 6,000 points and Daok, who was pretty high up in spite of the fact that English is obviously not his first language, lost 5,000.

My Stack Floweth Over

I spend most of the time that I’m waiting for things to happen (compiles, application start ups, etc) reading and answering questions on StackOverflow, the best site for programming related questions bar none. One of the things that makes StackOverflow so good is their “reputation” system (although I keep calling it “XP” just to see if anybody will start copying me). You get XP when other users vote up your questions or answers, and when you “level up” to certain levels you are trusted to do various book-keeping tasks on the site like editing other people’s posts or closing them. There are also various badges you can get (or “Achievements” ) when you accomplish various things like getting a certain amount of up-votes on an answer. It’s a great system, and I don’t just say that because I am in the top 15 for XP. But one of the things they do is limit the amount of XP you can get in a single day. And overnight, some of my older answers got a whole bunch of up-votes, so I started off the day with nearly my limit, and I’ve now hit my limit for the day. Which means that for the rest of the day, I’ll be answering questions out of the goodness of my heart (and a design to show-off) rather than for XP.

This also means that I might have to actually be productive at work today. Sigh.