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Last week there was a massive internet outage with Comcast (my internet provider). Users complained about it here. The typical rants that are (sadly) true: All major ISPs over-subscribe their networks, the support personnel are clueless, etc. Well, yesterday the same thing occured again. Click To Read More...

I’ve been working on learning JavaScript over the last month or so and I’ve come to a point where I’ve started to delve into the hot topic of “Asynchronous JavaScript, DHTML and Server-side Programming”, or as some pundits have termed it “Ajax”. The ‘x’ is supposed to stand for XML since one of the primary enablers for this technology is the JavaScript object XMLHttpRequest (though you can use it to return any type of text). Click To Read More...

Did my first bit of yard work today and it got me thinking about something I was mulling over last summer: Converting from a grass lawn into a clover lawn. Doing a google search turned up the tidbit that clover lawns are trendy this year. I guess clover lawns used to be an American tradition in the early 20th century, too.

The benefits of clover lawns are numerous:

• Don’t have to water (as much)
• Don’t have to cut as much
• Is generally softer than grass
• Relatively pest free
• Don’t have to fertilize
• Clover improves the soil by releasing nitrogen back into the soil
• Stays green longer
• Clover is aggressive and can grow dense enough to keep out weeds
• Resistant to dog urine

It all sounds great, but I doubt I would be able to just wait for the existing clover patches to take over my whole lawn as it might take a century or two. Yep, it seems that I would still have to kill the existing weeds and overseed with clover to really get somewhere. It’s a shame because I’d like to do the least amount of work possible (aka “none”).

If this year, clover could be ultra-aggressive and take over the lawn, weeds, grass and all, I wouldn’t mind. Wouldn’t mind at all…

A friend is looking to collect data for a course they’re taking. If you have a few minutes, please fill out this survey so they don’t fail.

Answer honestly and don’t think too much about the answers.

I learned yesterday that someone had made the Firefox logo available as a SVG file for the purposes of putting onto T-Shirts, etc. I decided I’d use this opportunity to gauge the state of SVG renderers available to me, the average lay-person. Click To Read More...

When I’m at home, I use MSN Messenger for my primary Instant Messaging application. Unfortunately, at work we are generally (and perhaps wisely) blocked from using IM clients to access the internet. However, MSN has introduced a web service they call “Web Messaging” (http://webmessenger.msn.com) which allows those people at Internet Cafe’s or using computers that are not their own to still access the IM network and chat. Similar to web e-mail services like Hotmail and Gmail, WebMessenger uses a web browser to faithfully reproduce the IM client experience and it seems to work pretty well. The browser window looks almost identical to the IM client window and it properly imported all my contacts (though it did not arrange them in my categories like I have at home, thus contact categories must be a client-only feature). It did cause my IE to crash once (thus, I use Firefox) and a few days ago I was unable to access the webserver a few times, but so far I’m happy.