Oh Crappy Day
Wednesday, July 20th, 2005The thing that I was depressed about just got more depressing— I am heading north again to try to be of some assistance. Basically, my mother is in hospital after a complication from a car accident she had about a month ago, and it’s a complication that [almost certainly] never needed to happen. I am trying not to get really really angry about this. I hate feeling so fucking powerless! And I end up hating myself because if I were financially solvent I could be of a lot more assistance— my frivolous do-what-you-like lifestyle suddenly feels stupid and reckless, because it means I have no reserves to call on when unexpected needs arise.
I do at least have my time, so at least I can give some of that.
Aaaaanyway… in less crappy news, I saw a crappy movie today, Bewitched, and particularly enjoyed this piece of dialogue from an uptight young AD dancing around under the influence of magic: “I feel so alive! … I feel like one of those people I make fun of! … I believe in unicorns!” — maybe you had to be there.
Also, I made gravatars work here again using a raw IP (64.124.231.223) since Tom [Mr Gravatar] forgot to renew the domain name on time. Please Tom, decentralize Gravatar just a bit by providing scripts so that people can cache images locally. For outages like this, and to reduce your own bandwidth requirements.
PS why the fuck do airlines always mail my itinerary to me as a PDF attachment? I hate PDF! All I want is the details of my flight, why can’t they just stick it in the body text of the email? PDF is heavy on form and light on content. HTML is in my mind the perfect balance between the two, and is already supported by 99% of email clients, so why add this extra step?
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UPDATE: gravatar is back up, and I now note that there is at least one cacheing plugin which has been endorsed by Tom. Also there is a forum for discussion of the next version of gravatars, so I might drop in there…
July 24th, 2005 at 6:47 am
Hey Mark, I hope your mom gets well soon! Hospitals are depressing. But then again, where would we be without them?
July 24th, 2005 at 6:48 am
Okay… forgot to leave my name there… Anyways.
July 24th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
Thanks, hopefully she’ll be out in just a couple more days. (and this hospital is quite a pleasant one as hospitals go)
August 11th, 2005 at 5:01 pm
You can use pdftk to decompress PDFs, at which point you can often easily scrape the text information from them. I think ghostscript even comes with ps2ascii which will automate the text extraction.
August 16th, 2005 at 12:06 am
Ben, you have the most amazing domain name ever! I had to click to be sure it was real :)
(yay lego)