Harringtonization project

He who laughs last hasn't been told the terrible truth. -- unknown

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Yet another list of words I've had to look up:

morbidity, comports, agency (other usages), complot, innumerate, peripatetic, histrionic, genuflect, hubris, charlatan, mountebank, quisling, resplendent, quaint, tenable, apocryphal, abraded, presage, limn, mordant, exculpate, environs, fastidious, chary, arrogate, fatuous, Occam's Razor (aka law of parsimony), recrimination, egregious, capitulate, acrimony, zenith, precipitously, modus vivendi, edifice, miasmic, duality, Cynic (as a proper noun), dystopian, euphemistic, dissonance, vituperation, vitriol, effete, traduce, solidarity

These are all words I've recently heard or read.

I've had it with the old beamer! Here it goes....

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Last weekend I went on a much needed trip to visit Darcy in Lexington. It was great to see her. It had been over a month since my last visit!

We had a really good time. Saturday was a completely lazy day. We slept half the day, killed 4 hours at borders, then went home and watched a movie and fell asleep. It was great!

On Sunday we went on a double date our new friends Jen and Paul. Jen is finishing up her MS in teaching and plans to do missionary work in Papua New Guinea. Paul was recently involved in starting a local church. I'm really happy that Darcy & I now have another couple to go on double dates with! We both need to be just a little bit more social when we’re together.

The date took us on a road trip to Mitchell's Fish Market in Newport, KY (right across the river from Cincinnati). It was expensive but well deserved. Darcy & I hadn't treated ourselves to a really nice dinner for a long time. After dinner we went for a stroll on the Purple People Bridge, a pedestrian-only bridge that spans the Ohio River. The weather was perfect. It was one of the highlights of the evening.

On Monday we walked downtown to the fountains and spent several hours there just talking and enjoying each other's company. After that we brought home ice cream and watched a mostly incomprehensible movie that involved recursive (?!) time travel. Nonetheless, it was geeky sci-fi so we both were happy.

I forgot that I had the camera until the very end so all I have is this pic that I took right before I left on Tuesday morning.


Wednesday, August 16, 2006

I wrote a company-wide email today after three different people stopped by my office today in the span of one hour to express worries about website cookies! To prevent an outbreak of this, I sent out a company-wide email explaining my position on the matter. In case you are also concerned about cookies, here it is:

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To All:

I would like to address your concerns about website cookies. First, know that they are simply small text files that are stored on your computer. Here is what a typical cookie looks like:

en_GB
www.google.com/
1425
2053574882
29726548
4298754968
23581292
*

Personally, I don’t think cookies are harmful. They are website-specific and only contain information that you freely give them. A particular website cannot access any other website’s cookies. So why would you want them? Cookies are useful. For instance, our website creates a cookie when someone uploads a file. That cookie contains all the text values that the user entered (except the filenames). That way, the next time that person goes to upload another file, they won’t have to fill out all the fields again. Another example is a corporate website that has a different version of their website for different geographic regions (i.e. HP North America, HP Asia, etc.). The first time you go to the site, you have to choose your region. The website then stores that value in a cookie so the next time you go to the site, it automatically chooses the correct region.

Some people don’t like cookies because they can allow syndicates of websites that all tie in to a common website to track which website you visited. I don’t think that’s a big deal. If company X and company Y are in cahoots to find out if I visited one of their websites then let them, maybe they’ll start showing me more relevant ads. While I don’t see that as a privacy risk, some people do. I think it’s a small price to pay for the benefits cookies have to offer.

That’s just my opinion. You should decide for yourself. For more information, read: http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/security/are-cookies-dangerous/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie.

If you want to delete your cookies, please read http://help.expedient.com/browsers/cookies.shtml.

(name deleted)
IT Manager

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I had another trip to Lex to visit Darcy. Here's the abridged version:

Friday: Drove to Cincinnati. On the way there, we stopped at in a small town and went to a carnival. It was raining. We rode some of the rides, getting dirty and wet in the process.

Then we went on to Cincinnati and ate at Shanghai Mama's.

Saturday: Went bowling. It was great!