Blackberries hurting your thumbs?

Article from the BBC about how Blackberry use could lead to serious problems. Except it's all speculative.

The thumb is not very flexible and repetitive use of it can lead to damage to the tendon on the outside of the thumb. -- Professor Alan Hedge

According to the article there aren't any known instances of much worse than sore thumbs. If you remember mashing the buttons for the Nintendo or Commodore 64 joystick, it's apparently a similar scare.

So I suppose the news is that if your thumbs hurt, stop doing whatever it is that makes them hurt. Also many top scientists believe that consuming a whole lot of blackberries gives you sticky fingers and stains them a purplish color.

Today, work sucks

The Man is away today. This whole week actually. He's skiing in Colorado. And it's been a LOOOONG day. I'm not gonna go so far as to suggest that he left things in an incomplete state. I'm just gonna say that it doesn't seem like a good idea to make major changes to the way the program works just before you leave for a week.

Well, we're dealing with it. With CATS there are always work-arounds. And perhaps that's what He had in mind all along. His evil plan to get this particular client to leave behind the toys and games of childhood and enter the world of adults. Adults who use the program the way it's supposed to be used.

But don't get me started on that.

Only an hour of this left and I can sleep. Or something. An hours not so long...

Brand new RSS Feed

I just added a handy-dandy RSS feed to the blog here. Pretty damn easy to do actually. Dare I say it again, Blosxom is fantastic!

There's a link to the RSS feed itself to the right. The feed is also connected to the page. So if you have a reasonably intelligent web browser you should have an option to subscribe to my feed.

The RSS feed gives a short and sweet look at the top page of the blog. To see what fun can be had with RSS, check out my Friendster page. The latest posts to the page are listed on the left.

Ability to Online Edit

I'm glad to anounce that I've added the ability to edit the blog interactively online. This means, for one thing, that it's easier for me to post. The other benefit is that I can let other people post their news.

Also I added the navigation bar on the rightside and cleaned up some of the CSS that was causing me problems.

There are more improvements in the works. But right now I'm kinda tired of working on the blog. But I'm looking forward to having fellow contributors and not just my own miserable self doing this stuff.

The Postman Sucks!

Well, I find it unlikely that anyone would require my confirmation on this. But the Postman is maybe the suckiest movie ever made. There needs to be a law against Kevin Costner reciting Shakespeare.

It snowed a lot this weekend. I didn't get anything done. I blame the snow. Cause you know, I had to shovel and there was football on TV.

Ahhh, the Great Outdoors!

Spent the weekend at Bolton Valley, a small, but beautiful ski resort in Vermont (the Cheddar Cheese on your Apple Pie state).

What was I doing there? Other than lookin' pretty and frosting my hair, I was skiing and snowshoeing.

Skiing was fun. It definately makes a difference to have a Ski-Buddy (not to be confused with a Ski Bunny). And the trails at Bolton were fun, the ski-lift lines were short and the slopes weren't crowded at all. Plenty of room to be reckless and endanger only myself. Just the way I like it.

Snowshoeing was fun. Grueling, but my initial awkwardness on the snowshoes was replaced by a sort of grudging acceptance. Thank you snowshoes, for keeping me from falling in the river.

Two warnings about Bolton.

1. The "Bolton Valley Access Road" is a long, steep and winding hill. If there's even a hint of snow, make sure you take a four wheel drive vehicle.
2. Beware the mid-way point on the "Timberline Lift" or your ski-poles may pay the price.

Those Cautious Swedes

Now class. What do we know about the Swedish?

• Are their women hot? YES
• Do they have long beards? SOMETIMES
• Do they make weird movies with their hot women? YES

• Are they committed to traffic safety? ABSOLUTELY

That last link is the reason for this post.^{(thanks K)}

Gotta respect their commitment to traffic safety. That's some pretty detailed stuff. And the animations are top-notch.

So Long Alternative Radio

A long-time DC/Baltimore area radio station switched from Alternative (good) to Spanish Soft-Rock (bad) today. And, of course, they forgot to tell anyone about it. I guess it's hard to sell advertisement space when your demographic is aging hippies and punk rockers.

But it's still really sad. My man, Paul, says they were his favorite night-time radio station. And now they're gone.

Radio is a tough business, it would seem. But Paul and I have a long tradition of liking radio stations and watching them go down in flames. It can't just be coincidence, can it? All the best radio stations, the ones dedicated to great music (that you might not have heard of) fail and the annoying/commercial/pop-oriented keep going and going.

I, for one, blame the President.

I'm really digging Bloxsom

My webhost balked at some of MovableType's requirements. So I decided to continue looking for alternative blogging tools. Lo-and-behold, I discovered Bloxsom.

Very simple to use, simple to set up, and quick to get going. Doesn't require much besides Perl. It's completely customizable. With community-built plugins out the wazzoo.

Note the blog-calendar on the right. Fancy, eh?

Turns out there are too many plugins (at least for the moment) for me to check them all out. It's gonna be a process while I play around and see which plguins I want to use.

For example, the comments API is there (visitors can post commments), but it looks awful. Gotta go and spend a couple hours tweaking that layout... See if I can't get it to display some comments on the main page... Try to make it resistant to spamming (good luck)... Allow users to login (there's a plugin) and maybe make it so only logged in users can post...

Plenty of new nifty features on the way, folks.

-tom