I feel like I haven’t gotten anything done in a long time. It’s kind of weird. I’ve been working some and slacking some and I still just feel funny.

My weekends are planned for the next several weeks. This weekend’s “plans” are to do nothing - to decompress from last weekend and have some time to myself. The following weekend D will be coming from Minnesota to visit his boyfriend here, so hopefully we’ll get together. The weekend after that I’m (hopefully) going with A and R and R’s girlfriend to Six Flags; the 15th is their first Deaf Heritage Day. And so the next weekend I’ll probably go visit my friends in New York and go paddling up there. Hmm, when is Father’s Day? Okay, the 16th - maybe I can actually celebrate a holiday on that holiday!

Dmoz pops up in the strangest places. It turns out Syndic8 uses the ODP category scheme to sort its feeds. What’s perhaps even more amazing, though, is that they actually adhere to the license terms and give the credit at the bottom of each page.

(This is a convenient opportunity for me to mention that I’ve used the VoidStar RSSify tool to create RSS for this blog. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.)

The other Friday Five is on vacation again, so LJFF is the only one this week.

1. What are some of the summer activities you like to do best? Why?
Last September I learned kayaking, so I’m really looking forward to doing that again. It’s a good workout for me and it’s entertaining. (Besides, my legs are inaccessible under a sprayskirt and my arms are busy paddling, so even if I noticed the hives I couldn’t scratch them.)
(more…)

I only saw the one squirrel today because I didn’t walk through the park like I usually do. Instead I got off the train at Metro Center, walked down 13th to E and back up to New York Avenue, then went over to H and went up 14th to M before coming back along Massachusetts Avenue and down 13th to my building. All this in the name of photography! I’d heard there were Toynbee tiles at various intersections along 13th Street, but the only one I found there was the one I already knew about at 13th and G. I took three pictures of Party Animals - all elephants - and then went up to take a picture of the new Toynbee at M Street and Thomas Circle. When my boss arrived we started talking about the donkeys and elephants; apparently there are a few more close by. He and his wife are going to ride their bikes around the city finding the animals, so he had me print up the list of installations and I’m printing a copy for myself as well.

Drat, I forgot to weigh in this morning. I wonder if I should do it tonight or wait till tomorrow morning.

It’s amazing how many people abuse the LiveJournal support crew. Whether their question didn’t get answered the first time or something. And apparently nobody checks the list of open support requests before submitting a question. Twice now I’ve had problems with the Windows client, and both times I went straight to the open requests. Sure enough, both times there were a dozen questions about the exact same problem. I’m sure the responsible party knows about the error by now, all those requests really aren’t necessary

I finally opened my own spiffy new site design in Netscape 4.79 and…yuck. I’d been using IE 4 and 5.5 to test it, and I have fallen victim to my own pet peeve: a site that looks great in IE and much worse in Netscape. It’s at least functional - very much so, in fact - and I’ve encountered sites you can’t even use without IE, and it isn’t ugly, but I had wanted it to look and work right. I should have checked a compatibility table before deciding I was all set…I’ve used a number of attributes not supported in Netscape. Damn! I’ll have to figure out what to do about this, because I really do want to degrade gracefully. (I suppose it’s not ungraceful, but still.) And for some reason the text within the right column of the journal and blog pages is much smaller than the text on the rest of the site…I haven’t figured that out ye

A few lawmakers in Russia are thinking about banning homosexuality. Good grief. Apparently male homosexuality was illegal under the Soviet regime, and an official has put forward the idea of bringing back that law. Now Alexei Mitrofanov, a nationalist member of the State Duma, has announced that he and other lawmakers are introducing a bill to make committing lesbian acts a criminal offense.

I thought Russia was supposed to be civilized.

I just stumbled across the old “who do you appreciate with ODP?” threads in the Penguin Café. I was amazed to see glynis mentioned me back in March 2000, and sherbear thanked me for a mozzie I never even created. Then newwave said thanks to me for “a HUGE cleanup job” I don’t even remember, and he thanked me again in November for “volunteering to clean up a mess” but I don’t remember that one either.

Sometimes there are little things in life to make you happy; I compiled a list once. Today I’d like to add the appearance of a 24oz Diet Mountain Dew in the vendor’s icebox. There have been 24oz Diet Pepsi bottles for a long time, and regular Mountain Dew was also available in 24oz - but I’d long wanted a giant diet version. I know I shouldn’t have so much caffeine, and usually if there’s a caffeine-free Diet Coke in the bin I pick that up, but today I saw one and then spotted the 24oz Diet Mountain Dew and couldn’t help grabbing it. I’m sleepy this morning, but this made me happy in a very small way. (Reading OOB on the metro was amusing, too.)

Oddly enough, the Weight Watchers database gave me two results when I searched for “diet dew” -
Mountain Dew Diet Mountain Dew - 1 item(s) - 0 points
Mountain Dew Caffeine-Free Diet Mountain Dew - 1 item(s) - 0 points
Caffeine-free Mountain Dew?! I never heard of such a thing.

Oh, lucky us! I think Virginia is going to be the first state with a license plate commemmorating September 11th. The Post’s article claims the plate’s graphic honors New York, Washington, and Somerset County - but I don’t see anything representing Pennsylvania. It looks like it’s just the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to me. As with all specially-requested thematic plates (of which Virginia has many designs), there must be a minimum of 350 requests placed with the DMV to have the plates actually printed. The article says the Arlington police hope they will have that many requests by the September 11th anniversary - do they really think it’ll take that long? I’m sure they’ll have that many in a couple of months.