Mom just sent me this picture. It was taken a few months ago, and since many of you had seen my dad and brothers when they were younger, I thought a little update would be in order. Andrew is on the left, then dad, Aaron and me (the one with the funny hair). It took along time to take this photo, because it was hard to get Aaron, Andrew and I to all squint at the same time. I had to crop the picture because none of us are wearing pants.
Journal
Too much multimedia
These Geeky posts are in the Meta category so that they don’t appear on the main page, but so that I have a spot to look back and see what changes I’ve made in case I ever need to undo them or duplicate them.
I had to add a plugin to WordPress to get the movie to showup on the MRI post. But it’s a fairly comprehensive plugin, and it also changed links to songs (.mp3) to “click to listen” buttons. That’s not what I wanted –at least not to the links to songs that were already on the site. I changed the file anarchy_media_player.php in the Anarchy Media plugin by changing the tag that it searches for to do the replacement from an anchor (A) tag to an (A3) tag which doesn’t exit in html. I’m assuming here that an actual (a3) tag would become a “play me” link, but I have not tested it.
iBay, UBay, we all Bay for eBay
So, at the auction last week, in addition to 26 printers (are you guys sure you don’t need one?) I also bought 3 toner cartridges solely to resell on eBay. I’ve never done that before, but they were not very expensive in any sort of absolute terms although they did, at the time, cost as much as 2 laser printers. I listed them on eBay Saturday night, and so far they haven’t generated any bids. There is one guy who is watching them, but I don’t know what his intentions are.
I didn’t know how I was going to package them, but last Sunday when we were at Walmarts our friend Randy, who works there, threw a box at us from over the aisle, and it was exactly the right size for the toner cartridge. If we had better writers for this show I would have shouted something like “missed” until he had thrown over as many as I needed, but we just went over and asked him for some more.
Getting inside my head
As some of you know, my eyes have been bothering me since I had an eye infection in July. I’ve been to an eye doctor a few times and he (after trying a few things that didn’t work) had me get an MRI. He actually got me in to get it really quickly. The bad part was that my appointment was at 6:45 in the morning. I asked the technician to take my picture. He didn’t act like that was weird, but it was early.
The MRI was really easy. You just have to lie still and not have a metal plate embedded in your skull. It’s really loud, but not an entirely unpleasantly loud. They give you headphones to wear and literally pipe in (no magnets in the MRI) music, but you can only hear the music in between scans. At the end of the of the scanning I used the old line, “My wife is a preschool teacher, can I have X?” where X is anything up to their first born child. In this case X was, “a copy of the image you made”. He asked if a copy on CD would be okay and I said sure.
On the CD were 18 scans (we can’t decide if that is likely to be all of the scans) and a program to manipulate them. We can rotate my head in 3D and also make those red/blue 3D pictures. Anyone have a pair of 3D glasses? The eye doctor said that the MRI would let him know whether I needed to see a Neurological Opthomologist or and Ear, Nose and Throat guy. I’m not sure which one to hope for.
P.S. You can manipulate the first image by right clicking on it.
A thump in the night….
A spooky tale of danger and disaster!!!!Â
So.  To enhance the super-spookiness of our fabulously decorated house, I called Lloyd on the phone and said, “We could put the wireless speaker outside and play scary music, but the speaker would get stolen.” “Well,” said Lloyd, “you could put it on the roof.”
Now here’s where all of YOU think, “Duh! You don’t put a piece of fairly pricey electronics on the roof, idiots. That obviously has disaster written all over it.” Well, nay-sayers and wet blankets, you don’t live on the edge like we do. We live life large, and that’s the way we like it.
So I went upstairs to Brad’s room and did a great job of balancing the speaker against the outside of the window. Great job. Really.   Once downstairs I thought, “Maybe I should go tie something to the handle and anchor it inside – but I’ve got people ringing the doorbell – I’ll wait until Lloyd gets home.”
When Lloyd got home I asked him to go upstairs to take it out of the window – so it wouldn’t fall. I told him just how it was balanced….. but I should have done it. (I mean, this thing was precarious – not great.) Sitting at the computer, I heard from above – THUMP! thumpthumpthumpthump.   Yeah, it fell – from the window, to the roof, to the gutter, to the sidewalk (and some in the grass, and a little in the hedge).  Â
No Trick-or-Treaters were harmed.
Here’s the result:
Happy Halloween!
Here’re my cheap-o Sack-o-Lanterns. I had to come up with some stuff to decorate with tomorrow. Fortunately, leaving the potted plants out in the freezing cold has given us some nice creepy foliage by the front door. Happy Candy Day!