I’ve decided to move from Wordpress to Movable type. Since movable type allows me to manage several blogs at once, I’ve decided to create new URLs for my new blogs.
So this will be the last post in this location. Eventually I’ll figure out how to migrate all these posts over to the new blogs.
The new locations are:
http://levelsofdetail.kendeeter.com
http://health.kendeeter.com
I’ve yet to make a keyboard one yet.
Most literature about atopic dermatitis and eczema will talk about how you should use a good moisturizer all the time, to keep your skin in good shape and less susceptible to external irritants.
Today, I came across a few products that claim a new product type, the _shielding lotion_, which they explicitly differentiate from a moisturizer. A couple examples are “Gloves in a bottle”:http://www.glovesinabottle.com and “Skin MD”:http://www.skinmdnatural.com.
Both of these products claim that instead of just trying to supply moisture to the skin, the correct approach is to create a lotion that has barrier-forming elements that semi-permanently bond with your skin, and that this has the dual effect of keeping irritants out and keeping natural skin moisture in.
I suppose this is somewhat in line with the new topical ceramide-based approaches as well (in that they all aim for a significant reduction in TEWL, trans-epidermal water loss), but if you look at the ingredients list for each, they seem very very similar to the standard moisturizers out there on the market already. The standard humectant + dimethicone + preservatives + thickeners formula. This makes it hard to tell if the formulations really are different, or if it’s just marketing bullshit.
Anyhow, I’m not about to waste a huge amount of my time trying to do all the research before I put some money down. The Gloves in a Bottle product is less than $20 for a bottle (with shipping) so I’m willing to give it a try and find out for myself. The “few reviews”:http://www.amazon.com/Gloves-In-A-Bottle-8oz/dp/B0001YSKBG/sr=8-1/qid=1165138315/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-5399795-2780424?ie=UTF8&s=hpc that I found on Amazon seem somewhat promising.
I’ll have to report back on the actual results.
I’ve been using my X60 for a few days, mostly at home while sitting on the couch or in bed. In this very short amoutn of time, this laptop has established itself as the one which I’ll be comparing all others to in terms of battery performance.
In the “Thinkpad default” power profile, with normal usage, the battery gets a solid 5 hours. In power saver mode, you’ll see battery meter readouts as high as 7 hours.
I almost feel like I’m using a phone instead of a computer. It’ll be hard to go back to anything less. This is exactly how portable computing should be. It’s the first time that my paranoid mind has been able to just completely forget about the battery life. I just open and close the lid as I please, and I just have to remember to plug in for a few hours once a day.
I don’t think there’s any going back to the sub 5-hour normal use range anymore. I guess that limits the possibilities quite a bit. The “Panasonics”:http://panasonic.jp/pc/ still fall within that range though, with the Y5 14 inch version claiming 9 hours max, and the X60-like (except that it has a Core Solo) R6 claiming an incredible 15 hours.
So I’m playing around with the random ThinkVantage software that came on this X60, and I find an option to “Rejuvenate My System”. Intrigued I click on it, and am greeted with the following message:
This option optmizes performance by defragmenting your hard drive and restoring your system and application files from a “known good” backup of your choice. This helps eliminate, viruses, adware, and spyware. _*Important:*_ Applications installed or changed after the selected backup was created might need to be installed again to function correctly.
Awesome. So to get a faster system, just throw away all the crap that you just did to mess it up. Gee thanks. I think I’ll pass.
I managed to score a tricked out Lenovo Thinkpad X60 through work, and it arrived today.
This thing is _*tiny*_. The top half is all screen, and the bottom half is mostly keyboard. Not even enough space for a touchpad.
The initial software configuration was disappointing. But I guess that’s to be expected form a new Windows machine. For some reason it was set to 16 bit color, ClearType was disabled, and it came with Antivirus and a bunch of random Google stuff (Picasa, Google IE Toolbar, and Google desktop search), plus a bazillion ThinkVantage programs.
Anyhow it really reminds me of my original Vaio 505. But smaller.
Maybe all the people sitting in front of computers all day know this already, but “according to this article”:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127112844.htm, sitting straight up is not the best posture for your back. They use a new kind of MRI to show that actually leaning back 45 degrees is better than sitting up straight. Slouching forward is apparently the worse.
I have a pretty bad slouch. Maybe I should sue that Saturday school teacher that always scolded us about our posture.
Just “a few shots”:http://puntium.smugmug.com/gallery/2171196 from our day-trip to Sonoma over the Thanksgiving weekend. I took RAW shots, and then was pretty liberal with _interpreting_ them in Adobe Lightroom, since I know Lightroom isn’t too great at reverse engineering the original colors for NEF files anyways.
Smells of the Mozart Effect claims, but this one seems to have also have some scientific experiments behind it.
Apparently, listening to Mozart reduces “allergic skin wheal responses in atopic dermatitis patients”:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GDQ/is_1_29/ai_n6032933.
Sounds pretty out there, but there’s no harm in trying I guess. The same researcher, Hajime Kimata, has also written about how laughter, kissing, and crying with tears all beneficially modulate the body’s allergic response.
*Update*: “Here’a an article”:http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4918 talking about the molecular basis for the Mozart Effect. It’s from 2004, and seems less controversial than the original study.
I doubt that anyone really noticed, but I switched back again to Wordpress.
This time the realizations were slightly different. The main reason is that I just don’t have the time to maintain four different looks for the four different sections that I had. Developing the look of one section takes enough time, having to do four is just unmanageable for a hobbyist web developer.
I promised myself that I would be more concentrating on content, and textpattern was taking me clearly away from that direction.
Also, while textpattern’s “tag” system is useful and easy to use, I find that most of the time, the built-in tags don’t do what I want. I end up writing straight PHP code to add the features that I need. If I’m going to do that, then using Wordpress just makes more sense, since you can just hack the templates directly with PHP.
On youtube, I found there are a few typing videos that demonstrate the use of some esoteric keyboards.
Additionally, here’s one that demonstrates the “chatter” problem on a Majestouch keyboard (chatter is where the signal transition between a pressed and unpressed key is not clean and stable, thus registering multiple keystrokes in one transition). That’s pretty worrying for a keyboard that claims to be high-end. But it’s only $60 or so, so they must be cutting corners somewhere.
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