Why are soap dishes normally placed so low around a tub. If the soap is directly in the stream of the water it gets all soggy - then you end up using way too much soap because the bar is all melty when used. Some people like to take baths - that’s cool, but is it really worth it? Is it okay if I put the soap dish higher or further toward the foot of the tub or would people think it looks strange?

Do you recall any cloud-filled vision of heaven in popular media that has contained deciduous trees? I can tell you that if heaven was wall-to-wall forest it surely wouldn’t contain this bastard of a tree. Many people have had ideas of what this tree growing through the fence in my back yard is, but sorry, you’re all wrong. It is an ailanthus altissima, more commonly referred to as a Tree of Heaven. This exotic tree likes to implant its buhjillion seeds everywhere, growing super quickly even in the most inconvenient areas. Hey, want a tree in the middle of your lawn? Here ya go. Want another one? Here ya go. I am not a fan. Heaven can have their weed back. It is getting chopped down this weekend.

I have been slightly interested in python for a while, but just never got around to actually writing anything. Not that I am enough of a programmer to be particularly swayed by one language over another - but the path of least resistance for writing plugins and such for the Linux desktop seems to by python. This was a simple project that taught me some basics, and since there isn’t a nicely developed perl module for the Google API I went on with the python.

Lets say you just made a little spreadsheet in OpenOffice

Now you want to share that amazingly complex spreadsheet with your lawyer on Google Docs

Now it’s up there…

and you can edit and share with friends

Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, lets you drop scripts of your choosing into ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/. When you run the script on a file through the right-click menu the file name gets passed to the script. I knew this was possible, and have played around with OS X folder actions before, but I have to say that in practice this is a lot easier than AppleScript to me.

Grab the python script yourself, download and install the gdata python API, edit the file to have your own username/password, and right-click your way to uploading fun. Disclaimer: this is just a quick and dirty thing, do not expect it to be good.

Stacey and I went meatless for the month of March. Our only motivation to do this was to have an interesting experience. I admit, I had expected that I would perhaps learn more about keeping healthy while staying veggie or gain some empathy for vegetarians. Sadly, it was a little less exciting. Here is what we learned:

• I am more prone to fits of rage when living meatless
• My family gets confused, a little angry (Grandma Dot), and talks about it too much
• Stacey likes vegetarian burritos from Chipotle
• Avoiding meat makes me more regular

We celebrated completing meatless march by scarfing down some Five Guys burgers.

Stacey has had about enough of these silly games - but I’ve decided to try something for April that is perhaps more difficult for me than giving up meat. I will not consume any alcoholic beverage during April. Again, no particularly compelling reason to do this other than just to change things up. I can’t remember the last time I have gone that long without drinking - so this will be challenging. I have already started offering drinks to Stacey so I can live vicariously through her. April will be a little easier to try this than other months since I am on call two weeks for work - and I shouldn’t drink those weeks anyhow.

Television consumers want bigger, brighter, and higher resolution displays. We look down upon a measly 1080i - yet at the same time I see more tolerance of completely fuct aspect ratios. Sure, is fun to laugh at screwed up proportions when looking at a fun house mirror, but now we just cannot escape it. In sports bars, building lobbies, and in our own homes we are increasingly tolerant of 4×3 aspect ratio pictures being stretched to 16×9. It drives me batty and gives me a headache. Why is it okay for a square to be a rectangle? Why is that fat lady on the tv the same width and height?

Today I came across the perfect illustration of this sad sad stretched world in which we live. The main video page for CNN has EVERY VIDEO STRETCHED. It is a tiny box in my browser, not constrained by the physical dimensions of a real television or a wife that says “what are those black bars on the side… fix it”. Yet this huge media company thinks that this is okay. Until Joe public starts demanding non fun house video we have more whack stuff like this to look forward to. Shame on everyone. Stop stretching and squeezing.

We are finally putting our condo up for sale. Who knows in this market how tough it will be to sell, but I am hoping to be able to get this done with rather quickly. Maybe you know someone looking for a one bedroom condo in Sterling - send them our way.

We had dedicated a good chunk of the last few months fixing things and getting it ready, and here is the full set of pictures. I’m sleepy.