Nica's Blog

Occasionally I come across a website that is so amazing that I think I must be misunderstanding it, like watching a magic show and not realizing you're just seeing tricks. When I first came across We feel fine I wasn't convinced it was really doing what it said it was doing. Had the creators not been so open in explaining how their website works, I would have left the site thinking it was an interesting proof of concept or demo. I am now convinced that this website parses thousands of blogs to create elegant graphics, animation, and text. It all makes me feel small; I realize just how many people are out there feeling sometimes profound feelings. They may not have good grammar, or spelling, but they feel.

Labels: websites

I would like to encourage people who do not plan to keep a poinsettia as a year around houseplant to simple not get poinsettias. About now great piles of the pretty flowering perennials are being tossed into compost piles and landfills. Go into some department stores and high-rise lobbies and you'll see great towers of the red, pink, and white petals (which are actually leaves) in cheesy foiled pots. These are plants doomed to die. The plants are perennials, but it's cheaper to just throw them away than to keep them alive for next year. It's a huge waste, and it has nothing to do with Christmas.

Once I get everyone to stop using poinsettias for holiday decor, I'm going to start making the Christmas tree a ritual of the past.

Seattle is a moderately rainy city, which makes it fine for me. I don't mind rain, and I usually enjoy it. I see people flinching under the rain like they are caught in a deluge of guano, and I feel sad they don't seem to enjoy rain; they don't even seem to want to enjoy the rain. People will enjoy the sunshine, even if it's making their skin peel and causing melanoma -- dammit they're going to enjoy the sunny days.

Seattle is not a very rainy city. Seattle gets a moderate amount of rain. Consider the average annual rainfalls of some well known cities:

London, 24.2 in
Paris, 24.1
Roma, 31.2
Toronto, 29.1
Seattle, 33.1
Tokyo, 60.0
Cairo, 1.0
Bangkok, 57.8
San Francisco, 19.6
Sydney Australia, 48.1
Baghdad, 6.1
Miami, 59.0
New Orleans, 59.8
Anchorage, 15.3
Grand Rapids, 201
New York City, 46.7

These numbers will vary depending on the source, but I don't think these numbers are skewed one way or the other. I was really surprised by how little I knew about rainfalls in various cities. I had no idea that San Francisco is so dry, and Grand Rapids is so wet. Baghdad is dry, no surprise, but Cairo is extraordinarily lacking in precipitation. No wonder the Nile is so important. All in all Seattle has a very middle-of-the-road sort of climate when it comes to rainfall. I was a little disappointed that London has so much less rain than Seattle. A rainy London has something of a romantic appeal to me.

Labels: rain

I like tea, that is real tea. I don't like herbal stuff. I find it hard to believe anyone really likes the herbal teas very much unless they are drinking it with tremendous amounts of sugar. Boil lawn clippings and add sugar and my guess is that you can manufacture something halfway palatable. I like green teas. On that topic I can recommend Tazo's China Green Tips which is sold through Starbucks. Oolong teas are good with a nice Chinese meal, but I really can't say I love the stuff. I so like black teas. I like black teas a lot, so when my husband asked me what "Orange Pekoe" is I was at a loss. I wasn't sure if it was a grade of tea, or an actual type of tea?

Wikipedia to the rescue. Any tea lover should read the orange pekeo Wikipedia entry. The best part is toward the bottom when it lists the grades of tea starting with "Orange Pekeo" and ending in "Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe". Given that FTGFOP (Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe) is jokingly referred to as "far too good for ordinary people", Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekeo must be for the gods. Save teas that good for when your super-fine-tippy-golden-flowery-friends visit.

Labels: tea

I have made Izze-cam full motion streaming video. Enjoy. You may be able to see Esmeralda and Gregory in the background. For those of you curious, I'm using Tincam as my webcam software. It's pretty cheap, but works OK. The webcam itself is pretty basic Creative Labs Live! usb webcam.

Labels: Izze-cam, Tincam, webcams

I had a little trouble with my Greymatter blog so I've wimped out and started using Blogger. I managed to corrupt some of the Greymatter files and it began FREAKING OUT. I'm not kidding. I was getting very patient emails from the sys admin saying I was impacting the performance of the web server and I better fix my scripts. A script was getting stuck in some sort of cpu hogging loop. I decided to check out Blogger. It's not perfect, but it is easy, I really didn't feel like re-installing my Greymatter Perl scripts. The only thing that makes me uneasy about Blogger is that it makes be dependent on an online service, but I'm hosting the files myself, so even if Blogger goes away, I still have my posts.

Happy Boxing Day!

Labels: blogger, greymatter