Mum and Dad showed me an episode of "Catalyst" from a while back, on meningococcal disease, this evening. Scary, scary stuff. (The septicaemia version, in particular.)
From what I saw (and have read tonight), once a person starts showing the symptoms (nausea, aching joints, fever, bruises or rashes), there's very little time before the person's life is seriously at risk. The bacteria itself moves into the bloodstream (hence septicaemia) and, through a chain of events, causes massive clotting. The end result is that the blood vessels rupture all over the body, and your organs and body parts start to die. Consequently, many people that survive the disease lose fingers, toes or limbs - and unfortunately, children and teenagers are the most affected.
This stuff really frightens me. Although there are vaccines, they don't cover what seems to be the worst variant of the disease - B. There's no real protection for it either. Thankfully, once diagnosed, simple drugs (i.e. penicillin) will kill off the bacteria.
On a side note, I think if I were to consider a career-change (career? what career? course change, maybe), I'd go into microbiology or another related field. To be able to develop these vaccines and save lines would be… very rewarding.
There's a little bit more information here
Well… not really. I flew up to Brisbane on Friday night to stay with my parents, and I'll be here until next Friday morning.
It's nice to sleep in and be able to relax, for once. Uni and work have been stressing me out a bit, so it's a welcome relief. The view from my parents' apartment (looking over the Brisbane River) is just magnificent, too.
Thanks to Joi Ito: Kofi Annan recently gave a speech on terrorism… I'm making my way through the full text now, but this passage really stood out for me:
"…the United Nations must continue to insist that, in the fight against terrorism, we cannot compromise on the core values I have listed. In particular, human rights and the rule of law must always be respected. As I see it, terrorism is in itself a direct attack on human rights and the rule of law. If we sacrifice them in our response, we are handing a victory to the terrorists."
Guantanamo Bay, anyone?
I came across a plugin for WordPress by Michele Finotto that allows you to highlight certain posts as "favourites".
A similar plugin was mentioned a while ago on Binary Bonsai, but was never released.
This one seems to work quite well, though. Thanks, Michele!
When editing a document or text field in a MacOS X app, have you ever noticed that hitting the "up" arrow on the keyboard eventually takes you to the beginning of the document? e.g. if you're on the third line, it will go directly upwards twice, then the cursor will move to the very left of the first line.
Similarly, pressing the "down" key will move the cursor downwards, and eventually sit right after the last character.
I've found this to be the default behaviour for many MacOS X applications (and it's the default behaviour in Apple's text views), but for some ODD reason, Word 2004 does not behave in the same manner. It simply beeps. Argh… It's the little things that count.
(FYI, hitting command+up or command+down places the cursor in the expected position.)
The Cat Empire are releasing a new single, "The Sly", on Monday, and they've been nice enough to put the video clip up on the website, here. (Direct link.)
It's quite cool… Listening to the song, I can't help but jump around the room a bit!
One thing that really irks me is laziness and a lack of consideration for others.
I was at the BridgePoint shopping centre today, and someone was kind enough to place a shopping trolley against the pillar next to my car, meaning I couldn't get out. Obviously, it was easy for me to move it (and my trolley) to the trolley bay located about 20 metres away. What got to me was that the shopper had failed to do that in the first place! If you've just spent the past hour doing the shopping, surely moving the trolley back to the bay (all of 30 seconds) isn't such a big ask?!
Bloody [North Shore] suburbanites…
Last week, we released Connoisseur 1.1.
Among the notable features/enhancements/bugfixes:
- It's much, MUCH faster!
- You can now scale recipes
- (Something I'm proud of) A MacOS X service that allows you to select text in a web page (or other app) and import that into Connoisseur as a recipe
- Entering recipes should also be a lot easier
For an exhaustive list of changes (and I do mean exhaustive… it's huge!), look here.
I've been thinking about playing around with del.icio.us for a while now, as the idea of having all of my bookmarks categorised (tagged) and online is quite compelling.
Along with that, I've decided to move the "asides" posts to del.icio.us under the asides tag. On the sidebar on the right of the page are the latest entries. I've implemented this using the del.icio.us cached plugin for WordPress. I've considered putting the del.icio.us posts back into the blog (similar to how the asides worked previously), but I feel it clutters the blog up a bit too much. There have been times where all I ever posted were little links (with small comments of my own)… simply because I couldn't be bothered writing full posts, or simply didn't have the time. If anyone's interested, this can be achieved using the WordPre.cio.us plugin.
There's also an RSS feed.
This post alerted me to the fact that GMail provides an Atom feed for GMail users. The URL is https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom. Quite handy, actually… it saves me logging into GMail all the time to check messages.
