!(alignright)http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-content/pages/freshview/images/freshview_logo.jpg!:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/projects/freshview/ Ah, it’s done! Many, including myself, have expressed some lament over the lack of any purely-visual indicators for Shaun Inman’s “Mint”:http://www.haveamint.com/. I have some thoughts as to why Shaun shied away from any visual cues. For one, most other web statistic tracking applications inundate the user with useless bar graphs and pie charts that do not succinctly display data in a friendly or accessible manner. Quite naturally, dynamically-generated graphs are hard to do aesthetically for several reasons:

* GD graphics for PHP does not have anti-aliasing
* Flash graphs would be difficult without relying on some external code to create the binary flash data
* Most graphs look horrible as they were slapped together just to show the data. No design was considered in their creation except for the very bright, primary colors used for each data group.

“Fresh View”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/freshview/ fixes all of this, and more. For one, Fresh View uses SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, to display graphs for the Past Day, Past Week, Past Month, and Past Year. What are the advantages of using SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) over the options listed above? Anti-aliased goodness and open, XML-based goodness. Add in the fact that “Firefox 1.5″:http://www.mozilla.org/ will have native SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) support, and you have a sweet -tasting- looking setup. I worked hard to match the look and feel of Mint, so as not to clash with the great aesthetics of Mint, while giving you a quick visual look at your visitor data.

One of my favorite features is what I call “Weekend Highlighting.” Basically, on the Past Week and Past Month graphs, a translucent box is drawn over the weekend data points that immediately clue you into week and weekend trends. Cool, huh? In addition, if you roll over a data point, the exact amount corresponding to that point is shown in a nifty, JavaScript-driven SVG tooltip. I’m sure that with use, you will discover other cool features that I have not mentioned here.

Well, enough jabbering! Take a look, get the details, and “GO DOWNLOAD IT!”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/freshview/

!http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/pastweek_graph.png!:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/freshview/

I just discovered that my flights to and from Denver in January for the trek across the country to the Inauguration events will be with “Ted Airlines”:http://www.flyted.com/ and I am excited. I hear they have great service, comfortable seating, and good food. Should be fun.

Anyone else flown on Ted that would care to share their experiences?

Ok, I’m giving myself five minutes between tasks. I just finished my first secondary application (due less than six days after receiving it, no less!), and must move directly onto physical chemistry as I have a fat, juicy mid-term tomorrow morning at 7:30 am. No, not 8:00 am when class usually starts, but 7:30 am, as is customary with all pChem exams.

The exam does not portend to include anything heinous, just your usual fare. Still, I must be as familiar as possible with the problem sets and in-class examples so that I may do well.

Two minutes left, and what to do. Maybe I’ll go buy some skittles.

[addendum] I wanted to mention that I used the word _impetus_ in one of my secondary applications. Oooo… Ahhh…

!(alignright)http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/logowikipedia.png(Free, community-run encyclopedia)!:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page The “Wikipeda”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is as awesome resource! For those not in the know, the Wikipedia is a community-run encyclopedia of sorts that dwarfs any commercially-available encyclopedias in both the amount and (in my opinion) the quality of information. It contains “entries”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_in_a_ring on “solutions”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator to the “Schrodinger Equation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodinger_equation and even a page about my “uncle”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Rove (including all the controversial stuff, labeled as such). Fun stuff!

Available in several other languages, this reference has over 358,583 estimated articles about everything. Anyone can register and add or update information. Cool stuff. I have come across various interesting articles, but today, I happened upon it again in my search for what “sodium does in liquid ammonia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Liquid_ammonia_as_a_solvent. Neat!

!(alignright)http://www.google.com/images/logo_sm.gif(Google, Inc.)!:http://www.google.com/ “Google”:http://www.google.com/ is a funny technology. It highlights how people find you (with the help of “Shaun Inman’s”:http://www.shauninman.com/ “ShortStat”:http://www.shauninman.com/mentary/past/shortstat_again.php web statistics package), showcases various idiosyncratic phrases within posts, and truly reveals how deep in Google’s results people go before they click on me. With that last one, the search term usually has absolutely nothing to do with me or anything posted here at sensory output, but people seem interested anyways.

My most interesting search term of late that I noticed popping up is “bio-entanglement physics(Link to Google search results for bio-entanglement physics)”:http://www.google.com/search?q=Bio-Entanglement+Physics&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8. I can hear the thoughts running through your head now: Bio-entanglement physics?!? This guys likes his science, but that sounds oddly fictional.” If you just had thoughts along those lines, then you’re right, because I posted about “Angels and Demons”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/archives/2004/09/12/angels-and-demons/ not too long ago. In that post, I mentioned how the author took some artistic freedom when exploring some scientific aspects of his characters. Needless to say, I find it weird that I am the *only* site that is listed for that result. In a web of billions upon billions of pages, I am the only one that mentions bio-entanglement physics. (Mentioning it over and over would normally help me in my PageRank for this search term, but I am already the one and only!)

My hits from Google are modest, but I find them fascinating, watching search terms that push people to my doorstep. Here are a few more oddballs:

* “La soupe aux tomates” download (3 times last month)
* Winie Soon (2 times last month)
* stargate fonts ancients (I want this too!)
* “tim cook” kidney writing desk (huh?)
* related lactate with neuron (umm, ok…)

Funny stuff.

!(alignright)http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/smallbath.jpg(Small bathroom tiling complete)! When remodeling a house, there are so many details, details that I have -ranted on- spoken about quite a few times in the last few months. Needless to say, we are *close* and have just a bunch of little things left to do. Among those small tasks includes painting doors, painting more baseboards, paint touch-ups, and fixing the four-way light switches (which I installed improperly). I finished tiling the small bathroom, and went to install the toilet only to discover that the elongated version does not fit. How depressing. This small setback requires a trip to “Home Depot”:http://www.homedepot.com/ in order to rectify. I hope they have taller wax seals, too, because the one I used when I attempted to install the elongated bowl didn’t quite make a complete contact. I only discovered this when I removed the bowl, fortunately, or it may leaked all over the place!

!(alignright)http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/largebath.jpg(Small bathroom tiling complete)! Once that is fixed, I can grout it and be done. Then, I have to wire up the in-floor heating, which you can see here in the other bathroom. I started tiling this today, as well, but had to leave it unfinished in order that we have access to a working toilet (hahaha). The work you can see here was a bit more difficult given the separations between the heating mats (orange mesh), necessitating that I float the tiles that straddle the two mats. Keeping the stone tiles flush with one another while maintaining proper spacing has been tedious. Still, it is fun and different than my normal activities. All I can say is that I might just be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

So I use my trusty iBook to receive all my email. My iBook, however, is showing its age, as it no longer has the speed to keep up with the demanding tasks that I wish to complete. To work, MailStat uses an AppleScript to insert a record in the MySQL database that is running on the iBook. This occurs as a rule action. Another action fires off if spam is detected to switch the @type@ field in the SQL record to “spam” from “mail,” thus keeping track of mail versus spam. Then, a cron script fires that gets a summary of mail for the last 30 days and FTP(File Transfer Protocol)s that information to my web server where you see “interpreted statistics”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/mailstat/. For reasons of lack of computing power (I think), Mail fails to run the second rule for spam. (My excuse for the lack of CPU power seems like a cop out, but this might be Mail’s fault or even—God forbid—an error in my code. I need to include some debugging code to figure out where exactly the problem lies.) Thus, on some days, my mail versus spam ratio rises considerably when compared to previous days despite no real increase in spam. To fix the discrepancies, I manually alter the SQL records on the iBook using “phpMyAdmin”:http://www.phpmyadmin.net/.

I’ll have to consider my options in how to fix this minor, but inconvenient, problem.

I often come across words that I know, but rarely use. These words are sophisticated and show off a bit of erudite by the user, and I often jot them down in the hopes of remembering the word. This has proven really ineffective, as my choice of paper for notation is usually my classroom notes. I write it once during a lecture and forget about it thereafter, only to recognize it in the corse of studying at a later date. After the course is over, I rarely go back to the notes, so the words fall back into a state of disuse.

To solve this problem, I want to code a simple PHP/MySQL solution that will allow me to quickly enter new words, search for words, and automatically pull the definitions upon displaying said words. I could include a script to randomly pull a word from the database and display it along with a short definition on my home page. (The wheels in my brain commence turning.) This really should require minimal effort, so conceivably, I should be able to turn around the idea quickly.

I think this would be cool, as I love words that have nuanced meanings. Few people (in the whole spectrum of educated persons), in my opinion, really discern the minute differences between synonyms—words that have a small amount of contextual meaning or usage. I cannot think of an example at the moment, but I trust you get the drift of my argument.

Mass media, television, and the Internet present a great deal of information and entertainment, but the value of words in books and literature has fallen dramatically in recent years, it would seem. So few young people (especially in their teens and twenties) seem to read for pleasure, instead opting to occupy their time with other forms of less stimulating entertainment (although probably not by their standards). There was an interesting news story somewhere about this phenomenon (related more to dropping vocabulary sizes) that reported a statistic that teenagers today have about half the average vocabulary size of teenagers ten years ago. Whoa! If alarms are not going off in your head, then perhaps you should re-read that last sentence. Clearly, there is a problem here.

Personally, I enjoy reading and wish I had more time to devote to it. In the meantime, though, I plan to try and remember interesting words that I happen upon with a bit of computerized help.

!(alignright)http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/flag.jpg(American Flag)! It’s difficult to believe that three whole years have passed since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the downing of a plane full of people in rural Pennsylvania. I clearly remember my French host mother picking me up from school around 3:00 pm (EST + 6) and gravely telling me that something bad was happing back home. When you hear something like that, you immediately think of your family and those close to you, but upon arriving home, I watched the surreal events of that New York morning unfold on live television from the other side of the Atlantic. I was in shock as I watched the two towers crumble and mortified by the shear confusion in the media about how many planes were hijacked, their targets and the estimated dead. Being so far away, though, I felt disconnected from the situation, only hearing about the disruption to air traffic and other commerce around the USA that week. Scary stuff.

_Le Monde 2_, a French monthly news magazine, put out a special edition the following week that included pictures from Ground Zero. It was different, I’m sure, watching the events unfold in other country (France, no less)—the news media and government responses to this attack on America clearly showing solidarity. But as with all things, they changed. By the spring of 2002, Bush had given his infamous “‘Axis of Evil’ State of the Union address”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html, after which the French and other Europeans had a field day picking it apart morsel by morsel. Clearly, I witnessed the initial falling out between the US and France, as relations became more and more sour, and the situation has only worsened with Iraq. Oh well, what can you do? The French will be French: righteous about their place in the world and their need to demonstrate this non-existent authority. The modern world really has given France a case of insecurity, as they attempt to assert their will without much success.

Still, 9/11 really did rally the French and the rest of the world for a time. We should not forget that _solidarité_, nor should we forget those who perished on that fateful day that fundamentally changed our world.

Ugh. Painting an entire house really wears you down, especially when that involves:

* Changing every power outlet from an almond colored outlet to a white one (~50)
* Changing every light switch from almond to white (~25)
* Removing doors, painting doors and putting them back
* Deciding to buy all new door hinges
* Attempting to create clean separations of two paint colors (tape doesn’t always works as advertised)

Much of the painting was greatly simplified when we also decided that all the carpet floors were to be changed out with hardwood (main living spaces) or new carpet (bedrooms) or natural stone (bathrooms). As such, protecting the floor from paint was not a concern. I removed all the carpeting, linoleum, and parquet myself to save money. In addition, I am installing the tile, and we decided to install heating pads underneath the stone to save on future energy costs and keep our feet comfortable on the natural stone in winter. This adds some complication of wiring and raising the stone a bit due to the height of the pads, which sit in the thin-set mortar.

All told, when this project is finished in the next two weeks, I will have touched every surface of the house with the exception of the ceilings (which are popcorn, thank goodness). That’s a lot of area! Despite all the toiling and complaining, it really does look great and will improve the value of the home considerably. Already, it feels more comfortable than it did previously.

The painters finished today with the exterior of the house, changing the colors from white with sea green trim to stone grey with white trim. The contrast with the small areas of red brick near the garage and under the living room window in the front looks great. The stone grey goes well with the concrete roof tiles, too. All in all, this major undertaking has turned out quite well, and I am pleased with the knowledge and skills I have mastered.