Ken Martin's Blog

I've been interested in weather since I was a little kid with my little home weather station. I know. Dweeb. Anyway, some years ago, I got to mix that interest with my geek work while I was working for Digital Cyclone helping build different bits of My-Cast, which I still use daily.

Well, something new is courting me for daily attention: Seasonality. So many nice bits of information, well displayed, and easy to use. Great sunrise/sunset display. Satellite photos with radar and satellite transparently laid over (user definable transparency). Ooo, graphs.

There's a free demo; check it out!

Don't worry, DCI; I can't run it on my phone. :)

OK, so this guy has apparently been all over the news in various places. Why? He started a blog and had a red paperclip. He's hoping to trade it for a house. It looks like it's going to work. He's already traded up to a truck in something like seven or eight trades. And, of course, there's the book deal, the radio and TV interviews. Wow.

One of our kittys died today. :(

The comments on my post about Saint Paul's new smoking ban are really pretty interesting. A couple of gentlemen from very different perspectives have weighed in. I appreciate the conversation. I hope it can continue to be fairly civil. Let's not go ad hominum, please. :)

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Are not looking great right now. Margaret, are you watching?

Xyle Scope is pretty much everything I've ever wanted in a CSS app. Minus the little feature requests I've now already asked for. :)

A great tool for examination and troubleshooting, learning, and live editing and correcting. Exporting reformatted style sheets is sweet. I will finally be cracking open my legendarily tight wallet and ponying up for this one. Perhaps only my second shareware ever. The first? CD Finder.

It beats Mozilla's Web Developer because it shows pre-rendered CSS. It beats GoLive because it's on live, post-PHP pages. Nice cascade display. Nice DOM views. It's ginger peachy.

What is it about Germans and the great software? (I'm including Adobe GoLive in that, Jens, Lars, Veronika, et al.)

Child number five, at 22 months, has hit that stage where he can, for extended perods of time, be entertained by pointing to things and saying "What's this?" Over and over and over. :)

Somehow, between WebSTAR, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and Safari, I got locked out of this blog. It wouldn't take my password. I couldn't get in even through a "back door". Ugh!

Well, it's fixed. And I'm being more vigilant to see if I can discover what happened.

St. Paul, Minnesota has just adopted a smoking ban. I know that's not terribly uncommon anymore, but it sure seems cowardly. Cowardly because the folks pushing these initiatives won't do what should plainly be the Right Thing (from their perspective) and outlaw tobacco. Of course, they would reply that Big Tobacco is too powerful; big money lobbyists. But it sure seems there are some pretty deep pockets behind the anti-smoking folks, too. And if Big Tobacco's lobbyists are too powerful, it's only because they are able to sway politicians. And if politicians are easy to sway or not able to be trusted to rise above the crass temptation of lobbyists, should we be trusting them to curtail our liberties at all?