I also have three new videos to share with you. First, we have Emma trying to figure out how to use a sippy cup for the first time.
Next, we catch Emma on camera during a chatty moment. She has a lot of these, but she seems to get shy around other people and around the camera, so a lot of you haven’t been able to see this side of her.
Lastly, we have a video of Emma trying to eat an apple. While she has a few teeth that have broken through the gum line, she’s not quite up to the task of eating an apple. The other voice you hear in this one is Emma’s Aunt Heather.
She is actually even more chatty than the video shows. Especially in the car. She loves to talk to you while you are driving around. Then again, she does have a mirror in the back seat so she might think that she is talking to that little girl more than she is talking to you. She can say several different things too. Her most common phrases are “dadadadadada”, “mamamamamama”, and “bababababababa”. She does sometimes just say “mama” or “dada”, but not necessarily to the right people. She actually calls Punky “dada” sometimes, but I think she is really trying to call her doggy.
One: Stephanie and I went by our polling place at 6:30 PM on election night, just to see what the line was like. There was literally no line. We could see inside and there were some booths that weren’t even occupied. No more waiting in line in the cold for ninety minutes to vote early for me.
Two: As a general rule, I don’t like to hear other people’s opinions of politics. Especially the opinions of people with extremely strong opinions. That said, I’ve been surprised and impressed with the mature, sensible way most (but not all) of the extremely conservative people I know have reacted to the results of the election. Just one example: “My man didn’t win, but I will now support this man as my President.”
Written by Kip on Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 11:17 am (EST) Tagged as: artmy-psychepolitics
Yesterday’s xkcd cartoon discussed the terminology “The West” and “The East”, and how it was confusing to an American:
His map isn’t exactly in line with what I’ve inferred the meanings of these terms to be, so I modified his map a bit to reflect my (also confusing) understanding of these terms:
Generally, “The West” and “The Western Hemisphere” have a meaning roughly equivalent to “First-World Nations”, with the exceptions of Japan and (maybe?) South Korea. Which is to say, something similar to “developed democracies which were aligned with the United States in the Cold War.” This generally includes Australia and New Zealand, which makes the map pretty nonsensical. Sometimes “The West” includes Mexico and Central and South America, but I didn’t mark the map this way because that’s not usually how I hear the term used.
Oddly, “The East” does not mean “Not ‘The West.’” It is more synonymous with “The Far East”, which is to say, “places where Asian people live.” That includes Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. I suppose that if the “Middle East” is really the middle of the east, then “The East” must include all of Asia and Africa. But I think “Middle East” is a whole other discussion. You could also debate whether India, Indonesia, and New Guinea belong in “The East.” I just drew it based on what I’ve inferred.
In either map, I think it is clear that the terms are ambiguous and only loosely correlated to their geographic meaning.
well indonesia is part of southeast asia so that would mean it is part of the east. southeast asia is thailand, cambodia (and the countries around those) singapore, philippines, malaysia, and indonesia and a few other countries in the area. i get this from the southeast asia games.
It’s been a while since I implemented a spammer’s honeypot here on Vacant Nebula. It has been extremely effective, so much so that I disabled the captcha. All I do is put a hidden form before any blog posts are displayed. Humans never see it, but spambots all see it, and apparently they are configured to submit spam to the first form on the page. In fact the only spam that has gotten through in the last year has been spam that submitted to all forms on the page, not just the first one. (I think this just happened once though.)
Fast-forward to a few days ago, I noticed that the excerpt of a page that Google shows displays the hidden comment submission form. This doesn’t particularly matter, but I’d prefer it not be there. So I added a check on useragent, and if it appears to be a search engine bot the honeypot is not displayed. Well apparently spammers use a two-step process. First they scan for blogs with forms while pretending to be googlebot. Then they submit to those forms pretending to be a normal user’s browser (usually IE 5.5).
I know this because I got about fifty spam comments in the last two days. If they were scanning the page with user agent reported as IE 5.5, they would have still seen the honeypot. But the comments were submitted with user agent of IE 5.5. Anyway, I’ve gone back to printing the honeypot for everyone, but only for the homepage. Any permalink pages will not have the honeypot. I’m pretty sure spammers don’t bother to go to the permalink pages, and search bots should only be indexing the permalinks. Hopefully, both problems are solved. If not, I’ll have to go back to a more fragile solution (something requiring Javascript, something requiring cookies, or even reinstating captchas).
Or maybe the spammers were just trying to wish me a happy twenty-seventh birthday by flooding my site with links to porn.
I experimented with using Feedburner to manage the feeds for this site, but I haven’t been pleased with the statistics they provide. They seem to be inaccurate, and I think the problem is that Feedburner is geared towards sites much larger than mine. So I’ve decided to revert to hosting my own feeds.
So. If you subscribed to a feed from this site in the last three months, you may need to resubscribe sometime next week in order to keep getting updates. If you’re not sure which feed you’re subscribed to, you should start getting notifications sometime next week that the feed is dead (if you’re subscribed to the Feedburner feed). If you don’t get any notifications, and you keep getting my blog posts, then you don’t need to do anything.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about then none of this applies to you.
Just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday here are a few more videos of Emma for everyone to enjoy. On November 13, exactly two weeks before Thanksgiving, we had started to notice how close Emma was to being able to crawl. She had learned to get on hands and knees, and she could kind of rock forward and backward. I predicted that she would be fully mobile by Thanksgiving. Prediction confirmed. You can see the progress she made in just eight days in the video below.
And second, we have a rather long video of Emma and yours truly “playing football.” Which causes her to giggle uncontrollably.
November 4, 11:17 pm
She is actually even more chatty than the video shows. Especially in the car. She loves to talk to you while you are driving around. Then again, she does have a mirror in the back seat so she might think that she is talking to that little girl more than she is talking to you. She can say several different things too. Her most common phrases are “dadadadadada”, “mamamamamama”, and “bababababababa”. She does sometimes just say “mama” or “dada”, but not necessarily to the right people. She actually calls Punky “dada” sometimes, but I think she is really trying to call her doggy.