You may recall that nearly three years ago I won a SumoLounge Omni bean bag chair.  At the time, I said “I’ll be sure to let you, o faithful reader of my blog, know what I think of it.”  Well I never did, mainly because I forgot about it.  But a few months ago someone asked me what I thought of the chair, and I wrote a quick review in an e-mail.  And I decided, since I had already written it, I would repost it here and fulfill that three-year-old promise.  I know you’ve all been awaiting this anxiously.

The most surprising thing to me was that it was very light.  Bean bag chairs that I’ve used before were always really heavy, but this thing uses something about as dense as styrofoam.  It’s also pretty much indestructible—I’ve let my dog play on it and her claws never came close to penetrating the material, which feels sort of like the material heavy-duty waterproof backpacks or wintersports/skiing jackets are made from.

On the downside, it’s not very good as a seat for an extended period.  The SumoSacs look a lot bigger, so maybe that wouldn’t be a problem there.  But the Omni doesn’t hold its shape quite well enough when one person is sitting on it.  After a few minutes, you’re basically sitting on the floor.  I’ve never really tried the upright/straddling positions the blonde girl on the website is doing though.  I’ve tried putting it up against a wall so that it is shaped kind of like a couch, but I didn’t find that very comfortable.  I’ve also tried folding it in half and sitting on it, but it felt like it wanted to unfold again.  The thing I’ve found it best for, actually, is if I want to lay on the floor and watch TV.  You can make one side of it into a pretty good pillow so your neck isn’t strained, and the rest stays comfy for a quite while (since your weight isn’t all focused on one spot when you’re laying down).

So, to make a conclusion: in my opinion, I don’t think the Omni is worth the price as a seat for an adult, but I can’t speak to any of the other bigger things they sell.

You may recall seeing this photo of a 2.5 L Coca-Cola bottle that I took in Mexico about six months ago:

You may even recall my caption: Why don’t they make the two-liter bottles look like this in America?

Well, now they do.  So I can say I CALLED IT!  Cue the balloons and ticker tape!

If you haven’t heard lately, YouTube will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6.  This is great.  I’m hoping more top-tier sites follow suit.  That is the only thing that is really going to force an upgrade on many users.  And more importantly, it might force more lazy IT departments to upgrade their users’ browsers (since many of them are locked out of better browsers).

Don’t get me wrong, Internet Explorer 6 was a great piece of software when it debuted, eight years ago.  I’m sure that 2009’s best browsers will be lacking many essential features in 2017’s internet.  Wow, 2017, that’s like a million years from now in internet years.

I finally got around to implementing a search feature on this site.  If you search for something in the bar over on the right side of the page, you’ll get a search over all the blog posts, photo, and photo albums on this site.

I did all this with the Zend Framework’s PHP implementation of Lucene.  It seems to give good results very quickly, although there are some issues I’m having that are either misunderstandings or outright bugs.  Or maybe it’s because I’ve been up till 4am fiddling with this thing.  Tomorrow I’ll try to simplify my scenario and see if I still get the same results... if not, then I guess I need to figure out where I’ve missed something.  I’ve found that the way you design a search index is quite a bit different from the way you work with a relational database, mainly because you intentionally denormalize data for the sake of faster searching, when you wouldn’t do that for a relational database (at least not until you found that some particular JOIN or something was a huge bottleneck).

Anyway, I need to get some sleep.  If you try out my search box and notice something particularly odd, let me know.  (Well, something other than the styling, which isn’t fully presentable yet.)  Most of the problems I’m having are with more advanced queries that aren’t working the way the documentation claims they should, but it shouldn’t be anything most users would ever see.

Update:  I figured out what was wrong, it was due to using the default query parser, when I needed to construct the query from APIs.  After writing my own query processor, all is well.  More info about the specific problem I was having can be found on this Stack Overflow question, which pointed me in the right direction.

So I mentioned in a post over two years ago that I was going to start reading The Chronicles Of Narnia.  Well I just finished them over Thanksgiving break, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

First of all, it didn’t take me two years to read them, I just read a lot of other stuff in between.  Especially after I finished The Silver Chair, I think it was over a year before I went back to the series.  I can easily say that it was my least favorite book in the series.

As Jonah mentioned in a comment on that post, the books were not written in the order in which the story takes place.  The Horse And His Boy and The Magician’s Nephew were written after The Silver Chair, but before The Last Battle, although the stories take place much earlier in the Narnia timeline.  I think The Magician’s Nephew needs to be read next-to-last to be properly appreciated.  There’s just too much in the story that you wouldn’t understand or appreciate if it was the first Narnia book you read.  Of people I’ve talked to who have read the series, they either didn’t like The Magician’s Nephew at all, or they liked it but only when they read the series for a second time.  I thought it was great, which is probably because I read it next-to-last.  Reading The Horse And His Boy where it is presented chronologically, however, is probably not going to detract from the story.

I will avoid spoilers even for this fifty-year-old book series (although, really, isn’t there a statute of limitations on spoilers?), but I have to say I was disappointed with the treatment of one character in particular.  Seriously, I think this character must have been named for a person who C.S. Lewis really liked when he started writing the books, but while he was writing the last book this person must have run over his dog, repeatedly.  The ultimate treatment of this character was just unnecessary.  In a way it reminded me of the gratuitous demise of Chef on South Park.  If you’ve read the books I’m sure you know who I’m referring to.

(Actually, I’m avoiding spoilers because Stephanie is reading the books now, so don’t leave any spoilers in the comments please!)

Now that the election is over, I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

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.”

For any who may care, my site now is now validated XHTML 1.0 Transitional.  I was gonna do strict, but it seemed a little too strict (no target attribute on an anchor tag?  What’s that all about?).  Oh well.  I wanted to make a very short post after my previous very long post, so... peace out homies.

Quick note to say that I’ve got RSS feeds for our blogs now.  If you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t care.  And if you do know, there’s a good chance you still don’t care.

Kip’s RSS feed
Steph’s RSS feed
Both blogs’ RSS feed

There will be links at the bottom of the page later, but for now you can use those.

Update
Upon learning of Firefox’s automatic live bookmark (very cool feature by the way), I retooled the RSS feed so that now there’s a feed for both blogs (as well as the original two).

Okay so this is the inaugural post for my blog. For those of you who may not be familiar with the “blog”, it is short for “weblog”. I’m still not sure if I’m gonna keep using the term on the site because it’s kind of seventh-grade-girl-ish. I might end up going with something more manly like “journal.”  Yeah, that’s much sexier. But that’s irrelevant really. The basic idea is that it’s kind of like a diary that anyone with access to the internet can read.

I don’t know how many people will actually read this with any regularity, but I’ll try to keep it updated for those who do. Plus this will give my website some regularly changing content.  I made this whole blogging script in about four hours, although it’s kind of crude right now.  I didn’t use any high-tech “databases” or “SQL queries” to do this, just PHP and ASCII text files.  Take that, America!  Right now functionality includes the following: print the posts from the last thirty days.  That’s about it.  Eventually I’ll have an archive browser, but I’ve got thirty days before that’ll be needed so I think we’re good.  More immediately important is some means of posting without writing a text file and uploading it.

I’m not sure how much I’ll end up writing here, since I’m normally not the type to share anything of importance with any but my closest of acquaintances, and even then with reluctance. But then again I don’t even know what I’ll talk about here. A lot of my life now revolves around work, and I’m scared to mention anything about work here since I signed an NDA and I’m legally prevented from discussing anything that could be considered a “company secret.” Not that I think anyone is going to read my posts and subsequently overthrow my company, but its best to be safe... I’m also not sure what kind of format this will end up taking.  I’m trying not to copy the design of Garrison’s log too much, but that’s going to be largely unavoidable.  But in my defense, he borrows from Penny-Arcade somewhat... at least that whole italicized-song-quote-at-the-end-of-the-post part...

I suppose that’s enough for a first post.