This morning I ate my last bowl of Sierra Crunch Muesli. At least it was the last bowl to come from the enormous box of the stuff I bought at the end of May. If you were counting, it took me less than two months to polish off fifteen pounds of cereal. If you average that out, it comes to roughly four ounces of cereal a day. Really that's just not very impressive. I'll have to search for some even more remarkable feat of breakfast food consumption.

On the whole, the experience wasn't as silly or unbearable as I was expecting. I had to lug the big box of cereal out of the storage room every morning until we finally bought a Tupperware cereal storage container. But the cereal didn't go stale. It wasn't a waste of money. Well, actually, it probably was a waste of money because of the cost of the cereal relative to, say, oatmeal. But I ate every tasty morsel, and lived to tell the tale.

Today's random chain of web browsing brought a rather interesting, and surprisingly timely discovery.

It started at Wil Wheaton's blog. He mentioned last night that someone sent him an email pointing out that Wil is mentioned in, of all places, the Andy Warhol diaries. Warhol has an entry in his diary about watching Stand By Me, and specifically mentions the cute kid who grows up to be a writer (though he doesn't mention Wil by name). Pretty exciting.

I decided to look up the diaries, so I did a web search on "Andy Warhol Diaries". The first link I got was a page of quotes from the diaries. Sure enough, Wil's entry is there, on Wednesday, August 13th, 1986. But another entry intrigued me even more. Just a few paragraphs up was Wednesday, October 19th, 1983. It starts, "There were articles in the papers about the police arresting the 'Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll son' for being an imposter". Now, anyone who has seen Six Degrees of Separation will recognize the strong correlation with the plot of that movie; it's too close to be a coincidence. Sure enough, the author of the web page notes that this incident inspired the play that became the movie. (If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it; it will give you a whole new level of respect for Will Smith).

Holy cow! I had no idea that the events related in the movie were drawn from a true story. I had to find out more about the guy who became Paul in the movie. More web searching didn't help, so I tried IMDB. Looking at the 'trivia' section for Six Degrees, I found the following note: "The inspiration for Paul, David Hampton, died of AIDS on 18 July 2003". That's five days ago. More holy cow. Having his full name made him easy to find on the web. Here is some background on Hampton, including his attempts to sue the author of the play for a share of the profits. And here is one of many online copies of his obituary, courtesy of AP.

I don't use this site as a way to broadcast interesting links I found. And I don't use it to advertise the supposedly shameful fact that I read slashdot. Nevertheless, I'd like to direct your attention to this editorial from Linux Journal, which I found on slashdot. It rambles on a bit, but it manages to pay lip service to just about everything that's wrong in the United States with respect to intellectual property law, corporate control of legislation, media corporations, telecom companies (whoops -- more media corporations), and frivolous lawsuits. I mean really -- when did extortion become a valid business model? But don't get me started on SCO.

Incidentally, it's articles like this one that make slashdot worth reading. I don't actually read slashdot itself. I can barely tolerate the line noise that passes for English on their site. But as often as not they'll link to articles that really are interesting. I go there to find the links.

I'm happy to report that after just a couple of days of making do with ancient, gigantic glasses, I'm back in business with my original pair. A local optician worked a miracle and rendered my frames whole again. He drilled a hole at an oblique angle across the fracture in the bridge. Then, he joined the two halves with a screw and shaved the head off. Finally, a quick coating of black goop around the joint made them almost good as new! Close up, you can clearly see the blob of plastic added to the frames. But otherwise you wouldn't know they had been broken.

Needless to say, I'm quite pleased with the positive resolution to what might have been a catastrophe. I'm glad I didn't resort to crazy glue, which probably wouldn't have worked anyway and would have made it impossible for the optician to work his magic. Now this fix isn't going to add years to the life of the glasses, but they'll last me long enough to see an optometrist (I'm overdue anyway) and get a new pair.

The optician also showed me a rather stylish pair of prescription squash goggles. I tried to find prescription goggles on the west coast with no luck, so I'm thrilled to discover them here. I'm sure they'll go on my shopping list. Plus, they're cleverly designed to double as (not ugly!) sunglasses. Sounds like a good deal to me.

When I was but a 'tween, and I had recently started wearing glasses, I had an unfortunate habit of breaking them. I would tend to forget where on the ground I had put them, and then would tread on them later. Whoops. Eventually, I got more conscientious, and I was careful about where I left my glasses. Aside from a few truly accidental mishaps over the years (like being hit in the face with a ball during a solar eclipse, but that's another story), I've managed to keep my frames intact.

That's why I was so disappointed today. I removed my glasses to wipe them on my shirt and as I lowered them to my waist they snapped in two, right through the bridge of the nose. I say "snapped," though I think that's probably too aggressive a word for what actually happened. It's not as if there was a sudden shock or an unreasonable strain on the frames. It was more like the plastic equivalent of metal fatigue -- the middle of the bridge had gradually lost its integrity, and the two halves simply drooped away from each other ("Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, etc").

Witness the unfortunate result:

Well, I guess it's a sign. I mean, it might be a sign, but of course I can't read it from here. Time to see the optometrist. In the meantime I'm wearing my old glasses. Old as in ancient. Large frames that at one time were stylish (okay, no they weren't) but are now pitiable. These frames are larger than all the frames I've had since, put together. On the plus side, they're made out of that unbreakable bendy nylon stuff, so I don't expect them to break before I get a new pair. At least I hope they don't. Watch this space for a posting on "nylon fatigue."

As per my message from earlier today, I've implemented a new feature for this website: the Thingo Stagnometer(tm). The stagnometer provides immediate visual feedback on how long it's been since the last post -- as we approach thirty days of stagnation, all the text on the page slowly fades to invisibility. Of course, from my point of view the feature is more of a guiltometer. Ideally, you the reader should never see the stagnometer in action because the guilt of knowing that it's laying in wait should drive me to keep the site fresh. On the other hand, you may feel cheated if you were never be able to see the effect. If you want to see what the page would (will?) look like after n days of stagnation, you can use the URL http://thingo.net/?age=n to peek forward through the mists of time (the link in this case is set to show the site at 25 days).

As a technical note, to implement the stagnometer I simply changed my stylesheet (formerly style.css) from a static file into a CGI script. I wasn't sure that stylesheets could be scripts, though I suppose there's no reason why they shouldn't be. Anyway, it's something I haven't seen done before.

And in unrelated news, I noticed that the timestamps on entries were still keyed to Pacific time. I just changed that to Eastern. Do not attempt to adjust your thingo.

The longer I go without posting to thingo, the more likely it is that I'll receive an angry message from my most Avid Reader. Such an email arrived a week ago, which shows you how slow I am to post updates even in the face of irate customers threatening to cancel their subscriptions.

I've been thinking that it would be cool to modify the stylesheet for this site so that as the most recent post becomes increasingly dated, the text starts to fade to the background colour. Since I visit thingo at least once a day (to follow links to the other blogs I read), this should provide a visceral reminder that the site isn't getting the attention it deserves. Maybe I'll try sticking this new "feature" in for fun.

Of course, my explanation is that the outside world has once again intruded upon my attempts to keep thingo up to date. I went back to the west coast for a weekend in June to attend the commencement ceremony and be honoured for receiving my PhD last year. And my workload has been increasing -- teaching is getting busier in light of the upcoming end of term, and after that I'll have the first steps in the NSERC application process to consider. The good news is that it looks like I'm no longer scheduled to teach in the fall. The timing is good to get some research done and put together a strong NSERC application.

Stay tuned, Mr. Avid Reader. You have not been forgotten.