paperclippy

A couple notes to WPF developers who use VS2008:

If you install the Windows SDK, it is likely that your XAML Intellisense will stop working. To fix it, you have to use regedit to change some special registry key to point to some special DLL. There's a webpage about this somewhere, google can find it for you.

Also, somewhere along the line I think the WPF Window VS2008 Template got changed. Instead of apps coming up with a Window that has SizeToContent set to WidthAndHeight, it now comes up set to Manual. This, of course, is not reflected in the designer, resulting in much time spent trying to figure out why my app comes up at some random size instead of the size it appears in the designer and should be based on how WPF sizes things. To change the template, rather than changing anything in the IDE or in preferences, you have to edit C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\WPF\1033\WPFWindow.zip. Of course that is the intuitively obvious way to change such a thing. *rolls eyes*

I <3 90's dance pop. So much so that when I investigated a song Pandora played me that I really really liked, I discovered it was a 1995 dance hit. (The song was "Baby Baby" by Corona.)

It is not only excellent music for parties, but also for coding and doing documentation.

So, this weekend I was feeling good enough to dig my violin out of the closet and give it a shot. It was woefully out of tune, and my bow needs to be rehaired (about half the hairs had fallen out), but still functional and no damage. I played for about 5-10 minutes, not long enough to do any more damage to my wrists.

Those 5-10 minutes were enough to show me that not playing in three years has really left me out of violin shape. :( I could feel the weak muscles in my wrist any time I used my third and fourth fingers, and shifting felt really awkward. On top of that I found that I was really out of tune (at least to my ears I was, I don't know how it would sound to someone with untrained ears). My high school violin teacher's voice was echoing in my head saying, "Use your fingertip ears, Jessica!!" I made it through a couple scales and an etude before putting it down.

Anyway, I waited two days after that session to make sure that my tendons and muscles didn't freak out, and they still feel okay. My new plan is to slowly work up. I'll work on scales for about 5-10 minutes every other day until it starts feeling comfortable again, then gradually up my time about 5 min/week or less and start etudes. Every day is probably pushing it for my wrists right now. Now the trick is to sort through my scale and etude books and figure out which ones I should be using. Any violinists out there want to make a recommendation? Here's what I have in my library:

• Sitt - Scale Studies (appendix to Schriadek's Scales)
  
• photocopies of some Dont stuff, I think 4-octave scales and arpeggios
  
• Trott - Melodious Double-Stops
  
• Mazas etudes
  
• Kreutzer - 42 Studies
  

I might also have Sevcik lying around here somewhere. I seem to remember that I started with Sitt and moved on to my photocopies, and that I started with Mazas and Trott and moved on to Kreutzer, but my memory isn't great. I think Sitt is all three-octave scales and arpeggios. I definitely think I should start with three octaves to avoid stressing my wrist, but maybe I should only start with two?

Anyway, I hope I can get back into good shape with my violin. This is the longest I've gone without playing since I started when I was six years old. Previous to this I'd only reduced my practicing during summer vacations.

Rules:
* Post 3 things you've done that you believe nobody else on your F-list has done.
* If anybody responds with "I've done that," add another thing.
* Encourage your friends to paste this into their own journal to list the unique things they've done.

My three things:
1) Cried because I thought my stuffed dogs didn't like me anymore -- when I was in college.
2) Got married at an organic dairy farm. :)
3) Got completely lost on the freeways of LA (ended up in Glendale while trying to get from Little Tokyo to the Valley) and found my way home again without asking anyone for directions (this was before cell phones were common).
3) Got stung by stepping on a dead bee.
3) Ate chicken esophagus (or trachea, I'm not sure), snake, frog, and pig's blood soup at the same meal. (We also had a Yangtze river fish and some more normal chicken.) For the record, I have also eaten chicken sternum.

from an LJ community, someone basically said "I don't know how to do X...I want do to X...lol?"

Apparently the latest definition of "lol" is "can you help me?"

This weekend, I . . .

• learned that Carter loves to swim, but hates baths
  
• had my car get sideswiped by a deer
  
• ate nearly half a dozen muffins in one sitting, proving to myself yet again that I have no restraint and need to get things in smaller quantities
  
• had a tick try to attach itself to me for the first time (it failed, I found it before it got hooked in, although I still don't know how it got in my shirt)
  
• wore a new summery dress (strapless and about knee-length) without being freezing cold
  
• had a nice family group-hug with Ben and Carter
  
• managed to do 8 wrist curls (flexor side) with a 3-lb weight without increased pain
  
• ate nearly 2500 calories in a single day without realizing that I was doing so (I felt like it had been a pretty healthy day! That just goes to show the damage a 500-cal bowl of ice cream can do). For the record this was not the same day that I ate all those muffins.
  
• pre-ordered Lynn Flewelling's new book and Jacqueline Carey's new book, plus the paperback editions of Sarah Monette's "The Mirador" and "A Companion to Wolves,"
  
• ordered the third book in the gay pirate romance series
  
• spent $40 at Half Price Books and came away with about 15 books, some of which are mint-condition hardcovers
  

Yay = CA supreme court says denying same-sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutional.

Stupid quote (from CNN article about the case) = "The government should promote and encourage strong families," said Glen Lavy of the Alliance Defense Fund. "The voters realize that defining marriage as one man and one woman is important because the government should not, by design, deny a child both a mother and father."

Someone please explain to me how allowing two people physically incapable of having a biological child together to get married denies a mother and father to anyone. Any child born of natural means (as opposed to grown in a test tube or cloned) by definition has a mother and a father. This quote wouldn't even apply to allowing gays to adopt. They're not denying the child a mother and father, they're allowing the child to have parents at all. People like this make me so angry!

Since I've been going to this new occupational therapist, I have learned a lot of exercises, stretches, and techniques that really seem to help with my wrist pain, so I thought I should share them with you. If you don't have RSI, some of these will help you avoid getting it in the future.

( worth taking a look if you have RSI or are trying to avoid it )

Okay, so I was going to give more detail on my last post, but I think I already hit the important points, so unless someone asks about anything specific I'll just leave it at that.

I am almost done with MFC at work. Yay! But of course I left the hardest task for last. :P

TripAdvisor.com put out their annual best places to visit list. I've been to an okay number of them (particularly the ones in the US and Asia), but here's a list of some I would like to go to:

• New Zealand
  
• Lake Louise (Alberta, Canada)
  
• Sedona, AZ
  
• London
  
• Barcelona
  
• Machu Picchu
  
• Hawaii
  
• Agra, India (Taj Mahal)
  
• Santiago, Chile
  
• Egypt
  
• Marrakech, Morocco
  

There are many more places I'd like to go, but those are all ones listed in the TripAdvisor guide.

While I was in the archaeology museum at UPenn, looking through the African and Polynesian artifacts, I was thinking how cool it would be to learn one language from each language group. One romance language, one germanic language, one polynesian language, etc. I suppose the place to start would be brushing up on my Japanese, and then probably trying to learn Spanish. If I could, I would learn the following languages:

• Spanish
  
• German
  
• Welsh or Gaelic
  
• Hawaiian
  
• Hebrew
  
• Russian
  
• Swahili
  
• Hindi
  
• Mandarin Chinese
  
• Malay
  
• Arabic
  
• Swedish
  
• French
  

and many more. At least I think I ought to be able to learn Spanish okay on my own (with the help of language CDs, TV, and textbooks). That would be the most useful one. Sometimes I really regret taking Latin in high school, despite how much I loved it.