At the Charity Ball

Yesterday we were at the MUSC Charity Ball, one of those fund raising events put on by a student organization where everyone gets to dress up and look all spiffy. Lots of students and faculty show up to have a good time and showing off their dressy duds.

Since the wife is part of the group that puts the event on, attendance for me is kind of mandatory. It’s a nice event though, and a chance for people to see how really dressed up everyone else can get. It also means I usually end up being one of the helpers at the end too. Generally, whatever organization the wife ends up joining, they usually end up getting a two-fer deal out of us. It’s fun though, and I get to walk around taking lots of pictures. There were a few interesting things that we put bids on, but other people ended up outbidding us on them.

There’s also a silent auction (the fundraising portion) that goes along with the charity ball that the students work hard at putting together. Lots of donations from local businesses are solicited and put up for auction. The money raised helps fund various student-run programs like the CARES clinic.

The end of the evening ends up being a little hectic with people lining up to pay for and collect the items they won, and people running back and forth brining things up to the front table (that’s usually where I pitch in and help out a bit). It’s all fairly well organized though and goes pretty smoothly for the most part. Anything that’s left over at the end of the night are collected and carted back to campus so that people can come by to get their items later.

Looked like everybody had a good time at this year’s event again.

Dust bunnies beware!

After Roomba died, we were stuck with using the old vacuum again (over there on the left). Does a reasonably decent job for being a 10 year old vacuum. We were going to get another Roomba, but then the wife decided she wanted a Dyson. And not just any Dyson either. We were going to get a Dyson Ball.

Old red Eureka Powerline vacuum on the left standing next to the new purple Dyson DC15 Animal Ball on the right.

After some reading and research, we decided to get the Animal variant, partly because of the extra attachments it comes with, and partly because of the cool purple colour.

The wife got to use it first, and after seeing the pictures of what came out of the carpet, I’m sold. Now admitedly, it had been a while since our last vacuuming so that was probably a few weeks worth of dust build up. Still, I don’t think it’s anywhere near what our old vacuum would have sucked up.

The Dyson is a bit on the heavy side, but actually surprisingly easy to move around. It’s also a lot quieter than I expected. I used it a little bit last night to vacuum along the baseboards with the mini-turbine head. The hose is nice and long, although it becomes a little bit cumbersome moving around with the rest of the vacuum dragging behind. The telescoping wand is reasonably thin, and the crevice tool allows me to get into places that our old vacuum wouldn’t (it had a larger diameter hose). I was finally able to get to those clumps of dog hair towards the back of the fridge!

I imagine the house will be pretty clean with the new Dyson (at least for the next few weeks until the novelty factor wears off).

A good 404

Got a laugh out of this one. Marvin meets httpd.

http://www.bac.ro/txts/ftp.txt

Found via Blogus Maximus

Going for 7

I’ve discovered that it really is possible to rack up 7 blood donations in one year if you time it right. I’m about to head off for #2 so far this year. As long as I don’t manage to skip more than a couple of weeks, I’ll be making 7 donations this year. Here’s my schedule:

  1. Jan 3
  2. Feb 28
  3. Apr 25
  4. Jun 20
  5. Aug 15
  6. Oct 10
  7. Dec 5

Cool.

Ok, your turn.

Firefox not so <strong>?

I haven’t had the chance to test things extensively yet, but the last few Firefox nightly builds (currently using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060227 Firefox/1.6a1 ID:2006022704) just haven’t been behaving properly.

For one, <strong> and <b> tags don’t seem to be rendering at all. Let’s test.

This is inside <strong> tags. This isn’t.

This is inside <b> tags. This isn’t.

This is a level 3 header

A quick look in IE shows things being rendered properly, but except for the H3 line, none of the strong or bold text gets rendered in this build of Firefox.

Here’s a screen shot of what it looks like in IE:

Bold and strong properly rendered in IE

But in Firefox, this is what it looks like:

No bold or strong in FF

Also, in text areas the cursor seems to advance a little further than it should as text is entered so that after a little bit of typing, the cursor winds up being a few character widths ahead of where characters are actually being typed.

As I said, I haven’t done any extensive testing on this yet. Haven’t gotten around to testing on other machines or other browsers to see if it’s just this installation or this particular nightly build. A quick search of Mozilla’s Bugzilla revealed this bug that was filed last July.

Perhaps I should head off and go file a couple of bug reports. Feel free to chime in and let me know what you see.

Update: Of course, now that I’ve gone and commented on that bug and attached some screenshots, I download and install the latest nightly (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060228 Firefox/1.6a1 ID:2006022804) and discover it seems to have fixed the bold and strong rendering issues. I suppose checking the latest nightly should have been the first thing I did.