Kara’s Blog

I found this neat site, GameKnot, where you can play long term chess games against people. This appeals to me, because I can make moves at my convenience instead of setting to side an entire hour block of time or so and committing it to a chess game.

My username is tachyondecay. If you have an account, or you fancy yourself a chess player and want to sign up, challenge me to a…

If I look out my bedroom window, I can see spring arriving in the pond that used to be my backyard. The snow--which is actually now semi-frozen ice--and the ice proper beneath it is melting, flooding entire portions of my backyard. The end of a little ice age.

Bits of autumnal debris slowly raise themselves up from the muck: leaves and branches, planks of wood. Hey, look, a shovel. The meltwater flows around these objects,…

If you look on the sidebar of the homepage you may notice a shiny new blue box with a question in it. You Choose the answer to that question.

Yes, it's a poll. :arr: It is my latest pet project. Some of you may have noticed the abundant "ghost options" appearing in my other poll, powered by idioPoll. I was getting tired of this bug, so I decided to write a poll script myself when…

If you haven't seen it already, you need to watch Karl Fisch's Did You Know? presentation. My history teacher showed us the version by Scott McLeod (which removes the school-specific slides).

You can watch it on YouTube, and I encourage you to do so. It's quite impactful. At first glance they might seem just like statistics, but take a moment to just consider the ramifications of the statements. We have moved from a local…

As I continue to expand my boundaries of knowledge by reading and watching more books and movies, it occurs to me that there are some books/movies that are regarded as "classics" by culture, but that I've never had a chance to actually experience the whole way through. An example of this is It's A Wonderful Life--classic Christmas movie, but I guess because it's been played over and over on TV so much, I never…

:'(

That last scene between Rose and the Doctor was just so sad, but poignant. It wasn't the catharsis for which I was looking--not really--but it came close. I cried. I knew that the Doctor would run out of time before he could say it, but still, watching it happen.... Wow.

The Tenth Doctor is my favourite television character bar none now. At the beginning of season 2 I was worried, I'll admit, that David…

Vanilla Guestbook has long suffered from neglect on my part. Unfortunately, I've just been too busy to devote as much time as I would have liked to improving it. So I'm sure you'll be happy to learn that today marks the release of the next version of Vanilla Guestbook.

The coolest new feature, in my opinion, is the localisation support that I've added thanks to the gettext extension for PHP. Now, it would be even…

I never liked JavaScript. I find it awkward to use. Part of this is due to the fact that, because it's a client-side language, it depends on the user's browser to function, so it inherits the stigma of "results may vary". Moreover, error-handling has always been hit-and-miss. I find it hard to figure out where I'm going wrong, even with Console² running interference for me. So JavaScript and I have never really gotten…

I've already blogged about the indecency with which people have treated global warming. This is not a repeat, but an addendum.

Society loves to make a big deal out of issues that are silly and don't really matter, like gay marriage or what colour of underwear Britney Spears purchases. If we didn't draw so much attention to them, guess what: they wouldn't affect our lives that much. Yes, shocking.

I am sick and tired…

My brother, Brad, and I spent almost the entire day painting my room. It turned out wonderfully, and I'm very pleased with it--not only are the walls a different colour, but it gave me a chance to clean out my room and reorganise. ^_^ Of course, a lot of prep work went into the endeavor. I had to remove all of my stuffed animals from my room ... and I have a lot. They aren't…