BMI (Body Mass Index) is widely relied upon as an indicator of cardiovascular health. It is thrown off at both extremes by subjects with lean, muscular physique as well as subjects with marked bone and muscle mass loss. The most truly reliable measure of body composition (fat vs. lean mass) is hydrostatic, but how many people have access to a water tank equipped with a hydrostatic scale? Certainly no gym nor doctor's office that I've ever visited. So simplicity is important, and while the BMI is not exa... (...more)

2 scoops of yerba maté in my french press, instead my usual coffee, turned into sleeplessness past 3AM. Somehow I still woke in time to start fairly timely recovery following a hardware migration we were never warned about. It's kind of insane that I have to fix the nameserver IP addresses for each domain individually with the registrar, and then all the IP bindings for each domain's DNS profile in the hosting control panel, and then wait some random amount of time (which the registrar says could... (...more)

Led my first battle with Order of Azeron into the wee hours last night, so I blew off church this morning. So slowly that it snuck up on me, Castle Age blossomed, from basically a heroic-fantasy-themed rip-off of Mafia Wars, into a rather complex and lively MMORPG. I used to say that FFXI would have to be my last MMORPG unless I hit the lottery. Mafia Wars, Farmville et al. all eventually pissed me off or just got boring, but CA managed to make a liar of me. No question that CA is an MMO, of course. I h... (...more)

After all my wrestling with jQuery's "promise" interface - which, for all my wrestling, is STILL rather alien - after rewriting my collision-avoidance logic in jqXHR terms, I still wasn't getting data back from the second PHP middleware resource. Then I changed the way that script returned its results, from return $reply; to die($reply); ... Yeah, that fixed it. Now, the jQuery autodidaction wasn't a total waste, of course, because there are still plenty of instances where you need to make ... (...more)

I admit, I'm a box wine convert. Thought I was picking up a 3L box of Franzia merlot, didn't realize til I got it home that I'd grabbed a box of burgundy instead. ~$2 more, rather nicer for what it is than their merlot... but I don't buy box wine for teh flava. If that was what the hokey pokey was all about at this stage of my life, I'd roll with Sutter Home, Barefoot or higher-brow wineries. Remaining weekend budget went to a six of Woodchuck Dark and Dry 802. Still had a cup of blenderized chickpeas l... (...more)