BrockLi Soup

You should watch this video. Images safe for work, but you should probably wear headphones.

Awesome and sickening and the same time.

That’s my very definition of a “nerd.” It’s not that you’re into technology, or that you’re into, you know, whatever, American Idol. It’s that, whatever you’re into, you’re just obsessed with it…You could be a nerd for fashion.

Tom Merritt on TWiT 133

If there’s anything I like more than the Dukes of Hazzard, it’s The Apple Bros. cover of Good Ol’ Boys. Get it on 3hive.

Remember when I was complaining yesterday about the dock in 10.5.2? Well don’t I feel silly.

I guess I didn’t really bother looking for an answer, because 30 seconds on Google got me a forum thread about this very subject. To use the folder’s icon in the dock, you just need to remove it and re-add it to the dock, or switch it from folder view to stack view and back again. For some reason though, restarting the machine won’t do it (I tried that first, just in case).

And since I didn’t describe it well, this is what I had to start with:

And this is what I’ve got now:

The Finances icon was made for me by the lovely and talented Sarah Friedlander, and I made the Atheist icon using the same tool she did, Can Combine Icons.

Commenters at DCist have been reporting on the taxi strike that’s happening today, and it’s not pretty. For those of you living elsewhere, DC’s taxis operate on a zone system, so you pay based on how many zones your trip takes you through. Mayor Fenty has been pushing to get them on a meter, like every other city in the nation, but the drivers want none of it - at least partially because they can easily take unsuspecting tourists on winding, four-zone trips that could really be done by crossing only two zones.

Still, I’m all for worker’s rights and making a decent wage, so I supported the cabbies that wanted to stick to the zone system. But this is just ridiculous - making traffic even worse during rush hour is no way to win the sympathy of your customers. I can only imagine how much support they lost thanks to this stunt.

Update: Apparently I was misinformed. The zone fare is based on what zone you start in and end in, not how many you pass through. I don’t know who explained it that way to me, or (in retrospect) why I bought it, but that really wouldn’t make much sense, would it?

MacTipcs .org has an article about the new Stacks features that came with the latest update to OS X. The big thing everyone has been talking about is the ability to display a folder as a folder when you’ve got it in your dock. Up until now, a lot of people have been using the method explained here: basically, put an icon file in the folder you’re going to put in the dock, and it will appear at the front of the stack.

Now, the folders in the dock will actually look like folders. This is a start, but it would be a lot better if they actually used the folder’s icon. For example, I’ve got two folders in my dock: Atheism and Finances. I want icons for each dock item to make it clear which is which - an X icon (or something else) for Atheism, and a dollar symbol for Finances. I was accomplishing this by dropping icons in those folders so that they would appear at the top of the stack, but it’s not an ideal solution. Now that the dock can display these as folders, I would rather use that for consistency.

The problem is that they just look like folders in the dock. I mean, in a perfect world, the Finances folder would have a dollar symbol on it, just like the Applications, Documents, Music, and other folders in OS X have icons to denote what they’re for. So I put an icon on the Finances folder, but alas, the icon isn’t used in the dock; it’s still just a boring folder. Everything else in the dock has the right icon - why not my stack folders?

It’s been a couple months now since Erin pointed out that I may well have Obsessive-compulsive Disorder.

I don’t even know what we were talking about, but I must have mentioned that my mom used to joke that I was OCD - when I was a kid, I would wash my hands all the time. I wasn’t the type that would scrub them incessantly; I just felt like I needed to rinse them off after touching…well, almost anything: the dog, doorknobs, any kind of food - anything.

The problem is that I really don’t know much about OCD. About a decade ago, I read a Reader’s Digest article about a teenage kid that exercised constantly, and there’s a Scrubs episode where Michael J. Fox plays an OCD surgeon, but that’s about all I know of it. Of course, I had never really given it any thought. I don’t know much about mental illness, but it seems that there are a lot more people dealing with mild, manageable forms of illnesses than those who can’t function normally. It makes sense that OCD doesn’t necessarily mean counting steps and touching everything in the room; I don’t know why it never occurred to me that there are probably thousands of people that deal with mild forms of it.

Erin has a little more experience in this than I do. She was diagnosed with OCD when she was a teenager, and took drugs for it for a few years. When she described her symptoms, I started to think she might be right about me having it. The thing is, I don’t know how other people think; it’s just not possible. Until she pointed it out, I just assumed that everybody would get songs and phrases stuck in their head for days at a time. I did some reading online, and WebMD gave me a pretty good list that made her case even stronger.

Here’s what I got:

• Songs stuck in my head: Not whole songs, just a part. Not even songs, necessarily - sometimes, I hear an interesting phrase, and that gets stuck in my head. And I don’t mean that I’m humming a jingle all afternoon, I mean I’m singing two lines of a song for hours (if not days) at a time.
• Hand washing: I still do this more than most people, but less than I did as a kid.
• Spitting: I don’t know if this one counts, but I spit into the sink almost every time I wash my hands. Kind of gross, I know.
• Nail biting: Might just be a nervous habit, but I’ve been doing it since I was like six and I have been completely unable to stop.
• Replaying/rehearsing conversation: After a lot of conversations, I replay parts of it in my head dozens of times, agonizing over things I may has misspoken about, or points I should have made. I also rehearse conversations the same way. Same goes for e-mails and blog posts: if it occurs to me that I’ve got an e-mail to write, or a blog post I want to make, I keep writing and re-wording it in my head until I can get to a computer and type it up.
• Compulsion to document my life: I always feel like I need to track things happening in my life, for reference later. I’ve been tracking movies I watch for a few years. I’ve also been trying to figure out some kind of life tracking web application for a long time, to track people I know, books I read, movies I see, events I go to, trips I take - everything. I feel like I need to be able to look things up later on to see what I did with who and when. I already track some of this in a wiki on my laptop, but I want an easier way to add and link things.
• Runaway imagination: I have a habit of considering the worst case scenario, and then letting my imagination run wild with it. In the five and a half months we’ve been together, I’ve imagined Erin dumping me at least a dozen times. Before we moved in together, Erin lived in a row house, and one night I had myself entirely convinced that the old-house noises were zombies in the attic. And every time I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I expect to find a demon staring back at me when I open the door. I know it’s completely and utterly ridiculous, but the image just gets more and more horrible in my mind until I open the door and see, just as I suspected, that nothing is there (except for the time that Erin WAS there and scared the Christ out of me).

I still don’t know if I actually have OCD. I haven’t talked to a doctor, and like I said, I have no idea how other people think, so I can’t tell if any of this is “normal.” I did mention it to my mom and learned that there are other folks with OCD in my family, so she wasn’t entirely joking back when I was a hand-washing kid.

Whether I do have OCD or not, I still haven’t figured out what to do with this information. I was actually literally speechless when Erin first told me, and I haven’t made it much further than that. If anything, I’m more conscious of it, and because I think about it more, it seems like it happens more.

Anyway, I don’t have a good reason for posting this. I doubt that I’ll bother seeing a doctor about it or anything; I mean, I’m obviously getting by, but Erin claims that the difference was incredible when she started taking meds for it. I suppose I’m kind of hoping that other people will chime in with their take on the matter, because I’m curious if anyone else knows what I’m talking about.

Wow, Ben Stein has lost it. He has a new documentary coming out about intelligent design and the way it’s cast aside among real scientists…and how that’s a bad thing. Watch the trailer:

If that’s not enough, there’s a blog, too.