Oh bugger 2: The foot of the problem

Those of you who've been reading this journal since the beginning know about the medical troubles I've had with my foot since "Splat Day" (March 10 1999, the day a San Jose woman T-boned me and my motorcycle on San Jose's Capitol Expressway in a full-size station wagon), and about how long it took to get the open pressure sore under my big toe healed.  (Loss of motion in my left ankle due to extensive scar tissue throughout my left foot and ankle threw all my weight onto my toes, and the tissue of my big toe broke down under the constant pressure.)  We finally cured that by fusing my toe at about a 25° up angle, which let the weight fall on the ball of my foot instead.

It is looking more and more as though there is a new fissure forming now under the ball of my foot.  The front of my foot has been feeling strange the past few days, sort of numb in a way that's not easy to describe, and my toes have been painful in general.  i don't knwo whether the two are connected, or whether the latter is due to the colder weather.

I am getting SO tired of this.  Does it never end?

Feature request, again

I think it's time for me to repeat, again, my feature request for an ability to edit comments.

Why?  Because right now, if you post a comment, then notice you made an error in your comment (a bad link, a typo, a bad HTML tag, an error in attribution, whatever), the only way you can fix it is to delete the comment and repost it.  Not only can this be awkward and time-consuming, but it really screws things up if someone has responded to your comment before you notice the error (or after you notice the error, but before you get it deleted and reposted).

Why not?  The most common argument I hear against this idea is, "Well, then people could go into their comments in an argument and change what they said."  In response to which, I make two observations:

• They can do that now, by deleting and reposting; if they can do it by editing, at least it won't screw up the whole thread.

• Users can already edit their posts after the event, to "change what they said".  Anyone care to explain to me why they think letting users do the same in their comments is somehow different?

Honestly, I really don't see a defensible downside to this, and it'd let people fix accidental errors in comments which they can't easily fix now.  So how about it?

Mixed success

The good news:  The CalComp graphics tablet is indeed ADB, and I've now been able to verify that it appears to be in perfect working order aside from the tip of the cordless stylus being badly worn down.  However, I only have Aldus IntelliDraw on the G3 Mac, and in the little playing I've done with it thus far, the main thing I've learned about IntelliDraw is that I utterly hate and despise it.

(To name just its two most egregious faults:  [1] tools cannot be persistently selected, so every fucking tool reverts to the goddamn selection bandbox after every action (read: every time you lift the stylus tip off the pad surface), which would make it utterly maddening to try to draw freehand with it, and [2] you effectively only get one control handle per B-spline point, and IntelliDraw doesn't even actually let you place the control points, which severely limits the ability to draw Bezier objects -- which is mainly what I wanted to be able to do with it.  Memo:  When I select a tool, I expect it to bloody well STAY selected until I select something else.)

Knowing those facts, though, and knowng that ADB-USB adapters exist, if I can get hold of such a thing I may be able to get the pad working on my Linux machine, where I have the Gimp.  Or maybe I can get my hands on a copy of Freehand for the Mac....

The bad news:  I thought I had a 1GB disk and a 4.3GB disk in the aforementioned G3 Mac, and two newer and cooler-running 9GB disks on my desk.  The 4.3GB disk isn't 100% reliable and doesn't always spin up (either it has a stiction problem, or it's drawing too much power for the Mac's power supply), so I was going to pull out both disks and replace them with one of the 9GB disks on my desk.  Only problem is, it turns out the 9GB disks on my desk are actually 4.3GB, and the unreliable 4.3GB disk in the Mac is actually a 9GB disk.  I could put both 4.3GB disks in the Mac, but (a) that defeats the goal of leaving only one disk in the Mac, and (b) I had plans to use one of the two disks on my desk in my Sparcstation LX when I reinstall it.  I could pull out the 1GB disk from the Mac and leave just the 9GB, if I trusted the 9GB disk; but given its demonstrated failures to spin up, I don't trust it as a boot disk.

Well, blarg.

Still, at least I now know the two ... er, 4.3GB disks are good.

Bad bank. No donut.

The Toronto Globe and Mail reported on Friday that Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has been faxing confidential information about hundreds of its customers to a scrapyard operator in West Virginia for more than three years, and he can't get them to stop.  The flood of FAX traffic has forced him to shut down one of his businesses by making the toll-free fax number he acquired for it unusable, for which he's sueing the bank in efforts to try to make them fix the problem.  CIBC's central office is apparently trying to blame him for the bank's error, while the CIBC branches sending the faxes tell him "Sod off, it's not our problem."