In an effort to finally figure out why I occassionally collapse and black-out, my doctor suggested that I had a heart monitor attached for 24 hours. This didn’t bother me too much.

When I turned up to have it fitted yesterday, it turns out it wasn’t a heart monitor he wanted fitted; it was a blood pressure monitor. This did bother me. A lot. I really don’t like having my blood pressure taken: restricting my arms, squeezing out my vains, making me lose feeling for a minute or two. It’s not my idea of fun. But, since it was supposedly in my own best interest, I got it attached.

Now, it’s fairly bad when a doctor takes your blood pressure. He can at least figure out how tight it’s supposed to get and get it done quickly. Apparently, machines can’t. It over-inflated almost every time, making sleeping quite difficult. Every hour (or every half hour before 10pm), it would switch on and try to cause my hand to burst. The experience was akin to having a Boa Constrictor attached to your arm; not entirely comfortable.

It’s off now. But I started thinking about the chances of it having found anything. Now, the fact that it kept waking me up last night means that my mathematical prowess is slightly off, but I reckon the chances of it actually picking up one of my crazy-fun-collapso-fits is 900 to 1. That’s not a horse I’d bet on.

From the tour diary of JetPlane Landing (no direct link due to the diary being opened in a new window – damn JavaScript):

I am learning more about cahir’s straight to video cop show. John Cutwire, a european immigrant and now LAPD detective, who doesn’t play by the rules. Renne, a french-canadian bloodhound, that saved Cutwire when he was climbing in the Alps visting the motherland. Noone knows where the motherland actually is. From that day forward they have been partners. Bob, is John Cutwires human partner. Nearly, every episode is about Bob either he’s getting kidnapped, framed, hurt or set-up. The stories are generally about revenge, or trying to prove Bob’s innoncence. Renne has an intense dislike for Bob (I haven’t worked out why yet). Its also important to note that although John Cutwire has a strong Noreweigan accent – his character demands that he be cast as an American, who then puts on the Norweigan accent.

Possibly the funniest idea for a TV show ever.

Recently, to solve a puzzle, I wrote a function in PHP that determines whether or not a given string is a palindrome. After a little work, it now works perfectly. It’s not case-sensitive, removes white-space and get’s rid of non-alphanumeric characters.

It’s been added to the Code archive and can be viewed directly.

I decided to clean out my “reading list” the other day. It’s a folder in my Bookmarks of stuff I want to read when I get the time. I deleted most of it before I thought of putting some of it here. So here’s part 1 of what was left, with a lot of other stuff I was looking at today:

• Apparently, if you manage to create a folder on windows called “aux” then you have to go through a whole bunch of instructions to get rid of them. Via Glish.
• Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and good writer, On Semantics and Markup – an interesting read from someone in his position,
• It seems that smiling leads to feeling better and not the other way around. Odd. (Link fixed).

Ok, that’s the lot for the day. More tomorrow.

Syndication, syndication, syndication is all I hear on the web these days. I’ve been providing an RSS 0.91 feed for this site from day one (I think), and now I’ve started supporting Aaron Swartz’s RSS 3.0 standard.

The RSS 3.0 feed for this site was pretty easy to make, all the necessary meta-data gets stored somewhere anyway.