SDP: Try Out Sweet Home 3D

Sweet Home 3D is an interior design Java application for quickly choosing and placing furniture on a house 2D plan drawn by the end-user, with a 3D preview.

And it's free. The screenshots look impressive. It looks like a handy application for layouts of home furnishings. Right now, I use my employer-supplied AutoCAD just to get a bird's eye view of the floor plan.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sweethome3d/

Dermatillomania and Dermatophagia

I have a history of minor skin picking and biting.

When I was a young boy, I would go to bed at night and then grind the knuckle of my left index finger into something hard, such as part of my lovey, the corner of the pillowcase, or a button, zipper or seam of my pajama. The knuckle quickly developed a blister, which I chewed off during the day. Then, when that formed a scab, I'd pick and bite the scab. I kept that up for years, and it got nasty-looking, so I was always embarrassed by it and tried to hide it.

I'm having a flare-up of this again. It's the same knuckle, the same urge. But now that I know that it's part of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), I'm no longer embarrassed by it. In fact, I'm almost proud of it. When my wife and daughter ask about it, I just say, "That's just noives (nerves)."

As I type this and then pause to collect my thoughts, my knuckle finds its way to the seam of my jeans, at the inside of the knee, to grind some more. I put an adhesive bandage on it this morning to prevent myself from picking at it and biting it. It's really tempting to do that now, because there's a nice thick scab there just waiting to be picked.

I thought I had outgrown this behavior after growing up. But three years ago, when my mother went into the hospital for the last time, I started it up again. After she died, I stopped bothering with it, and it quickly healed.

This current bout started at the end of August, when my father-in-law went into the hospital, also for the last time. He passed away a couple of weeks ago.

So is this behavior somehow related to death?

Do you have a similar compulsion? If so, what seems to trigger it for you?

Wednesday Weigh-In 20100929

Wow, is it Wednesday, again, already? I guess so!

Waist = 38.0"
Height = 5' 9"

References:

1. Wikipedia BMI page
2. Tanita Scale with Body Fat monitor
3. Javascript must be enabled to view the data.

The Telegraph, The Typewriter and the Answering Machine

Obsolescence. The more quickly new gadgets become available, the more quickly older ones fall by the wayside.

Phone booths, and public telephones in general, are rare, if they still exist at all. Most people today carry a cellphone¹ or, more likely, a smartphone. They have no need of a wired telephone. And since these public telephones are expensive to maintain (and somewhat prone to vandalism) they are being removed.

As GPS devices become ubiquitous, folks have less need of road signs that identify street names. So you can expect to see less of them, too. No, they won't be removed the way pay phones are. But they'll fail to be replaced. They will disappear first along the old, smaller roads that only local drivers are likely to drive on, and that have been subjected to construction. It's probably the current norm in Massachusetts to leave out street signs -- at least that's how it seemed while I attempted to drive to the Great East Festival in May². In fact it was this trip that compelled me to buy a GPS³ -- something I swore I'd never do.

When we discovered that our answering machine was broken recently, I came up with my latest prediction for obsolescence -- the hanky. No, just kidding. I mean the answering machine, of course. Those same folks who sport cellphones are deciding to eliminate their land line phone service. And the fewer folks that have a land line, the fewer that need a telephone and answering machine. But of the two, the answering machine is more dispensable because you can subscribe to your telephone provider's answering service, which you need a telephone to use.

The answering machine that broke was one I bought in 1992. Back then I chose a model that used ordinary audio cassette tapes. That was because someone in the store pointed out that the cassette tape feature would be handy in the event someone were to dictate directions over the phone. I'd be able to just set the answering machine to record the directions, and then take the tape with me in the car and play it back on the car stereo as I drove. Considering how it was the cassette tape mechanism that broke, and that I never played back recordings in the car, perhaps it wasn't the best advice. On the other hand, I still have the first message that my wife left for me just before our very first date.

You can still find answering machines, of course, but the selection isn't what it was 18 years ago. There seem to be few standalone units, and my brief search didn't turn up any that recorded onto tape (not that I wanted one like that). But if you're hoping to be able to find an answering machine in twenty years, well, let's just say you should buy a few extra units now and stash them away.

Then again, answering machines, street signs and even the odd pay phone might always be with us. After all, decades ago many people predicted that computers would bring about the demise of paper. But as we know, we are still drowning in the stuff, especially around election time.

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¹ Everyone except me, that is.
² It might've only seemed that way because I put off buying new eyeglasses and couldn't see the signs.
³ Also, we were planning to drive to Washington DC, and I wasn't going to force my wife to pretend to read a map. It actually was helpful, or at least better than having no clue about which direction to take. And in DC, you definitely don't want to wind up on certain roads appearing to be lost.

Dave Barry on Cats

There are no Seeing Eye cats, of course, because the sole function of cats, in the Great Chain of Life, is to cause harm to human beings. The instant a cat figured out that the blind person would follow it whether it went, it would lead this person directly into whirling unshielded manufacturing equipment.

From Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes.

Dream: Dinosaur Head at the Dinner Theatre

I'm with my wife and daughter in a large plain room. We're seated at a table at one end of the room along with others at other tables. All the tables are up against the walls. Our table is the only one against this wall, and a window is set into the wall above us. The window opens into another room, a projector room. The floor appears to be bare concrete. We're here for entertainment, and the show is about to start.

An emcee strolls about the center of the room. He gestures toward our table and says, "Those folks are in for a real treat," insinuating that a lot of scary action will take place near our table. The theme of the show has something to do with sea monsters. My expectation is that the floor will become sea water, and we'll be able to see creatures coming up out of the water.

A large object thuds onto our table as if it came out of the window. It appears to be the head of a dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It's about the size of a pony's head, richly textured, and a sickly reddish-pink hue. It looks so real, too, since the skin seems torn where the head was severed from the body. From my vantage point, I can see a whitish, plastic, ribbed tube positioned from the floor to the underside of the table. It's right underneath the head, so I infer that the head will be electronically controlled and become animated through wires that pass through the tube. I suppose that it will be one of the "creatures" that rise up from the water.

At this point my wife and daughter show their nervousness by moving to another table against an adjacent wall. But I decide to stay at the table. Isn't this what we came to experience?

Revenge Against the Evil Eyeglass Scammers

I've had to wear eyeglasses since I was eleven years old. Back then I was afraid of the kind of teasing I'd get. As an adult, I finally have the self confidence and composure to not worry myself about such silly nonsense. Besides, who's going to laugh at my eyeglasses when they have my pot belly and gray hair to ridicule?

But as an adult I am afraid of the folks who sell eyeglasses. I feel their sole purpose is to profit heavily from my minor handicap. I don't know why I feel this way, unless it's the fact that they do not publish the price of any of their eyeglasses in their advertisements.

Why is it that I can figure out, in the comfort of my own home, how much I will spend on a bunch of bananas, but I have no idea what my next pair of glasses will cost? Whereas every week, three local supermarkets pay for circulars that show the prices for many items, the only kinds of advertisements I see for eyeglasses are those that promise savings of $100 or "Buy one and get a second pair for 50% off." These eyeglass advertisements are accompanied by large paragraphs of fine print that explain that the offer does not apply to certain brands, or children's glasses, or it excludes the cost of the lenses.

Naturally, after you go through the trouble of showing up in the store and selecting frames that look somewhat stylish, you find out that, A, the coupon does not apply, and, B, that the pair you picked out cost "only" $300, and C, that the special lightweight progressive lenses bring the total price up to $600.¹ This actually happened to me the last time I bought both frames and lenses from a local Lens Maker store. But luckily, although they did not accept my health insurance, they did offer 50% off to policyholders such as myself. I was still not happy, because I'm a cheapskate who believes that some wire and glass should not cost $300.

It was nearly as frightening and upsetting as when I bought my wife's engagement ring.

So when I got my latest prescription, I was relieved when the doctor said that my eyes changed only one step. Unfortunately he said that last year, too, and I put off getting new glasses back then. I can't read street signs (even when I can find them), so this time I resolved to get at least new lenses for my old frames.

But even getting just replacement lenses is expensive when they're scratch-resistant carbonate progressive lenses. So when I heard on the Clark Howard show that you can get a pair of prescription glasses online for only $8.00, I was very interested. He was talking about Zenni Optical.

Now I know that the local eyeglass provider is a professional that not only sells you glasses, but measures your eyes, adjusts the frames for proper fit, and, above all, tells you most sincerely how marvelous you look in them. I knew I could do without the flattery, and I was pretty sure that I could adjust a pair of mail-order wire-framed glasses myself. It was the measuring part that made me nervous.

You can't just look in the mirror and measure the distance between your own pupils. That's because you have to look at one pupil first to align the ruler to it. Then you have to look at the other pupil to read off the measurement. But in the process of looking at the other pupil, you've moved your eyes, and the ruler is no longer aligned to the first pupil. I could ask my wife to measure my pupils, but she gets physically ill from any activity that involves numbers. She could probably drive on an interstate if the exits were marked with letters or named after edible items: "Exit Bacon Cheeseburger, Right Lane, 1 mile."

So the need to have a pupil measurement was a deal breaker. Reluctant to give in, I carried the prescription around for a few more blurry weeks. I wondered if the Lens Maker store wrote my pupil measurement down in my records, and I could get a copy of it? But actually, they didn't do a good job of it because my two lenses were not aligned to my eyes -- I could see somewhat clearly through only one lens at a time. Maybe I could get my daughter to measure my pupils? No, although she's fine with numbers, I don't think she'd align the ruler properly.

But then I had a brilliant idea! I decided to use my existing pair of glasses as a measuring fixture! I cut a small Post It note in half, and placed the corner of one half on the right lens of my glasses while I was wearing them. I placed it such that the corner pointed to a distant object that I focused on. Then I did the same with the second half of the Post It. After making sure that both corners pointed to the distant object while I gazed at that object, I removed the glasses and measured the distance between the two corners. It was 60mm. Bingo! I was ready to order.

I called up the website and used the guide to help me find frames. I decided to get bifocals instead of progressive lenses -- they're cheaper, and they offer clear viewing over a wider lateral angle than progressive lenses (a fallback in case I screwed up the measurement). Not all frames are compatible with bifocals (or progressive lenses), so that limited my choices a bit. Also, I wanted wire frames so I could bend them easily. I wanted full rims, which are more durable than the rimless lenses that use a flimsy fishing line to hold the lenses. And I wanted them to look fairly good.

Thus I chose frames that cost about $27. With the lenses and two additional clip-on-like sunglass accessories, plus a spare pair of glasses fitted with single-vision lenses, my absolute total was just $72, which, at the local Lens Maker store would've entitled me to not even a single lens.

The order arrived three weeks after I placed it. I was a bit nervous, especially since I did not receive a confirmation e-mail, and the website promised typical delivery of two weeks. In fact, the order arrived on the day I decided to contact them. Nevertheless, I am happy with the bifocals. To adjust them I bent the ear piece to fit more closely behind my ear. And that was it!

If you're as tired as I am of getting ripped off by your local provider of eyeglasses, I would recommend that you buy your next pair online. But I offer some caveats. First, stick with wire frames that you can bend if you need to. Second, be prepared with a set of jeweler's screwdrivers and know how to use them. You will eventually need to snug a screw that holds the arm in place or even the lens in the rim, although I haven't had to do this yet. Three, don't depend on them if you need eyeglasses right away.

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¹ Or, in New York city, "six hundred friggin bucks."