Scott's Blog

From the blood tests it seems that I do have toxoplasmosis and have had it for a while, but the parasite has only attacked now. I've taken about 10 days of drugs which has it's own side effects (like insomnia). At night I get this nice purple color shift when I look at lights. Another neat thing is when I turn off the lights at night I see some activity still going on in the affected area (a little light show for 5 minutes). I'd say that the lesion has diminishing, although slowly. I can now see the tops of letters, but not quite enough to read comfortably with the right eye. My peripheral vision is unaffected but there's a big blind spot to the right and down of where by gaze would focus, and it makes things look sort of blurry when looking through both eyes. I think my brain is starting to get used to looking mostly through the left eye, and I can work pretty much normally. I'll be taking my drugs until the day or two after Christmas. I'm also off: sof...

About a week ago I noticed that right eye had a part of the vision 'missing'. I setup an appointment with my eye doctor the next day and it got worse. So bad that I can't read with my right eye anymore. I've since gone to a specialist and have started taking some drugs. There's a chance that it's Toxoplasmosis , which isn't great, but at least it's curable. There are no other effects besides the loss of vision (it's where I look, the peripheral vision is still ok).

There are some words in Portuguese that are odd to my English ears. puxe (pronounced "push"), means pull confuses the hell out of me when it's written on the door. pretende in means intend in English. entender means to understand . sex means Fri or sexta-feira. Every Friday it seems the elevator wants to have sex as it shows the date at the top. no means in or at . So the other day I saw " 1/2 preço no happy-hour " and it made me sad that there's no happy hour. meia means half, socks , and six . Apparently, the six comes from "half" a dozen. de 30 em 30 dias means every 30 days but to my mathematical mind 30/30 = 1, it should be every day. legal means legal and cool . But I would think that only lawyers think legal is cool. direito means right , but direto means straight ahead . Very confusing when someones giving instructions while driving. jóia means jewelry and great . Actually, this one does kinda make sense. If it meant B...

I was at a Google party and we were talking about our first computers etc. and got a big laugh when I admitted that I remembered the day we got the new DOS with subdirectories (i.e. mkdir). That would have been MS-DOS 2.0 in 1983, I was 16 years old then.

Content aware image sizing is a method of resizing an image horizontally or vertically by removing pixels. In the picture above we're resizing horizontally and the cyan line is the pixels that will be removed. What's even neater is you can give hints of what parts to preserve or which parts to preferencially remove. Watch the video it explains it all. Here's the research paper .

Looks like the Wii has finally outsold the XBox 360 in worldwide sales, despite the one year lead by Microsoft. Although my favorite site doesn't yet say that yet.

This model follows your cursor with her eyes and is very well done. So well done it's creepy .