Wow. I really don’t update this thing much these days. I blame two things: general business at home and Facebook. It’s interesting, in a way, how Facebook has sapped the “will to blog” by providing a channel to constantly emit little bits of opinion here and there, acting much like a pressure cooker regulator- and lessening the perceived need to publish larger amounts here.

An additional consideration is that I know my boss reads this blog (hi, Steve!), so I’m not completely comfortable with some of the more cutting remarks I might make about the office, even though the chance of negative repercussions is probably not high. But then, sometimes I just feel that perhaps this blog has run its course, that there’s no more steam left in the boiler. I don’t know. We’ll see.

The first thing the cats did after they woke up this morning was to jump up on the bed and settle down for a nap. Their languid demeanor and slow, comfortable stretches were evocative of a sort of whole-body yawn, and flickers of regret for leaving the cozy confines of the covers briefly ran through my mind.

As the cats settled in for another long period of inaction, I thought about yawning- in particular, how contagious it is. You know the drill; someone next to you yawns and you can’t help but repeat it. While I didn’t see either cat yawn as it curled up for its snooze, they certainly do yawn voluminously when it suits them. But is a yawn transmissible between species? Maybe I should confine myself to bed today (regretfully ignoring the day’s chores) in order to observe the potential behavior firsthand.

Driving home in the dusk on a lonely country road, having abandoned the clogged freeway that is my normal route, I was suddenly gripped by the urge to just keep driving. No destination, no goal, other than to keep moving, to hear the tires sing over another mile of unfamiliar road, following the dotted line forever, just to see where it would take me.

I passed farmhouses and silent rail crossings, empty fields and misty canals. It was at once melancholy and hopeful; mundane, yet profound. Despite the curious sense of mysticism it aroused, I nonetheless slowly drifted out of my reverie and dead-reckoned my way back home, wondering exactly where I’d been.

Where does that road go?

For the past few months now, every morning I wake up to find edge of the bed’s fitted sheet pulled up, and my pillows lolling halfway out of their covers. I haven’t the foggiest idea what’s going on, other than I’m apparently spinning like a dervish in the middle of the night. The way everything is all bunched up, I’m surprised I don’t wake up dizzy. It’s weird; I wonder if it means anything.

You know those Flash banner ads? The ones that feature silhouettes of dancing girls hawking mortgage refinancing? Or popups that play audio? Or the classier but mildly bandwidth-hogging corporate videos? While I appreciate that advertising is paying for content creation, it doesn’t erase the fact that a lot of Flash content is really annoying- and it can measurably delay pageload times on my crappy home DSL connection.

But then a colleague at the University turned me on to ClickToFlash, a Safari plugin that not only automatically disables the loading of flash content, it comes with this added little bonus: being able to load H.264 content from YouTube that is normally only sent to iPhone users, while us poor non-mobile Luddites are stuck with much crappier video quality. But no more, thanks to this handy plugin. I’ve been using this thing for a couple of weeks now and love it. If you’re a Safari user, install this bad boy without delay!