Darkoshi

A while back while squirting toothpaste onto my toothbrush, a tiny bit of it splashed into my eye (don't ask me how). It burned for a moment, then was ok.

A few weeks ago, while filing away some papers, the corner of one sheet of paper hit my eyeball (don't ask me how). It hurt like hell. Worrying that I've got a severe injury always makes it worse, too. I kept thinking that my eyeball must have gotten a paper-cut. After some minutes, I was able to look in a mirror (with difficulty) to verify there was (probably) no shard of paper still stuck in there. The eye kept tearing up, so I had to press a washcloth against it for a couple of hours to soak up the tears, as well as to block the ambient light which was painfully bright.

The incident with my eye happened 40 minutes before a scheduled Spectrum appointment, for my intermittent connectivity problem (which since that last appointment has not recurred, hurrah!) That was the 4th appointment for the same problem; the 3rd time was not the charm. I didn't want to cancel the appointment. So when the tech came, and for most of the time he was here, I kept holding the washcloth against my eye. The tech was unperturbed.

After a few hours the pain was mostly gone and my vision seemed normal. For the next few days, the eye ached only slightly and sporadically. Then it felt completely normal again.

Last week, toothpaste accidentally spritzed into my eye again. This time, it hurt quite bad, and continued to hurt badly for 10 to 15 minutes even after rinsing out my eye as well as I could. It was the same eye which had the paper-cut. Maybe the cut wasn't completely healed after all, and the toothpaste irritated it again. This in spite of it being the wintergreen-flavored toothpaste which is fairly mild. The peppermint and spearmint flavors are too strong for me; they make my mouth burn.

One of the pages I found while searching on "toothpaste in eye" mentioned that most toothpastes shouldn't be dangerous to the eye... except perhaps if it's one of the whitening kinds with silica, as those are more abrasive. I thought to myself, well I know mine doesn't have silica. I purposely don't buy that kind, because their whitening power comes from sanding off the outer layer of tooth enamel. I'm trying to increase my amount of tooth enamel, not decrease it.

But yesterday I happened to look at the ingredient list on the toothpaste tube. Surprisingly, the main inactive ingredient after water was "hydrated silica". I could have sworn it used to be calcium carbonate. Did they change the ingredients?

Then I remembered that I have a small box full of empty toothpaste tubes. They can't be put with the regular recyclables, but there's a place - TerraCycle that takes them for recycling, if I ever accumulate enough of them to make it worthwhile to send them.

So I checked the box, and found an older tube, which indeed has a slightly different ingredient list. Both the old and new tubes mention "whitening" on the front, but somehow I'd never paid attention to that.

(OLD) Inactive ingredients: glycerin, water, calcium carbonate, hydrated silica, xylitol, carrageenan, natural flavor (wintergreen oil and other natural flavor), sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium bicarbonate, zinc citrate.

(NEW) Inactive ingredients: water, hydrated silica, sorbitol, xylitol, glycerin, natural flavor (wintergreen oil and other natural flavor), sodium lauryl sulfate, zinc citrate, xanthan gum, titanium dioxide, carrageenan.

The Tom's of Maine (my toothpaste brand) website says:

In our Antiplaque Tartar Control & Whitening flavors, the hydrated silica we use is milled to produce a slightly larger particle size (an average particle size of 10 microns, versus 8 microns, on average, in our children's and Wintermint flavors). This makes it a better cleaner, so that it can help to remove stains that have formed on teeth.

So at least the silica in my toothpaste is small-sized. If it were only that, I might continue using it. But with this new propensity for splashing into my eye, I'll be looking for an alternative. (Is it unreasonable to think that brushing one's teeth or doing paperwork shouldn't require wearing safety goggles?) Now when I brush my teeth, I've started holding the tube at arm's length and pointing it away from me.

All About Whitening Toothpastes - has a chart comparing the abrasiveness of different brands of toothpaste.
Setting the record straight about toothpaste abrasivity - says there's no difference in tooth-wear, as long as the toothpaste is under 250 RDA. I don't quite believe that.

This is the 2nd night in a row my internet has gone down. Yesterday it was from about 12:30am to 1:07am. Today it was from 12:20am to 1:30am.

You might think that would be a good nudge to get me to go to bed a bit earlier than otherwise. But no, it leaves me too distraught to want to go to bed. I end up staying up even later than I might otherwise. I was in the middle of looking stuff up! How can I just drop everything and go to bed? Why isn't it working? Trying to see if rebooting the modem will fix it, etc. I hadn't even gotten to the point where I could relax by reading some LJ pages, before it went down.

Without the internet, I can't even play Words With Friends, like I sometimes do while brushing my teeth.
Without the internet, I can't even look up what the weather will be tomorrow, to decide what clothes I'll wear. Though I could have brought it up on my phone.

Pondering whether I should buy an external phone modem to use when the cable modem goes down... do ISPs even still have back-up dial-up modem numbers?
Pondering whether I should open accounts with both TWC and AT&T, just so that if one of them goes down, hopefully the other one would still be up. Bah, no. Are there any other affordable options?

I suppose I could get a cell phone plan with more data, and use that for backup.

Now that the internet is working again, reading reports from other people that it must have been a fairly widespread outage, and that their internet went out yesterday too, is soothing. It's not just me. It will get fixed. Hopefully it won't happen again tomorrow.

I put that outage website link in my phone so that I can at least check it if the house internet goes down again.

It's so easy nowadays with the internet to look up information and to share information with others.

When I was a kid, if I wanted an answer to a question, I'd have to ask people, or look it up in the encyclopedia or dictionary that we had at home, or go to a library and search through books. But even if you did all that, the answer might not be found.

That isn't to say that I spent much time as a child searching the library for answers to hard questions.

But still. Even if you had a whole library of books, where would you look up the answer to a question like, "Why do my shoes squeak and creak, and how can I make them stop?"

Sometimes you can figure out answers by yourself. In the past, when my shoes squeaked, it was usually due to friction between the tongue and the top of the shoe, or due to small holes in the sole. I found ways to prevent those noises.

This time, the culprit was neither the tongues nor the soles. Internet searching provided some answers I hadn't thought of. The foam layers on one of the insoles* were coming apart. So I glued them back together with silicon sealer. That fixed one of the squeaks. I also sprinkled talcum** powder under the insoles, and after a few repetitions, that got rid of most of the creaks. One of the creaks kept coming back, which I now suspect was due to a thick thread that was under the insole, perhaps letting air in. I trimmed the thread. For the time being, the squeaks and creaks are all gone. Yay.

*I originally thought that insoles are glued in, but in many cases they aren't, and you can simply pull them out.
**Corn starch didn't sound like a good idea, as it might get pasty when wet. Nor did I want my shoes to smell like baby powder. Luckily, I found that non-baby-scented talcum powder can be found in the pharmacy foot-care section. The one I got smells like wintergreen!

Anyway, I was thinking about the above, and also thinking about what will happen to that kind of data over time. People die. Then what happens to the data they've posted to the internet? If they had their own website domain, and if no one takes over paying the domain fees or web hosting provider fees after they die, their website will be gone. If they've posted data on other sites, then it will depend on how long those sites stay around. Websites are not permanent, and most will disappear or radically change over time. Some data may get archived on various sites. But the Internet Archive, for instance, while it has old webpages, isn't very searchable in the normal sense. Google's cache is sometimes useful, but I'm not sure how long Google maintains cached data, once the original websites are gone.

So the answers that I can find today while doing an internet search, may someday no longer be there to be found. Or may no longer be found in the same places. New people will have to post the answers in new places.

Another useful piece of info I found today is that if your Lotus Notes locks up for a long time whenever you paste rich text from a webpage into an email, check the Lotus Notes proxy settings. Make sure it doesn't list an old proxy server which is no longer valid.

The Consumerist : 30 Ways You Can Spot Fake Online Reviews (Apr 14, 2010)

The New York Times : A Rave, a Pan, or Just a Fake? (May 21, 2011)

Business Week : A Lie Detector Test for Online Reviewers (Sep 29, 2011)

Time : Now There’s Even More Reason to Distrust Online Reviews (Jan 27, 2012)

Time : 9 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Trust Online Reviews (Feb 3, 2012)

abc News : Yelp Outs Companies That Pay for Positive Reviews (Nov 19, 2012)

GeoCities went away in late 2009, but someone who should be commended went thru the effort of backing up what they could of the site. They made it available at ReoCities.com. If you have an old GeoCities link that doesn't work anymore, you can change the "g" to "r" in the URL, and see if the page is found.

Update:
www.geocities.ws is another such archive. To use this one, change the ".com" in the original GeoCities URL to ".ws".

Update 2:
oocities is another such archive. To use this one, try changing "geocities" to "oocities" in the original GeoCities URL.

Apparently some torrents also exist, of some parts of GeoCities. See this page for more info.


(Yay, I can now update the broken links on my website!)

I've noticed that when people reply to old threads in various forums, they are often admonished or ridiculed for doing so. For example, today I read a useful reply to a 3-year old thread, but someone subsequently responded to it with "Zombie Thread Alert!"

It's true that the person who originally created the thread or who originally asked the question, probably no longer needs the answer or information provided. However, those answers can be quite useful to other people like me, who are having the same problem/question, and who have found the thread through a search engine.

Is anyone else having problems with YouTube lately, with it doing a lot of pausing while playing back videos, while it buffers data? My download speed is good (~6.5 Mbps), so I'm wondering if it is a problem on the YouTube side.

Here is an amusing video about a button (I'm too lazy to figure out how to embed it in my own post). It made me LOL... I ought to feel so ashamed, but I don't.

This comic made me laugh too.

Hmmm... Not related to the above links, but I just realized that when other people post links using URL-shortening, such as ones crossposted from Twitter, I rarely feel much curiosity to click them. Not being able to see the actual URL or domain name makes me not want to click... I must like knowing where I'll be taken to, when I click. Or maybe it is that the URL that I see looks like gibberish, and that puts me off.

Now I need to shut up and stop posting things. Except I still wanted to post a picture....! Gah, maybe later.

It seems downright odd nowadays, if I do a websearch on a product and get absolutely no results found. I mean, how unlikely is it that a professionally-packaged product available in the United States would have no mention on the internet?

Someone gave Q a curious Halloween novelty candy. It is a clear plastic test tube filled with orange goo and candy gummy eyeballs. Another odd thing is that the label says that for Nutritional info, write to such and such address. It's a U.S. address. But no ingredients list nor web address is on the label. I was curious about the ingredients - it probably contains gelatin and is therefore non-vegan, but you never know. So I did a search on the product name and company - "gummy eye balls" + "imaginings". No results found! I did find out that Imaginings 3 is another name for Flix Candy. Flixcandy has a website showing their candy products, but these gummy eye balls are not included. A search on "flixcandy" + "gummy eye balls" also yields no results. The fact that I didn't find what I was looking for is no big deal. But the fact that no results were found is an oddity!


Addendum:
Now that I've posted this entry, if Google indexes it, there will no longer be no results found. Heheh.

Q's got a new Boost cellphone, and I've been looking up how to install Opera Mini on it like I did on mine.

I ran across a thread on tethering, which is connecting your cellphone to a computer and using it as a modem in order for the computer to connect to the internet. This is supposedly possible with Boost phones, and if you're paying for a plan which includes internet access, it might even be allowed by Boost's TOS - I found conflicting reports about it. I found a section in the TOS which seems relevant, but it isn't totally clear to me whether it disallows tethering or not, especially if you only use it once in a while, not as your main internet connection:

Specific Terms & Restrictions On Using Data Services
In addition to the rules for using all of our other Services, unless authorized by us, you can’t use our data Services: (1) with server devices or host computer applications, or other systems that drive continuous heavy traffic or data sessions; and (2) as a substitute or backup for private lines or frame relay connections. We reserve the right to limit, suspend or constrain any heavy, continuous data usage that adversely impacts our network performance or hinders access to our network.

Of course, the internet connection from Boost is rather slow. But hey, it could be better than nothing, right? And if for some reason using the browser on the phone doesn't suffice for something, being able to connect it to a laptop would be cool.

Opera 10 was recently released with a Turbo feature which speeds up browsing on slow connections by compressing the data that is sent to the browser. I think I'll try connecting my laptop to my phone, and try it out!