The Appointments

• Today, at 10:30, the optometrist, to get my eyes checked. New glasses will come later. Not covered by father's insurance, damn it.


• Monday, at 9:40, a visit to the doctor to take out the last of the dissolvable stitches in my ear which haven't yet come out. Covered by medicare, fortunately.


• Tuesday, at 8:40, a visit to the dentist to get three (possibly four) cavities filled in. Still covered by father's insurance, fortunately.

How to Add Blogrolls in LJ

The howto journal has a host of useful guides (organized as memories) on how to modify the appearance of your livejournal using overrides.

To add a sidebar, I used the information contained in this lesson on adding navigation links. This lesson contains information on how to piggyback multiple links onto the My Website link. To punctuate, use (br)--with <> brackets instead of ()--to start new lines. Use (p) and (/p)--again, with <> brackets instead of ()--to insert spaces.

The Optometrist's Judgements

Absent my glasses, I've got 20/400 vision. With the glasses I have now, I have 20/25 vision. So, needless to say, I need new glasses, with new lenses, in order to further my addiction to scholarship and reading, et cetera. The browsing should be interesting. Anyone have any preferred styles, or knowledge on what's trendy?

In other news, apparently I'm prone to spasms of the eyelid muscles, provoked whenever I see bright lights. This--at least in the form I have--is normal. My optometrist, who's taken care of my eyes since I was four, tells me that he's always seen me with this reflex whenever he shines a bright light in my face. This means two things:

• I can never be photographed directly, not when a flash is involved. Side profiles will be my lot. I hope my future biographers won't be disappointed.


• When I got in for laser eye surgery to remove my cataracts when I'm 69, I'll need to be sedated.

This seems too simple

200 OK - The request has succeeded.



You are easy going and unassuming, sometimes too
much so. You don't cause waves and are easy to
get along with.. probably because you prefer to
make everyone else happy before yourself. But
it doesn't matter, because people have a hard
time not liking you.


What's your HTTP Status Code?
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On Modifications

These will do for now.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On Space Colonies (Part 5)

Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 in this occasional series are also on-line.

***

The Dutch Republic of the 17th century probably qualifies as the first truly bourgeois state in Western history. By modern standards, to be sure, the Dutch Republic was extraordinarily narrow, oligarchic, and fundamentally unequal. To the Dutch Republic's contemporaries, though, the Republic was inclusive, pluralistic, and fundamentally egalitarian, to say nothing of being quite rich.

At the Dutch Republic's height in the mid-17th century, Dutch trading companies possessed two colonies which could be defined as colonies of European immigration, namely the New Netherlands (modern New York) and the Cape Province (at the time, southwestern South Africa). Neither colony thrived under Dutch rule, however: New Netherlands passed to England following its 1666 conquest and quickly became assimilated into the British North Atlantic colonial empire, while what settlement did occur in the Cape Province was incidental, a byproduct of the Dutch East India Company's concern with being able to restock its ships on the long sea route to Indonesia.

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