About Me

Sarah BrodwallI'm a 31 year old American expat living in Oslo, Norway, with my bulldog, Ada, and my husband, Johannes. My interests include interaction design, especially information architecture, philosophy of mind and ethics, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, feminism, yoga, fat acceptance, knitting, pottery, and cooking.

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Sarah Brodwall on Geeky Thoughts: I know it! You really are. :)…
Bethany on Geeky Thoughts: Hmm, being nerdy is neither good nor bad, IMO. I know nerds I like…
Sarah Brodwall on How’s this for an obscure bug?: Well, like we talked about, we need to plan some time for me to come…
Sarah Brodwall on Geeky Thoughts: The question is, really, do you think being nerdy is a good thing or a…
Bethany on Geeky Thoughts: Ahem, I shall try this again, since I apparently am so not-nerdy that I couldn’t…

22 October 2008

Geeky Thoughts

Three things, not necessarily in order of importance or interestingness:

  1. I have just placed an order on e-bay for what will be my first real pc mod, if putting an aftermarket GPU cooler into a system I built myself from stock parts is considered a pc mod, and I’m not sure it is. My 4870 is, not surprisingly, running hotter than is ideal, so I have ordered an Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev. 2 with the turbo module for it. I’m looking forward to getting back into the case.

  2. I am apparently nerdier than 99% of all people.


    I am nerdier than 99% of all people. Are you a nerd? Click here to find out!

    That’s saying a lot if “all people” is understood to mean “all people who have taken the test”, but then, we don’t really know how they’re calculating their statistics, do we? In any case, they’re not controlling for gender, so I figure I can be extra-proud of that score, given that I am a cisgendered female.

    On v2 of that test, they do control for gender:


    NerdTests.com says I'm a Cool Nerd Queen.  What are you?  Click here!

    Which leads me to my final point…

  3. I am very thankful to have learned about the internet at the point in time in my life when I did. I grew up around computers to the extent that I am very comfortable using them. The first time I remember using a computer in school was in first or second grade. I used them a lot in school and after school hours in the library from then on, and took my first “programming” class in seventh grade (in Apple BASIC, and thank you, Jared Housh, for teaching me all that fun sparkly stuff—perhaps it was you who set my feet upon on the path I walk today!). We got a computer at home in 1989 or so, a Tandy, and then I remember doing some gopher searches in the computer lab in high school, but it wasn’t until my first year of college that I really got seriously involved with computers.

    I am glad I had some time in my youth when I wasn’t connected to the ‘net intravenously, because if computers and the ‘net had been so omnipresent when I was growing up as they are today, I would never have managed to built the tenuous grip on the social world that grants me the “cool” part of that nerd rating above.

    And I would write more, but I’ve been up and on the computer for a huge number of hours now, and have promised my (internet-won) husband that I’d go to bed at the same time as he does tonight. :)

Posted at 2:39
80 Views - 4 Comments

15 October 2008

How’s this for an obscure bug?

Bugzilla@Mozilla Bug 442542: Position:absolute elements will not move when window is resized if a sibling contains float elements and a clear:both element

For once wacky CSS behavior is due to a browser bug and not a misunderstanding of the CSS spec (by me or the people writing the rendering engines).

Posted at 13:27
71 Views - 3 Comments

7 October 2008

Photos: Belfast Black Taxi Tour

Crumlin Courthouse

I’ve put up more photos from our summer vacation in the North of Ireland. Some are just from around Belfast; the ones from the Black Taxi tour we took are the most interesting of this newest lot.

Posted at 6:54
82 Views - 1 Comment

6 October 2008

Photos: Eleventh Night in Belfast

I’m finally getting around to sorting out the pictures from our summer vacation.

Eleventh Night Bonfire in Belfast

The ones we took on 11th night in Belfast are probably the most interesting.

Posted at 16:27
71 Views - No Comments