Tags: apps, filemanagement

Posted at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 12, 2007

Travelogue

Just a short note to let readers know that there's a new site section ready in advance of my trip to Italy this summer. Actually it is just a dressed up category archive, but well-dressed I must say. The Return to Barile subsite will collect all my posts on the homecoming (and there are many already queued). It also includes some background on the whole thing, an interactive map, and links to photos and such. These extras of course are only available on the site. Sorry, feedreaders! Obviously it will fill up quite a bit more as the trip nears and proceeds.

Enjoy: Return to Barile.

Tags: barile, italy, travelogue

Posted at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 6, 2007

29 bulbs

Today was the first day in months that my calendar had not a single colored box on it. Nothing. Zip. Not a single thing to do. A good thing, too, since I got home at 4:30 this morning after a day I wasn't sure I would live through.

Start with a friend's annual Kentucky Derby party early in the afternoon, add a Cubs home win (.500 baby!), season with Cinco de Mayo cheer and a frozen margarita machine, then cap off with a concert that started at 1 AM at the Metro. (Amon Tobin. Mixed live in 5.1 surround. Sick sick beats. My mouth was agape half the show.)

So needless to say I woke late, way late. Had lunch with my saintly wife and the three kids who she mercifully steered clear of me. (Mercy for them, I am sure. I was no role model.) Then, of course, nap time for all. So, essentially my day began at 3:30 PM today. And then I started to feel guilty about wasting a completely open day. You know, the guilt of a thousand to do's paired with an empty calendar.

Why not enjoy the free day, you say? Well, I did an inventory of home tasks and here's what the list read:

Rear screen door is permanently locked from a particularly hard wind-slam. We've removed the glass pane for exit, but my kids have biffed over the door frame so many times that it seems parentally negligent not to remove the whole thing from the threshold.

Grill on the deck is rotting from the inside-out. Not that we didn't cook dinner on it tonight, but it is a serious fire hazard. Basically it is no longer a grill. It is a open gas line where one may prop foodstuffs upon several layers of carbonized former foods for cooking.

Car with expired temporary tags and plates that simply need to be affixed. You'd think I would have gotten to this after the latest ticket. Sigh.

But here's the kicker. There are 29 burnt-out lights in this house. Yes, 29. Can bulbs, regular bulbs, vanity bulbs, chandelier bulbs, outdoor floods. This place is a like a medieval scriptorium.

How did it get to this point? Not entirely sure. I kinda exhausted myself inventorying all the burnt out bulbs so now I'm on the couch catching up on Lost episodes with thelovelywife. I guess it'll all have to wait until the next empty calendar day.

UPDATE: Wife reports that the oven light is burnt out. That should be nice and dangerous to replace. Total: 30.

Tags: home, lazy, tasks

Posted at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 13, 2007

Nano is the new micro

Long time readers of this blog (hello, you two) might remember the micropost. It was a little area for blurbs too small to be full posts. I discontinued it in June 2005 for the simple reason that it was too difficult. I had to edit the homepage Movable Type template each time.

But now comes Twitter, a service built around microposting or nanoblogging, as I like to call it. So, like the marginalia, music playlist, bookshelf, and photostream (all powered by sites elsewhere and excerpted here) the micropost now surfaces on the blog via Twitter. An experiment -- as everything on this blog is, but one that I think might have staying power because of the administrative simplicity.

Feed readers: the micropost lives in the upper right of the blog home page. For now it a little bonus for coming to the actual webpage (until Feedburner supports Twitter, that is). You can subscribe to the microposts separately, though.

For nostalgists here are all the microposts prior to me canning them the first time.

Wired loves this little stuff.

Tags: twitter

Posted at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 17, 2007

Spring dust-off

Except it isn't spring in these parts for about two more months.

For those of you who follow Ascent Stage in a feed reader, I have changed the blended feed for the main posts and marginalia to http://feeds.feedburner.com/AscentStage. This feed appends [del.icio.us] to all Marginalia links to ease the distress of clicking on a link only to learn it is merely a link and not a meaty post. You know who you are. The old feed should still work properly. And if you're not subscribing to the blended feed, why not? By the way, the margin links are not ads. They're other places in the tubosphere that I find interesting.

MediaLoom, that dinosaur project that I'm still rather fond of, has been moved into the Ascent Stage empire. Nostalgic for Macromedia Director and platform incompatibility? Click here!

Many busted links fixed. Not all, certainly. But many.

That is all.

Posted at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 15, 2007

Forward with backup

Is there any subject as thrilling as backup? Many-- nay, most -- in fact. But lately it seems like I spend at least as much time worrying about how to preserve my data as I do creating it.

I could create a rather interesting map mashup of all the places and ways my laptops have decided to crap out, so I'm more than normally concerned about comprehensive backup. But recently over the holidays I entered a whole new stratum of data management. I thought, gee, it would be nice finally to digitize all the family video we've had laying around since my first son was born in 2001. We've not been obsessive about videotaping family gatherings; we had only 20 tapes -- few full -- in six years. I thought, I'll just whip up a quick DVD as a stocking stuffer for the wife. Idiot me. A full week later of nearly nonstop chip-searing rendering I had produced five full DVD's of video. (And if I had heard another rendition of “Happy Birthday To You” I would have lost it.) It turned out well, though the data it produced was both priceless and ginormous.

So this added to a few of my backup needs, detailed here. Ideally I need to:

• Backup my main work laptop daily such that in the event of catastrophe I can boot from the backup image and resume work immediately.
• Backup two other essential machines in the house.
• Synchronize the main work laptop and a secondary work laptop. Oh, one is Mac OS the other is XP.
• Establish a schedule that includes local, accessible backup and offsite storage in the event of real catastrophe. (“Fire! Grab the kids ... and the drives!”)
• Deal with the a massive music library and new half-terabyte of digitized video -- offsite.

I've worked almost all of it out. For nightly backup I use SuperDuper! -- a great app -- to dump changes to a perfect image of my work laptop (a MacBook Pro) to an external, bootable Firewire drive.

The other machines in the house backup monthly to a networked Lacie drive.

I synchronize the MBP and ThinkPad using Apple's smart folders, just copying over files from a Modified Since Last Backup folder to the ThinkPad. If you've ever used iTunes smart playlists you know how easy this is to set up. I suppose I could create an Automator action to do this automatically too, now that I think of it.

The last two present the problem. And this where I need your help. All told I have about a half terabyte of data to backup offsite, in case the shit really hits the fan. Time was, I'd just burn DVD's and shuttle them to friends, family, or work. But I've surpassed the feasibility of burning DVD-R's, HD-DVD storage is a a very rare thing these days, and the feasibility of online storage is hampered by cost and upload bandwidth. You'll say, buy another external drive and move it offsite monthlyl! But I loathe to buy a fourth external drive in a calendar year. What to do?

The real problem is more philosophical. Backup to another device is relatively easy -- and it is where most backup people do (if at all) stops. But to be truly comprehensive about it you need your backups in two different physical locations. Things happen. Robbery, fire, flooding. And this is where I am stuck. Help me, won't you?

Tags: data, backup

Posted at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 27, 2006

Favorite posts of 2006

Lists. That's what the end of the year is about.

It was a slower year on Ascent Stage than last, but as I've said I think the quality went up a notch. As the primary (sometimes sole) reader of this blog, I offer you my favorite posts of 2006.

“Mama, I gotta make my guitar louder”
"Today one of my colleagues noted that he was going to devote the next few years of his life to becoming as young as Les Paul. To this Les, in a room full of academics and museum-types, leaned back on his chair and mimicked taking a long drag from a joint. This man is 90 years old."

City of the Dead
"On this gray day nearly every mausoleum was stained about four feet off the ground with the puke-green demarcation of high water — a grim reminder that most of the bodies of loved ones were submerged during the weeks before the floodwaters receded."

Turkish delight
"This is no massage. For one, you’re on hard marble. For another, these gentlemen are probably former interrogators from the Turkish military. Despite the presence of soap and a loofah glove the whole thing is like a wrestling match where you’re not allowed to fight back."

Scissorhands
"See, five blades does give a nice shave on the open fields of ones cheeks, but for actual styling or for navigating any kind of variance in facial topography it is simply too big. I have a goatee, so getting close in to the beard is key. If I don’t I look like a hick meth addict festooned with different lengths of hair around my mouth."

Regeneration
"Only a specialist could point to what is original to the hall’s 1406 construction and what parts are copies installed since. This happens in the West too, of course, but the difference as I’ve experienced it in China is that it doesn’t matter. The originality of the building is the idea of it, what it represents."

In which I offer a series of exciting thoughts about punctuation in the 21st century
"What it comes down to is only this: I am getting to the point where I don’t trust online writing that does not contain links. Just like you’re wary of the grocer who sells “apple’s” or the the writer whose sentences run on for miles without a period, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with writing that’s link-free."

Bathroom ethnography
"The Stall Jiggler - This is the guy who won’t take no for an answer when he encounters a locked stall door."

Urban scar tissue
"We were driving posts into the dirt for a fence on an irregular diagonal property border when we hit something solid that turned out to be a railroad tie. We later learned that the screwy lot line was the result of surface train tracks that once cut through the area, the remains of which we had dug up."

Culinary turntablism
"What would this meal sound like if the zhuan pan were a recording?"

The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time
"System design verges on science fiction here as we move through the implications of a community space that exists on different timelines. For example what happens to the field trip group when some of your classmates decide to peel off for the 16th century?"

How to create a LEGO mosaic
"My daughter was born a few weeks ago and so naturally I went back to the Brick-o-lizer to create her mosaic. Imagine my horror to find out that it isn’t available anymore. How could I deprive my baby girl of her LEGO mosaic? Well. Obviously. I couldn’t."

Zodiac desktops
"Not sure who first said 'wallpaper makes bad stationery,' but it was my guiding principle. Backgrounds need to be easy to work against, contrasting highly with the folders and files that live on it. Photos of children, hot rods, and (sigh) rocket ships generally don’t offer this."

Wired up in my capsule to the moon
"A few weeks ago I went back to the tanks armed with a heartrate monitor in addition to the waterproof iPod. In I went, on came the album, and the simple EKG started logging."

Ore consequences
"I struggle to list a hazard that this mine doesn’t contain so in the interest of having something to blog about I’ll here detail those that it does."

Nike plus iPod minus Nike
"But I hate Nike running shoes. I think most people hate Nike running shoes. Well, this sucks. It’s like … Nike is locking people in to proprietary hardware just like … Apple."

All it takes is one bad apple
"At one point in this process my wife asked nonchalantly 'Is there any possibility that this will kill us when we drink it?'"

When the metaverse is your town hall
"You just try corralling talented, curious, script-wielding colleagues in Second Life to serve as virtual extras. It is like arranging toddlers for a photo shoot. Everyone wants to show off their latest set of wings or ability to make it rain."

Party as a verb
"We were worried about the fire marshal and the ATF. The first because we invited way too many people and we don’t have a gigantic space. The second because, well, let’s just say the freeze-distillation of the homemade apple cider succeeded."

Tags: lists, faves

Posted at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 7, 2006

Terrible Twos

On Oct. 1 Ascent Stage turned two. True to form the blog is behaving like a toddler: less predictable, more prone to outbursts, and frankly stinkier.

But let's have a look at this objectively.

Since inception there have been 458 posts, but only 142 posts in its second year. Way behind year one pace. In fact, I'd have to exceed the number of posts year-to-date in the last two months of this year to equal last year.

There have been 303 comments to date. The most commented posts almost perfectly correspond to the most viewed pages (which makes sense). Here are the top three most visited pages:

How To Build a Lego Mosaic
Ascent Stage Home Page
Tonsiloliths

These three pages account for almost two-thirds of all content views. Even more striking is that the two actual posts minus the home page account for 44% of all site traffic. That's kinda depressing. Almost half of traffic for two lousy posts? Clearly Howto's and obscure medical phenomema are key to Google-derived traffic nirvana.

Rounding out the top ten, but far, far distant from the top three are:

The Genographic Project
The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time
Outlook Detox
The topic category Science/Tech
Nike plus iPod minus Nike
The topic category Music
Deprivation and Focus

Most of the top posts came from this year. Quality not quantity, baby. Strangely missing from the top ten is Satisfying Inconvenience, the most commented-on post ever.

I've posted 865 marginalia links on del.icio.us since inception. That, at least, exceeds one a day.

Browser stats:

Internet Explorer: 57%
Firefox: 34%
Safari: 7%

The IE numbers are dead on for the Internet average while Firefox is slightly higher than the norm. I guess I've pissed off Opera users somewhere along the way.

And the platform breakdown:

Windows: 85%
Mac: 14%
Linux: <1%

That's about 10% higher for Mac users than the Internet norm. Does this mean I'm cool?

Happy birthday, Ascent Stage.

Posted at 7:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 4, 2006

2.1

Blogchores. Nothing but blogchores on this Labor Day.

Some housekeeping notes:

• The main page has been tidied up a bit.
• Gone is the blogroll (it's not you, it's me).
• Search, feed subscriptions, and links to topics by date and by category live only on the archive page now.
• The photo sidebar now shows the five latest Flickr pics rather than a random one.
• The very bottom of the sidebar lists upcoming events, usually conferences I'll be attending.
• Comments no longer need approval. Taking a gamble on this one, but with spam mostly curbed (thanks to this) it'll be easier. Wish I could turn trackbacks back on, though. Sigh.
• Post titles in the title bar. I know, I know. Curb your urge to leap skyward in joy.
• Upgrade to Movable Type 3.32. This means virtually nothing to you, the reader, but it makes things a tad easier for me. Support for tags (about time), widgets (basically scriptable includes), and tighter external feed integration (promising but very 1.0) may lead to new functionality later on.

If you've made it this far, you clearly care way too much about my blog so ... I have a question for you (way down below). You know the marginalia links, yes? Well they are powered by del.icio.us. It couldn't be easier for me. But there are some drawbacks. The one that most irritates is that apostrophes (single quotes) get stripped out of the feed, presumably by the Javascript required to include it. Escaping the ' doesn't work. Using the numeric code for the ' does work but makes the actual entries on del.icio.us and associated RSS look awful. Sucking the feed in using MT's new feed integration doesn't include the link notes.

Witness the marginalia, denuded of the single quote (thrice)! Top is del.icio.us, bottom is the sidebar run through the Javascript shucker.

I can't abide this. Even the loss of one type of punctuation gets my dander up.

As I see it, I have three options.

1. Live with the lack of apostrophe, losing my footing on the slippery path that leads to complete punctutaion anarchy.
2. Use the del.icio.us blog function that posts recent additions once daily (like this). I don't like this so much because, well, because it only happens once daily.
3. Really drop the hammer by dumping del.icio.us and integrating links as quasi-posts right in the body, all Kottke remaindered links-like. The big advantage here is a more flexible format than linked title + short link-free description. But crap it is a lot of work to implement.

Thoughts?

Posted at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 9, 2006

Those who dwell in the gutter

Lots of travel these days which ironically provides the best blog material and the least time to write about it. More soon.

Since the time I have for composting the blogosphere is also a bit limited these days I've asked my pal Chris to man the marginalia link farm for a bit. Hope you enjoy his unique approach to agribusiness.

Posted at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 16, 2006

Get in here before we both starve!

In all the RSS retooling I forgot to mention that the original site feed (no comments, no marginalia) has changed. If you follow Ascent Stage in a newsreader and you want this feed please make sure to subscribe to http://www.ascentstage.com/atom.xml. All other feeds are at the bottom of the home page.

Posted at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 7, 2006

Feedbag

Turns out the new blog + marginalia feed was not updating. Should be fine now. Also, by popular request I have added a feed that contains blog posts plus reader comments. Happy feeding.

Posted at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 31, 2005

Two-Oh

It may not look like much, but Ascent Stage has undergone a major revision this past week. I only just got around to addressing the corrupt database issue from a while back and in the process took care of just about everything else that was bugging me about the site this whole year. So, in no particular order, here's what's new:

• Browse by Topic category is back from the dead (the corrupt db killed it).
• Browse by Date no longer sucks (as bad).
• Movable Type has been upgraded to 3.2 -- there are more features, of course, but the best is what seems to me to be faster rebuilds.
• Trackbacks are off for the time-being -- still searching for a way to prevent trackback spam as I have done with comments (which remain open). Ideas?
• There is now a merged RSS feed for the main blog and the marginalia, thanks to Feed Digest.
• My account at Last.fm, the site which catalogs my music played and powers the sidebar, has been upgraded. Those of you who listen to the streaming radio from Last.fm (which would be -- checking -- exactly no one to date) can expect it to be faster now.
• There is now an actual error page for 404 Not Found. It is not properly catching errors yet, but it does exist. See.
• There is now a consolidated Archives page as well as a single page listing every post to date.
• Site code has been cleaned and modularized. You care not at all, I know. But the general de-crufting makes me feel good.
• Search results and comment previewing are (finally) formatted properly.
• I am using Library Thing to catalog my recent reading in the sidebar. Eventually I'd like to write reviews for the books that end up in the margin, but for now I am still cataloging my library.
• For you usability folks, I've changed link colors slightly to better differentiate visited from unvisited.
• I added the now-standard RSS feed icon to denote subscribable feeds.
• Lots of other stuff that would bore you even more than the above, if that is possible.

There are some deep links that are broken still and I've not fully tested in IE or Safari, but for the most part the ship is seaworthy.

So, enough with the housekeeping. Time for 2006 content.

Posted at 1:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 10, 2005

Cleaning up the gutter

Quick note of thanks to Jeff for manning the marginalia links this past week. Good stuff. Just one question: how do you really feel about religion?

I've got a backlog of links to post so expect a dumping.

That is all.

Posted at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 2, 2005

Guests in the margin

An experiment in perspective for the next week, Ascent Stage will cede control of the margin links to Jeff Greer, fellow geek, avid connoisseur of web goodness, and pal. Hopefully he'll have some unique nuggets for us. Don't let my broad readership down, Greer.

By the way, if you're in a newsreader you'll need to subscribe to the marginalia feed seperately to see it.

Posted at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 14, 2005

More junk for your inbox

Those of you don't use newsreaders and who hate coming to the site only to find it looking exactly like it did last time you checked may be interested in the e-mail subscription option I've added at the very bottom of the page. For the exceptionally lazy, you can avoid scrolling and subscribe here.

Check your junk e-mail folder for my upcoming posts on Viagra, mortgage deals, brazen teen nymphomaniacs, and East African investment opportunities.

Posted at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 19, 2005

Please standby

Seems the blog's database is corrupt -- which has screwed up rebuilds, feeds, and search. Movable Type recommends upgrading to 3.2 and starting from a fresh db instance. Ugh.

So buckle up. It'll be a bit bumpy around here for a while.

Posted at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

Older blog entries

Talk about age discrimination. Older posts are the bane of blogs because (1) they virtually become invisible when they move off the home page and (2) they are the targets of almost all comment and trackback spam. And yet, and yet, we love them. We need to link back to them and bring them into more current discussions.

So, I appeal to you, blog readers, to help me with something that should be simple. I want to create an "Older Entries" link at the bottom of the home page that takes you back a few weeks sequentially so that you can continue reading after the cutoff point for posts on the main page. On these pages you could conceivably go "forward" again in time. I've seen this functionality on various blogs but I'm not sure how to do it in Movable Type. Gotta be a simple tag, archive template, or plugin, no?

Posted at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 1, 2005

Happy birthday, Ascent Stage!

Plink! One year ago today I added a single drop to the ocean of blogs. 255 posts and 397 sidebar links later I 'm still enjoying it. If reading this blog is 1/100^th as pleasurable as writing it then maybe the audience will come back for year two.

In honor of this milestone I'm performing a few upgrades which I'll roll out this week.

Thanks for reading, everybody!

Posted at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 27, 2005

More than marginally better

Quick housekeeping note. I'm no longer fetching the marginalia links sidebar via a third-party RSS reformater. Instead, the front page now pulls straight from my del.icio.us account. Del.icio.us calls these Linkrolls and they are mighty speedy. Recommended.

Posted at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 10, 2005

No one calls them microcomputers anymore either

Well the micropost experiment failed miserably. Culprit: time. Rather, lack thereof. I never got around to integrating microposting into the posting mechanism or the RSS feed/archives. So it was a manual process from start to finish. From now on all tiny posts will happen as regular blog entries. Better that way.

For the record, here are all the microposts to date.

++++++

My health club is promoting a kung fu class for three-year-olds. Short of an intro to electrical re-wiring I'm unable to think of a worse form of recreation for my child. Hee-yaa!

"Install a dashboard funtion which controls the speed of the wipers so that they keep time with the stereo." from Idea-A-Day

My son is having trouble eating a hot dog. Wife thinks fast. Carves top of frank into a cone. Slits ends, inserts potato chips as foils/stabilizers. Presents to son as as rocket ship. Fascinated, he eats the whole thing in between blast-off noises. Brilliant!

How hard is it to get NASA back on track? Perhaps it requires a rocket scientist.

Yearn for a simpler time, Lego block spacegeeks? Can’t stand specialized bricks that can only be used to build one damn thing? The Classic Space forum is for you (and me, obviously).

Today’s philosophically-profound spam: “Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.”

Last week I installed a great snippet of code for the input forms on this site and have not had a single piece of comment spam since. I’m in a bit of awe at this hack and wish there were one for trackbacks too. And no, I am not telling you what it is, you crazed Nigerian Viagra-addled Texas Hold ‘Em Freak.

What do you get when you mix a Kraftwerkian vocoder, disco grooves, and an earnest profusion of power chords? Why, Robot Rock, of course!

The WSJ has a great article on “Rock's Oldest Joke: Yelling 'Freebird!' In a Crowded Theater: For his part, Mr. Doughty suggests that musicians make a pact: Whenever anyone calls for "Freebird," play it in its entirety -- and if someone calls for it again, play it again. "That would put a stop to 'Freebird,' I think," he says. "It would be a bad couple of years, but it might be worth it."

iTunes as social icebreaker is an interesting idea. “Hi there, I noticed your taste in music is awful. May I buy you a drink?”

Note to person dumping the room service trays outside my door. If you are doing so out of compassion because you think I am hungry, thank you, but a knock would be helpful since I don't really care for half-day-soggy cereal. If you are doing so because you don't want it to clutter your slice of hallway, please stop. I have almost stepped into your breakfast wreckage twice now. Oh, and eat your strawberries or you'll get scurvy.

Fugitive Haiku
Poet-of-the-month
No background check required
Please keep the award.

The plural of the word 'mail' is simply 'mail' so why do people consider 'e-mails' the plural of 'e-mail'? This bugs me way more than it should.

There's a guy who works out at my health club who uses the pay phone every time he is there. But he also has a cell phone. I see him on it all the time. This can only mean one thing, right? He's having an affair. Has to be.

Note to interior designers. If we ask you to come over for a consultation on how to redesign/expand our home don't ask me if I really need all the computers I have on my desk. This will not win you business.

Naples, Italy is on the peninsula's southwest coast. Naples, Florida is on that peninsula's southwest coast. Is this a coincidence?

If one were not careful overhearing others' conversations in restaurants one could surmise that there is an entire stratum of society whose perception of Christianity is solely informed by The Da Vinci Code. This would be unfortunate.

I heard today that 6% of Americans have passports. Surely this will increase now that Canada requires a passport to cross the border, but good golly that seems suprisingly low. And I'm from the flyover states.

On a flight recently the pilot left the cockpit for coffee and a lav break, but not until a burly flight attendant -- the burliest they had around, that is -- positioned a metal drink cart perpendicular to the aisle as a rampart blocking access to the entire forward galley area. He just stood there with arms crossed glaring down the aisle. I'd never seen that before. You'd think a lockable door separating the main cabin from the cockpit/gallery/lavatory would do the trick, but clearly there are problems blocking passengers from emergency egress.

"Don't sweat the small stuff. And don't pet the sweaty stuff." Written on a Vancouver pub window.

"Yeehaw!" is not a foreign policy. Not new, but this bumper sticker made me laugh.

"You know it is spring in Chicago if you are cold at Wrigley Field. When you are no longer cold, it is summer." - LG

You don't have it this bad, but you can probably relate. Prepare to waste a good a good half-day.

Why have the voicemail menu options always recently changed? And why won't you tell me what has changed about them? Press 1 for recent changes. Would that be so bad?

Forgot this one on the friends-who-sell-stuff post. Actually, didn't know about it. High school pal Diana Jacklich (now Hamann) is the Wine Goddess. Quite an appellation.

One of my favorite authors, Steven Johnson, is on The Daily Show tonight talking about his new book Everything Bad Is Good For You, a piece of tinder that has the blogosphere alight.

Posted at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2005

Stabbed in the trackback

A while ago I installed a small script that disallows comments on this blog that are not actually typed in. That is, it looks for multiple keystrokes as opposed to one single dump of text -- the behavior of a spambot (or someone who copies-and-pastes comments wholesale). It has stopped 100% of the spam I used to deal with daily.

Alas, the scourge of trackback spam persists. Does anyone know of anything that will effectively block trackback spam? Ideally it too would be a keystroke-based defense, but anything that really works would do. I'd hate to have to shut off trackbacks as they are one of the most innovative things about blogs!

Help?

Posted at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 6, 2005

In the gutter

I've been messing around on the right side of the blog alot lately. Here's what's new.

I've felt the need for some way to post blurbs that either have no relevant link or don't warrant the focus of the main flow. Thus, the micropost. Right now it is updated manually, but I am looking to automate. Gotta be an MT sideblog plugin or something, right?

The marginalia section is a del.icio.us-powered link farm. I'm not quite done tagging the links themselves, but when I am that'll start all kinds of fun. Like this.

Recently played tunes comes courtesy of the excellent Audioscrobbler service. If you have not checked this out yet, do. Basically, you install plugins for your audio programs (iTunes, etc.) and everything you listen to is logged at Audioscrobbler. Over time the site develops a very nuanced profile of your musical tastes. But the real value is in the social functions. You develop musical "neighbors" and can track musical "friends". Best of all your profile powers a customized radio stream called last.fm. Personalization and social computing done so right.

Two sidenotes on this section. First, like the marginalia, the recently played list is just an RSS feed formatted and served by RSS Digest, which I recommend. But the shortest refresh period is 30 minutes for RSS Digest and this really is not quick enough for the playlog feed. So I am exploring the MTRSSfeed plugin to take one step out of the process. Anyone had any luck with this?

Second, while Audioscrobbler has plugins for iTunes and syncs up with the recently played tracks on your iPod there was no "plugin" for the Audiotron networked audio device, the component that supplies music to the rest of my house. Not tracking the Audiotron would have meant radically skewing my listening profile since the genres I listen to throughout the house differ substantially from what I listen to in front of my computer. But, as happens so often on the web, as soon as you need something, it appears. Kelly Felkins posted a Perl script called Atronscrobbler for doing precisely what I needed. Not only that, but he was kind enough to make code revisions on-the-fly to get it to work for me. The script runs on a computer and just polls the Audiotron and pushes updates to Audioscrobbler. Now, with the exception of the kids' music that is skewing my profile, I am completely covered. Anyone else have the Audiotron-Audioscrobbler combo going? If so, there's a group devoted to it now.

The recommended music section is mostly the same, except that links to the iTunes Music Store now contain my affiliate code. If you don't want Apple to make a micropayment to me for the referral then you can skip this. But why would you deprive me of these penny fractions? Note that, where possible, album info links to discogs.com. Also, I will link to un-DRM'ed files, if they exist, rather than to iTMS.

The outbound links section is redone and powered by Blogrolling. I'm not sure it is working entirely properly yet.

Lastly, the GeoURL badge links to this blog's neighbors in meatspace.

There are other minor updates, but that's the bulk of 'em. Thanks for reading.

See also: Marginalia

Posted at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

February 19, 2005

Marginalia

I've been searching for a sideblog to post quick links to. I kinda knew it would have something to do with del.icio.us, so when I stumbled upon Veen's recommendation to use it with the superbly simple RSS Digest I knew I had it. Check out the Marginalia column at right for updated niceties throughout the day.

Posted at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)