Posts

Some of my friends (Katie and Dana) use free blogging services, namely, LiveJournal and Blogger/Blogspot respectively. I personally went straight to Movable Type and then WordPress hosted on my own domain. Of those two choices I’d tend to go with Blogger. It’s owned by Google now, so there’s plenty of growth potential. Probably the main reason would be that I actually dislike LiveJournal because: it’s slow, its themes are applied only to the front page (comment pages are the horrendous style of the rest of the site), it’s slow, you are forced into a long address (even blogspot gives you a subdomain), it’s slow, everyone and their brother has an account there so you’re forced into an obscure AIM screename-ish username, and did I mention it’s slow? Yeah. I don’t like LiveJournal… at all… in any way… shape… or form.

I love when I get mentioned in other people’s blogs. In particular, when it’s a sexy context as at Dana’s blog.

The WordPress Development Blog has been updated with information about WordPress 1.3. It looks like they’ve been making some great strides and good improvements, but consipicuously absent from their goal list is per-post formatting support. This makes me very sad.

Some may have noticed the Blog Change Bot button I added to the sidebar some time ago. It was part of an experiment to see how well it worked. Until recently, it simply didn’t work at all. Sure, I could IM it at blogchangebot. I could even send commands. It even seemed to recognize my subscriptions and list their last modification. The problem was that it never notified me of changes (and I’m online more often than not). I was just about to remove the button and link when, this morning I actually got an update notification from blogchangebot8. Recently, I noticed that the bot had gone down frequently and I’m guessing that the developer was having scalability issues (though you couldn’t tell this from the website).

Brent Simmon’s, developer the excellent MarsEdit, has asked a very important question. Isn’t it time that a common weblog system feature set was agreed upon? This is related to my earlier entry about the fact that WordPress doesn’t entire support Movable Type’s API. For the record, it is very close. This isn’t horseshoes and computers are far less forgiving than any person I know. By leaving something as “minor” as post specific text formatting, it becomes impossible for external editing software to determine how to format posts, particularly for preview purposes.

Phishing (which is explained at Wikipedia) has become very commonplace, particularly on the Internet. It even happens over the phone. Up until this morning, I thought only morons became the victims of these scams because they were so obvious. However, this has changed somewhat. Not only has it become much more common (hell, more than half of my spam is phishing attempts), but they’ve hidden themselves very well. My father received an email this morning from Amazon.com supposedly asking to verify his credit card information. Yesterday, he had placed an order for him. The email even had an “@amazon.com” return address. It contained a link that was of the structure: {http://[email protected]//exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html/102-9382243-7140932}. Looks like Amazon, right? Wrong. Everything preceding the “@” is considered a username for the domain that follows, which is our scammer.

I’m getting progressively worse, but here we go: Tampa Bay vs. Atlanta Pittsburgh vs. Cleveland Houston vs. Indianapolis Detroit vs. Jacksonville Kansas City vs. New Orleans Baltimore vs. NY Jets Seattle vs. St. Louis Chicago vs. Tennessee Cincinnati vs. Washington NY Giants vs. Arizona Minnesota vs. Green Bay Carolina vs. San Fransisco Buffalo vs. New England Philadelphia vs. Dallas

WCVB, here in Massachusetts, has decided not to show Saving Private Ryan, the award winning film. I’d list the awards, but honestly, they would make this post huge. That is how many awards we are talking about. What is there reasoning and excuse? There’s too much violence and profanity in the film. Too many kids might watch it in the 8PM time slot originally allotted. What kind of society do we live in when children watching an award winning film with genuine social value is a problem? It’s absurd!

Because nearly every business gives Veteran’s Day off (save for Raytheon obviously), my entire commute took only 40 minutes, as compared with the normal hour and ten minutes to two hours. People left space, one could change lanes to pass someone if they wished, and I didn’t have the urge to jump out of my car and clobber anyone. Amazing. I know my ride home will be nice and I’m just glad that I’m not working tomorrow because I couldn’t take dealing with the normal traffic again so soon after my best ride in to Woburn ever.

From a Keyspan Press Release for its Keyspan Express Remote: Keyspan, America’s number 1 brand of USB connectivity products, announced that its new USB infrared remote control includes support for Apple’s groundbreaking Airport Express. I don’t have an Airport Express, but nonetheless, this sounds compelling. Perhaps the most heavily wanted feature as part of the Airport Express and Airtunes was the inclusion of a remote (and apparently being able to walk around with your laptop doesn’t count). I still maintain that Apple didn’t do this because it would destroy the absolute simplicity of the current design and require expensive modifications to it.