Plaidophile

Seeing as how I went and made my site easier to manage, I decided to get around to something I'd been putting off: posting my photography.

Just recent stuff for now; when I go back to my parents' house for the holidays I'll try to remember to get all my negatives from when I was in high school.

It's not often that something that makes the national news happens right outside my window.

Why the hell don't any RSS aggregators know how to rewrite relative HREF and SRC links to be relative to the item's permalink? Some of them are at least smart enough to tack the feed's server name to the beginning of a SRC link, but they still don't respect the relative path of the item.

It seems like the design of RSS is at odds with wanting to keep actual content portable.

Oh well.

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Amazon [disclaimer: my employer, yadda yadda] just launched a pretty interesting clickstream aggregation thing, Pheromone Trail. It'll be interesting to see if this catches on.

So the problem is with having to reach further in order to use the mouse, right?

So put the mouse on the left.

Let's see how this works out...

So, remember how back in July I tried the cable provider which services my building and it sucked and I cancelled the service right away and they messed up the billing and didn't want to give me a refund based on me having non-functioning service for two weeks but eventually they decided to give me the refund anyway, back on July 21? Well, I didn't mention that they never actually sent me the refund, and every month I got a "bill" from them stating that I had a balance of -$89.50 with them and that I would be receiving a check for that amount soon.

I finally got the check today.

Jeeze.

For the entire weekend, I will not be on MUCKs, IRC, or AIM. I will try to not post lots of weblog entries. The only computer use will be reading email, browsing the web, and maybe drawing my comic.

Future livelihood is more important than short-term entertainment.

Once upon a time, I had severe carpal tunnel syndrome. During this time I went to Hong Kong, and while I was there I discovered a copious number of small form-factor keyboards, which had minimal key travel and were narrow enough that I could keep my mouse at a reasonable location rather than having to either reach awkwardly for the mouse or keep the keyboard off to the side. Within a few months, these keyboards helped me to reclaim the sensation in my fingers. I bought several keyboards, and sold many of them to my computer scientist compatriots back in America, keeping two for myself.

One day I spilled a soda on one of them, and a few years later the other one wore out.

If I order this, is it a sign that I actually have too damn much money?

Because I'm really tempted.

So, yesterday morning I woke up with a start because I dreamt that my mom had found my weblog and was posting comments on it.

Which is oddly relevant.

Hi mom. :D

On the main page you might now notice a little capsule with various categories (and its own XML/RSS link icon), with things like art, code, and music. I've finally decided how to bring trikuare.cx content over to beesbuzz.biz; basically I'm just going to have MovableType manage it.

I'm making pretty sophisticated use of its nested category system, and using MT in a very non-weblog-like way. Hopefully this'll work out!

It's "Without further ado," not "without further adieu."

"Ado" means "fuss" or "delay." "Adieu" is not a noun but a complete statement which simply means "goodbye."

Why have I been seeing "without further adieu" on weblogs so often lately? It's stupid and wrong and makes no sense in any way! (Unless you're trying to cut a goodbye short.)

Until United Airlines decides to start informing passengers about flight delays and gate changes rather than just silently ignoring a few dozen customers who want to know where/when their flight actually is, they are on my shitlist.

Last night I ordered half a case of wine off of woot. And I know that when I get back to my apartment in Seattle, my new Wacom tablet will be waiting for me. While I'm away I'm still able to listen to all of my music via my streaming media server, and chat with my coworkers over our internal IM service.

What do these things have in common?

INTERNET!

trikuare.cx evaporates in just under two months. I'm kind of dragging my feet on moving everything over to this domain because I'm not sure whether I should do the easy way (just move the directories over, mod_rewrite them, keep using my same crappy CMS), the moderately-difficult-and-potentially-annoying way (use MovableType to emit the HTML for each thing, using its subcategory support and so on), or the extremely-difficult-and-still-potentially-annoying way (make my own dynamic db-driven CMS which allows me to assign arbitrary amounts of metadata to everything and makes the whole site searchable and sortable with a variety of views).

Yesterday I heard from my mom that Reginald Gammon died. He was a very important artist in the 1960s civil rights movement, an amazing portrait painter and printmaker whose work has been in museums and galleries around the world with chapters written about hiim in art history textbooks, and most importantly, he was a very close friend of my family, and a great guy. The few times I got to talk with him were great experiences, and we will all miss him.

The OSX 10.4.3 system update seems to break HDTV output from a DVI-connected Mac mini for resolutions other than 720p. If you use a Mac mini as a home theater PC, I recommend against updating to 10.4.3 at this time.

Palo Alto trip might be getting cancelled entirely. I'll know tomorrow. Never mind, I'm heading down as originally planned.

Incidentally

I upgraded my server to OSX 10.4.3 this morning and didn't realize that the upgrade turned off the Postgres startup item, breaking basically everything on my site. It's turned back on now. Yay.

Also, somehow a version of php5 without Postgres support got installed. I wonder when that happened — how long has my site been down, anyway?! Because the last time I did any Postgres updating was several days ago. So if you're reading this it's probably via the RSS feed, which isn't affected. Finally I figured out what was causing the fixed version of mod_php to not be running, though. (PROTIP: Restart Apache to reload modules.) Grr.

6:55 PM Ah, I see that several people did tell me. At 1 PM. Via AIM. While I was at work, and not on AIM.

11/4/2005 Today's outage was because the system hosting my DNS went down for unknown reasons. I'm looking into setting up some redundant hosting.

I got an email from my mom. Toby's missing now. :(

2005/11/05 He's back!

I hadn't really anticipated this, but Spotlight's indexing is actually really useful. For example, all of the text in all of my comics is indexed, so if I need to find what particular comic someone says something in, I can just do a Spotlight search on it.

Awesome.

Also, the screen capture commands now put out PNGs instead of annoying-to-use PDFs. Woo.