Changelog

Moving back to Movable Type… This spot is for testing until I get everything working.

Head on over to Quiznos’ web site and check out the new commercials starring Joel Veitch’s weird monkeys (of Moon Song fame).

I just noticed a problem with Blosxom RSS feeds. The problem is that I have RSS Bandit set to keep RSS items for about 3 months. After that they’re deleted. The problem is that Blosxom feeds don’t (apparently) set the date correctly for each item in the feed. That means that if a feed is largely stagnant (not much updating), items will be deleted by RSS Bandit for being too old, and then be added right back (since they’re still in the feed) as new.

I assume that if the date for each item was set correctly, then RSS Bandit would hopefully recognize the item as old (based on the date). Instead, they’re being listed as having been added today instead of the date they were actually posted.

This might be a Blosxom RSS template problem or an RSS Bandit problem. Not sure which yet…

Update

This problem is also happening on a feed from a friend’s b2 blog. The problem appears to be that items in the feed do not have dates. When RSS Bandit reads them ,it gives them the current date, and therefor all the items in the feed that are not in RSS Bandits database are added with todays date. That includes items that are older but still in the feed.

Try Pingvin, the only game where a Yeti hits a penguin with a baseball bat. My record is 3622.3.

via rebecky

Explanation:

• Lived in: CA, AZ, CO, NC
• Relatives: CA, WI, DC, IN
• Annual family car trips as a kid: CA, OR, NV, ID, MT, UT, NM, TX, LA, IL, WI, IN
• Boy Scout trips: WY, UT, NM, FL, AK
• Visiting friends: SD, WI, DC, CT, MD, VT
• Recent road trips: MD, DC, PA, MA, CT, VT

States passed through when going to others and those where I have only seen the airport have not been counted. If they were, the whole map would be red with the exceptions of Hawaii, Maine, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and maybe North Dakota.

via justin

Don’t let the picture fool you. That driveway is an ice rink.

I admit to having a love/hate relationship with blogging. I love weblogs as a tool and platform, but I hate my own. Yet my fascination with the concept keeps dragging me back in.

Quick Recap

With the end of finals having finally arrived, our heroes fled the state of North Carolina for the arid foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Much Christmas shopping and gathering of families ensued. Christmas Eve was spent in the company of the heroe’s families. Christmas saw the death of many carefully crafted ribbons and bows. New Years passed at Connor O’Neill’s on Pearl Street. Shortly thereafter our heroes once again braved the wilds of the Eisenhower Interstate System and returned to North Carolina. At the end of their harrowing journey a pact is made to never drive to CO again. Mostly because you have to drive through Kansas to get there.

Highlights

Food: Sri Thai, Deli Zone, Khow Thai, Casa Alvarez, Qdoba, Red Robin, Old Chicago.
Scenery: Mountains.
Movies: Return of the King.

Finishing Quicksilver, staying within budget for Christmas presents, seeing friends, spending time with family.

Proposing to Erica.

Finally figured out how to get my laptop connected at my parent’s home…

Erica and I are home for the holidays after another 35 hour trip from NC to CO. Posting will be lite light till then. If anyone is reading this, hope you all have a great holiday!

Tweaks all around, new colors from ColorMatch Remix, added links to monthly archives, and I broke the site in IE all over again IE works again.

Much to my surprise I find myself actually interested in my Information Retrieval paper topic… I’m writing about weblog specific IR systems like Feedster and how they compare to Google. I would really like to look more indepth into the information seeking behaviors that are common to weblogs, and to look more into how weblogs work as distributed tools.

It has come to my attention that this site looks like ass in IE6. This will be fixed… Eventually :)

In the meantime the sidebar has made a return so that people might notice the new entry called “ramble.” This is the weblog of my friend Dave Van Wie who is currently travelling through Peru on his way to a NOLS course in the patagonia.

Looks like United is going for the JetBlue vibe with Fly Ted.

Considering how far behind on my Information Retrieval paper I am, you would think I would be more concerned…

Cory Doctorow has a new story online! via Boing Boing

1. Yet Another New Look-N-Feel. I really wish Microsoft would stick with a system-wide look-n-feel for its UI bits. This constant redesign makes it so that developers can’t keep up, and in the end every app on my machine acts just a little differently than all the others.
2. Toolbars can’t be locked down. This is one of my favorite Windows XP features, but it doesn’t seem to be making it into other MS products.
3. OneNote is so much less than the concept would make it seem.
4. None of the Office Apps use my default browser (Mozilla Firebird).

Outlook 2003

1. Outlook’s new search folders only work on local mail folders.

Meet Fridgezilla. Turns out we forgot about the trim and stuff when we measured out the space before going shopping. Well… A hammer and some judicious application leverage fixed everything.

Dave Winer linked to weblogs.mit.edu. Looks a lot like Harvard’s blog site.

When I started this blog I used Hivelogic for inspiration. Since then my template has changed a few times. Well, just recently Hivelogic went and redesigned. It hardly suprises me that my first reaction was to whip out TextPad and start playing eith my site templates again…

I decided the cure for my malaise was to go retro for a little while :)

Ok, turned the colors down a little…

So this site is starting to irritate me again. I think the root of the problem is that I’m really interested in blogging and blog tech, but not really that interested in actually blogging. That and and my near constant obsession with redesigning the site at large. I’m going to try one more time to get all the different little bits I have laying around my public_html directory into some kind of order and then see how I feel about this part of the whole mess. Most certainly it will go on, but I might have to make some changes to encourage myself to post something worth reading :)