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Monday, August 05, 2002 |
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Step Three: Moving Day There are still a few things to take care of (aren't there always) but I might as well announce that the move has been made. If you have bookmarked or blogrolled me, first of all, thanks! I appreciate the patronage. Second, please modify yer link to point at http://www.robertkbrown.com/. If you've subscribed to the RSS feed, http://robertkbrown.com/index.rdf is where you can find the new one. Automatic redirection of pages here will be made much simpler by the fact that my new MT archive structure mirrors my Radio archive structure. In other words, content that appears at http://radio.weblogs.com/0101146/2002/08/01.html will now appear at http://www.robertkbrown.com/archives/2002/08/01.html. This will all be automated later today, after I return home. I'll manually go in and update pointers from old to new for my fiction and non-fiction entries, but there aren't too many of those. Thanks again. See you at the new digs. |
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Anniversary Plans Thanks to the travel section of the Sunday morning paper, Melissa and I have a destination for our anniversary. It'll just be a weekend getaway, but still. Should be nice. 10:09:00 AM 
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Two From Tim Morning reading finds a couple of good links from Geodog. First, a solid summary of Bush's assault on civil liberties: 1) passion for secrecy; 2)arrogation of power to self; and 3) cynical motivation. Also, he's been recently added to The Lefty Directory. 9:46:40 AM
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Sunday, August 04, 2002 |
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A term that I've heard quite often over the years -- especially as a consultant, brought in to build some system or another for clients -- is "knowledge transfer." It's not quite an afterthought, but it does tend to get lumped into some of the marginal project deliverables like documentation and testing. The feeling is that it's a one-time thing. Your developer sits down with our developer for half a day maybe, explaining where everything is and any potential roadblocks. There's a mind-lock, and knowledge transfers directly from one brain into another. Neat. Tidy. Unfortunately, even if it actually worked that way, it would still be a one-time deal. This is related to a general failing of most project-management systems in that they're typically used only once, at the very beginning, but are seldom updated. What you need is constant communication, a knowledge stream, that ensures everybody is on the same page.
I see weblogs as one piece to that puzzle, a part of the stream. They will help you stay current at the same time they present an easy portal to the past. If I were still a consultant, I'd re-word my proposals to talk about creating a knowledge stream with the client, using all of the appropriate tools to facilitate that conduit. |
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Yummers: Bruegger's everything bagel, toasted, with veggie cream cheese. 1:34:41 PM
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Saturday, August 03, 2002 |
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The NYT (registration, etc.) has an editorial from Al Gore: The economic debate, now as then, is fundamentally about principle. The problem is not that Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney picked the wrong advisers or misunderstood the technical arguments, but that their economic purpose was and is ideological: to provide $1.6 trillion in tax giveaways for the few while pretending they were for the many, and manipulating the numbers to make it appear that the budget surplus would be preserved. It was pre-Enron political accounting. |
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Watched Amelie again tonight. What a joy. If it wasn't already so late, I'd pop The Double Life of Veronique into the VCR. Perhaps tomorrow. 10:47:10 PM
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The problem with Google and weblogs (also see Death by Blogging) is clearly illustrated in this search from my referrers log. I am the number one result of searches for don lerman pictures. First of all, and this is a sporadic problem, it doesn't link to the actual page where those posts were made. If it went to the cached version to see the correct date, you'd see the second problem: Don Lerman ate almost two pounds of butter in five minutes! The picture is from Roche Harbor.
What a disappointment it must have been when the lead-in text read .. Pictures don't do it justice. ... Crazy Legs Conti ate 168 oysters in 10 minutes. And Don Lerman ate seven quarter-pound sticks of butter in five minutes. ... only to discover pictures of the San Juan Islands. |
 I really want to grill some burgers for dinner tonight. This is the radar image from about half an hour ago. The collection of squares on the right is the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. I'm in the lower-left square. The wall is moving in our direction.
Do I try to beat it out? Or after the downpour comes, do I wait for a lull in the storm? |
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News.Com: "For a mainstream Web site such as MSNBC, blogs offer a stepped-up level of editorial control over the often raucous ramblings from readers in online discussion boards. The site closed the popular boards last December because of the high cost of monitoring discussions that often turned into obscene flame wars." [Scripting News] 5:56:15 PM
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My niece, Paige Albay Thomson, was introduced to the world at 1:16 AM this morning. Her older brother spent the night with us last night, so we were expecting the call. Haven't met her yet, but we'll be visiting the hospital soon. Congratulations to my brother and sister in law! 9:10:53 AM
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First spotted on Geodog's blog, Judge orders U.S. government to release names of 9/11 detainees. 8:42:51 AM
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Two from the op/ed page of this morning's paper. I wonder when news media will begin looking to weblogs for content on their printed pages? Because, frankly, I've seen both of these opinions stated elsewhere over the past couple of weeks (especially the Orwell bit).
8:40:05 AM
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Friday, August 02, 2002 |
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So we're at Blockbuster, picking up a couple of movies for the weekend. There is a man renting a video in the line next to us. Our cashier is trying to figure out the confusing combination of coupons that I'd brought, so I'm able to listen to the cashier next to us explain that there is a balance of $4.25 on the man's account. The man begins to explain, repeatedly, that he dropped the video off right at noon. He went to the pizza place for lunch next door. He made a special trip. He dropped it off. At noon. How can you possibly charge me? Can we work out a deal? I don't have enough money. Can we let it slide? I dropped it off. Why can't you help me out, here? I made a special trip. It was excrutiating. Apparently he only had enough cash on him to rent the one movie he came in for. The manager tried suggesting that when there are actually people in the store, and you're having lunch next door anyway, it might be a good idea to go into the store to ensure there's no "extended viewing charge." Let's see what time you guys processed it. I dropped it off at noon. I made a special trip... what? Seven o'clock at night? Why... why... And then he stormed off. Unbelievable. He probably used to work out schemes to get free pizzas just by complaining loud enough and long enough that the driver took longer than thirty minutes. I was glad to see that the young cashier didn't give into this guy.
Correction: the cashier did cave, when he almost immediately offered to cut the late fee in half. What I'm glad about is that the guy didn't get what he wanted -- that he didn't have even two more dollars in his wallet to pay the late fee -- and had to walk away empty handed. |
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Went ahead and took the bait on daypop, and tried the five minute IQ test. I was surprised. It's basically a vocabulary test. Big whoop. I'm not gonna say what I got, but it was above the threshold (126) for qualification in this cool club of cognizant citizens. Did I pay the sixty dollar entrance fee? Hmm. This must be part of the test. A paradox: to be included in the special society, you need to be above the line; but if you're above the line, you probably won't waste your money. 11:03:40 AM
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If you haven't listened to Aimee Mann since her days with 'Til Tuesday (hush hush, voices carry), you've been missing out. After watching Magnolia last year, I immediately picked up the soundtrack. From Momentum, one of my favorite songs on the CD: Oh, for the
sake of momentum And she gets it: her new
album, Lost in Space won't be released until the end of August, but
until then, she's streaming the
entire thing, free of charge, on her website (Flash required). |
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Turns out all that effort expended last night wasn't for naught. This morning the tub had cleared, and the drain is running nice and fast. Guess it just took a bit longer to work through whatever was causing the backup. Hip hip hooray. After seeing the tub last night, and taking a peek this morning, Esmé declared "Dad, you're such a good fixer." Nice. 9:17:30 AM
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Thursday, August 01, 2002 |
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Final update on the Funky Amazon URLs. The extra hash from my home PC is the same as it was a couple of days ago. I just wiped out all of the cookies on my machine. Now it's 103-6295626-9570229. Deleted them again: 103-3195233-8521434.
Hmm. Curious. |
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Op/Ed piece from the local paper. Of course, it's late Thursday night, and this is for Friday's paper, so I'll have to make sure to buy a copy with coffee in the morning: The White House should accept the House's judgment and let the half-baked concept of Operation TIPS remain in the congressional trash bin where it belongs. 11:37:20 PM
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Sure, sure, chopping an onion is very simple. Just get a sharp knife and a cutting board. Slice parallel lines between where the root and stem used to be, creating nice circular wedges. Stack the circles. Cut again, maybe even criss-crossing. Wipe your tears and a joke about how onions always make you sad. Or you could make it surprisingly easier, and with no more tears.
Cut off the top. Holding the onion by the root, make numerous slices from the top to the root end, stopping just before the root. Cut as many as you want. The onion will stay together, since the root still holds it all together. When you've finished with that, then make your standard onion-cutting cuts, perpendicular to the cuts you've just made. Presto Magico! Instant chopped onions. |
 It's a good sign when your eldest daughter starts picking books that you bought for her years ago, partly because you thought she'd like them at some point, but mostly because you thought they were pretty cool. They've been collecting dust for years. There are much more popular books in the shelves. Books that have accompanying dolls, or movies. It's been a good run the past three nights.
10:17:40 PM
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I'd like to think I learned a few things from the A/C fiasco. So when the bathtub was draining slowly a couple of days ago, I took some preventative measures. Last night, after the girls' bath, it was extremely slow, but some heavy duty plunging cleared it up okay. This morning left a few inches of standing water after both showers. I'd already planned some corrective action. I knew where to look for trouble, and had already eliminated a couple of possibilities. During the day, I called the plumber anyway, and scheduled an appointment for first thing tomorrow morning. Got home. The standing water was still standing. Poured some wicked strong draino down the pipe and let it set for half an hour. More plunging. Unscrewed the doohicky, pulled apart the thingmabob, snaked around the drain some more. Still nothing. There go my options.
But we'll still have an expert coming in the morning. Net result? I had the opportunity to solve the problem from a couple of different angles (pounds chest, grunts, puts tools neatly away), and the family will have the services of the bathtub over the weekend. I think that's what they call a "win-win" scenario. |
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Wednesday, July 31, 2002 |
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I know next to nothing about programming languages for Unix. I can (and probably will) learn them, but not in the timeframe I'm looking for. I've already discovered, through Step One, that MovableType has a nifty little import feature. All you need to do is format the output of your blog into a predefined format, collected in a single .txt file. I had help with this already, but it didn't quite get me where I wanted to go. No titles. Posts I'd sent via e-mail have all kinds of goofy formatting and lost links and whatnot I also know that Radio creates local XML files for each post in my weblog. They are all in a single directory, and look something like this. So I need to clean up formatting and include the link titles. I don't know PHP or Perl or Python, but I do know vbscript and HTML pretty well. I'm too tired to build this now, but the strategy is this:
Should be pretty solid. Hope I can get to it by the weekend. |
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Here's the deal: I'm definitely going to migrate this site to MovableType. I'll document the process later, I promise, but here's the first test (let's call it half an hour of effort). Please note that this is not the final destination.
In doing this, I think I have some better ideas on migration that won't fudge the links, or lose my titles. After that, I'll see if I can get comments, too. |
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Tuesday, July 30, 2002 |
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It's worse than you think, Joe. There have been 30 issues of Time so far this year. At the end of April we get Yoda on the cover. End of May is Spider Man. End of June? Tom Cruise. The Boss at the end of July just maintains the pattern. But take a look for yourself. There's a fairly high percentage of "and now, a very special Blossom" covers (including three out of the past four), scattered amongst timely media reporting. More to the point of why these are the cover stories instead of much of the actual news that can be found inside: which issue do you think sold more copies at the newsstand? June 17 or February 18?
I'm not saying. I'm just saying. |
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Question to self: "has James Cameron done any movies since Titanic, that way overbudget, way highest grossing film of all time?"
The answer, courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes: nope. |
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Moving it's way up daypop is this prescient article from The Onion, way back in January of 2001. What's that they say about the truth being stranger than fiction? During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years. "You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?" On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic
stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a
recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in
consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the
recession even further. |
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Anybody else find it odd that there has been so much recent discussion about the upcoming war against Iraq? As if it's a foregone conclusion that it will take place. Phase Whatever on the War Against Terrorism. Or is it simply Daddy and Me protecting our interests? Y'all don't mess with Texas, y'hear? I thought there was supposed to be a series of checks and balances that prevented the president from declaring war willy-nilly (also see FDR, hands tied, WW II). Umm. Maybe that last one is a bad example. |
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Jon Oltsik writes about the balance between business and technology, and the necessity for a fundamental change in the way technology organizations are structured. What's more, the relationship between business and legacy IT personnel often borders on the dysfunctional. Meetings between the two groups are long and often end in frustration--if not outright anger. You might think that they spoke different languages and shared a mutual mistrust. In a way, they do. While the business side wants to focus on what's needed and why, IT can't get beyond the question of how: how to create a technology strategy, how to qualify vendors, and how to go about implementation The relationship is sometimes so fraught that I've seen situations where the business side decided to outsource technology to escape from this perpetual quagmire. I don't necessarily agree with
everything in this article: the 3 year timeline for disaster, as well as the
implication that by not doing the things he talks about, companies
(or at least their CIO's) are doomed to failure. I've seen way too many
businesses that succeed in spite of themselves, and this should be no
different. I do, however, think he hits the nail on the head when he writes
that business solutions, not technology widgets, create revenue and cut
costs. Companies need responsive, business-focused IT organizations that can
create and then manage these solutions. Good stuff. |
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I'd noticed the same thing that Joe Gregorio points out regarding Amazon URLs (link courtesy of Sam Ruby). I find myself routinely lopping off what seems like the last half of the URL before copying and pasting to include in a link. This seems to most consistently happen when you search for something, but it seems to pop up whenever you follow a link from within Amazon to another product. Seems like referrer information gets embedded within the URL, and can get pretty lengthy if you follow one product to another to another. The actual product ID is made up of the ten alphanumeric characters following /ASIN/. If you remove anything after that number, Amazon always adds another lengthy numeric sequence. Even more interesting: delete or replace a bunch of those numbers, and Amazon keeps the changes you've made, but appends that last, much longer number. Upon further review, any product I viewed had this number at the end: 102-7239491-0232932. Hmm. Wonder if that's related to my IP address, to today's date, a session variable, a cookie, or some combination. This link to the next thing I'm probably going to buy at Amazon is the shortest version possible. When I follow it, though, I get the same digits (102-7239491-0232932) at the end. I bet it's a machine-specific number.
Update. Here's what I get at home: 102-9557139-9658555. |
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My experience with MovableType sounds like it started off somewhat like what Mark Pilgrim describes happened to your favorite sucky web-site finder, Vincent Flanders: He has a particular gripe with Movable Type, which he failed to install. That there are detailed MT installation instructions does not console him. That the Movable Type authors offer professional installation for the low low price of $20 only adds insult to injury in Vincent's mind. He would prefer to pay for software that installs out of the box, even if the long-term experience is inferior. But he's left feeling that it's his own fault that he's stuck with a sub-optimal system, since obviously, if he only knew a little more, he could have had this other system that so many people rave about... I'd say it took me maybe an hour, all told, to get MT up and running on Cornerhost. I had a couple of difficulties that were host related, but almost immediately after I'd mentioned them, they were fixed (and I was credited the use of a mySQL database for my trouble). After that, I had to live with the fact that I know next to nothing about life on a UNIX box. Yes, Radio installs out of the box. Very nice, very simple. But Movable Type's instructions were straight-forward, and I was able to pretty drastically modify my templates immediately after getting everything up and running. I like that I can
work with MT anywhere. I like that it's easy to set up a multi-user blog,
with different levels of user-specific security. I think adding images is
way easier in MT than Radio. There are many, many things to like about it.
Next up will be a conversation with Ben & Mena to figure out how to move
A Work In Progress with a minimum of hassle. |
Last update: 8/17/2002; 5:08:45 PM .
