Hmm, spend $90 right now

Hmm, spend $90 right now on three cool O’Reilly books or spend $10 on Safari and I get the ability to search them, share notes, check out 2 more books, and switch them out with other technical books in a month? Am I missing some reason to buy the dead tree version? Maybe if I were a paper fetishist.

The greater part of my

The greater part of my life, really up to the last couple of years, has been spent wishing I had more friends. I’ve lingered around the edges of conversations pretending I was too cool for the people I watched, or wanting desperately for them to talk to me. Something changed and that wasn’t as important to me. All of sudden I meet people with an ease I never knew before. Even before the great and mighty dfwblogs I had spent the Summer meeting gobs of new people. This is an entirely unprecedented event in the digital saint canon. Now I find myself composing emails in my head to all these people I meet and never writing them down. I think about things I’d like to do with them and I never do it. I see things that I think they’d like and I never tell them. When I do see them I worry that I haven’t read their site recently enough and I’ll make some embarrassing gaffe. I’ve always worried about the consequences of my actions but now a simple screwup can spread like a virus through the web as my wired friends document it on their site. In short an abundance of new people to talk with and share ideas appears to be leading me down a course of unintentional isolation. Oh silly boy, give up on the queeny histrionics. Get over yourself and enjoy the opportunities before you. You don’t need to worry, that is till they learn the naughty things about you. ;)

Updated: I've added a

I thought this was kinda

I thought this was kinda funny. I hung out with this girl Min Jung at SXSW. She lives in SF. When I read this entry about her being a Potato Queen I immediately thought of Porovaara and Otopico. I didn’t know they had a term for asian chicks that dig white guys. Killer-Van Der Graaf Generator - Various Artists - Supernatural Fairy Tales (2/5)

Woohoo! The Netflix mail parser

Woohoo! The Netflix mail parser really works. Email from Netflix goes to a special mailbox on my server that delivers to my email account (so I have a copy just in case) and the Netflix email parser program. That program updates an XML file of what DVDs have been shipped and received. I then use this xsl file to display the movies I currently have out. Now I just need to build a robot with some Lego Mindstorms to drive to my post office box in Irving, sort my mail into trash and Netflix DVDs, and then drive back and put the DVDs in my DVD player. Would my robot have to be 16 or have a driver’s license?

I've also started on some

I’ve also started on some slideshow documentation if anyone was curious as to what XML, XSLT (HTML/CSS), JavaScript stuff I was doing. I think the plan right now is to move more of the code out of the XSLT file and into JavaScript so it’s more universally usable. I might even move the XML parsing to the client side using JavaScript to make this thing more usable outside of my small Cocoon/Xalan world.

For those of you who

For those of you who use PHP you can use this Weblogs Bug script to “ping” weblogs.com when you update. Basically you add two lines of php which load the library, and then check to see if the file has been updated.

Whenever someone looks at that page it checks itself to see if it has been modified. If it has been modified it “pings” weblogs.com. I haven’t really tested it, but if you want to try it out go for it. Let me know how it goes.

I'm thinking about turning off

I’m thinking about turning off the weblogs.com ping functionality in the blogchecker stuff I have on dfwblogs.com. Since I didn’t want to leave the 5 or 6 people who use that stranded I came up with something new. I’ve got a php library that you can include in your Blogger template. Basically when someone goes to your freshly published weblog for the first time your page realizes it’s been updated. It then pings weblogs.com for you. I’m still testing it right now. However, I’ll probably post source and instructions tomorrow.

This is just stupid funny.

This is just stupid funny.

Back in big D after

Back in big D after fun, fun, fun in the Austin rain and sun. Saw a few movies, met a buncha people. I’ll write more later, sorry to blog and run.

A few CDs will be joining my regular rotation the Dismemberment Plan and Juno EP. Juno’s cover of DJ Shadow’s High Noon owned me. I left it on repeat for awhile. Death Cab for Cutie’s Photo Album and anything by Television as soon as I can find a CD of theirs. As far as I’m concerned Josh struck gold when he found one of their CDs in the Waterloo Records used area. I had never heard them before, and boy had I been missing out.