Finding the slender threads This

Finding the slender threads

This is something I’ve been kicking around a little bit. People’s blogs are really cool to me because people tend to share personal things about themselves in them. Not only are these personal things shared but they are archived. I’ve long been fascinated by the notion of lateral discovery. You can go to places like yahoo and try to describe your interests so others can discover you. However, interests change over time and your fanatical devotion to the A-Team just doesn’t mean what it used to. What if yahoo could use some sort of introspection by studying your journals to determine your interests? In this case, what if I had some software that studied people’s journals and determined their interests?

The latest Netfuture starts off

The latest Netfuture starts off when an amusing quote:

If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear [energy] is really very good.-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill Steve Talbott goes on to point out that we don’t think about these things in terms of the thousands of years they will be with us and offers this analogy: O’Neill might just as well have said of a bullet that has as yet barely cleared the gun’s muzzle: “So far, its safety record looks pretty good”. Later on it goes into a really great piece about insecticides and our short-sighted understanding of their long term problems. The best piece in the newsletter centers on the relationship between this one entomologist and the grasshoppers that his insecticides wipe out in the hundreds of millions.

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Ever wonder if you're really

Ever wonder if you’re really alive? What do the coincidences in your life mean? Do you struggle against breaking the world down into binary models like good or evil, fear or love, on of off? If God knows everything, then everything is mapped out already right? What’s the point in just walking through God’s movie script? While we are connected to others in many diverse ways, what’s the base connection, the prime mover that connects us all? Does God only exist so long as we exist? Voltaire said “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Certainly not a new question, but then if it’s all mapped out anyways new is a relatively useless term. Anyone want to tell the patent and trademark office that nothing has ever been invented, just discovered?

Kiad wrote this life program

Kiad wrote this life program poem that really impressed me. I remember doing something similar with my curiosity about love, only using C instead of F77. Who needs haikus, sonnets or other traditional poetry forms when we have computer language syntax and grammar that begs to be filled with thoughts from the creatives among us? Perl Poetry has always had a strong following.

I don't think I'll be

I don’t think I’ll be changing clothes in the car any more. I was changing clothes at the drive-thru for McDonalds and I hit the woman’s car in front of me. Nothing was damaged. Just moments before that I was changing clothes in the parking lot at Target and almost had an awkward incident.

Car Clothing Changing Tips

• If in a parking lot, park far away from the buildings.- When changing pants unload everything from your current pants pockets and preload them into the new pants beforebefore putting them on.- Changing shoes might seem really easy in your head but be careful there are many hidden pitfalls. Cruise control is not your friend.- There are two distinct approaches to car clothes changing, one is in a moving vehicle, one is in a parked vehicle. You should thoroughly explore the parked vehicle clothes changing techniques before moving on.- You might want to consider a bigger car if this will become a lifestyle change for you.

Quickies Fixed the commenting thing.

Quickies

Fixed the commenting thing. I’m a dumbass. One day soon it will be threaded and use cookies to store your id information. Cookie stuff is written, threading is almost done.

Working at SBC I’ve learned how to change my pants, shirt and shoes in the car heading south on Central Expressway after work. I hate the dress code they have there.

I hate the fact that I sacrificed some small part of myself to a corporate dress code.

Living the e-lifestyle Get on

Living the e-lifestyle Get on the Dallas Tollway at Spring Valley. The green light comes on telling me I’m good to go and that they’ve dinged my tolltag for more money. The amber light comes on reminding me that they need a new credit card number so they can debit more money from me.

*Heading south on the tollway.*I look at the tolltag and call the phone number and explain to the operator that I need to give them a new credit card number. She asks for my Texas driver’s license number. Oh crap, I don’t have one since I had to surrender it in Alabama this summer. I tell her I’ll figure something out and call her back.

After Mark's story about Austin

After Mark’s story about Austin cops I thought I’d make a contribution to the lighter side of police work.

It all starts on an early January night during my senior year of high school. It’s during the holiday break and my friend Roy has a surplus of bottle rockets needing disposal. We do what any red-blooded American teenager does in that situation we drive to the top deck of a parking garage in downtown Huntsville and square off against each other from either side of the deck. A furious, pitched battle is waged as we launch rockets at each other. We both have a few close calls as an errant rocket hits our rocket stashes threatening to send them all off at once.

Seeking creative XML locking solutions

Seeking creative XML locking solutions

Nascent content management system seeks ideas for ways to lock whole parts or fragments of XML document.

Here’s the problem I’ve got. I have XML files holding everything on my site. This is great because I can do anything I want as far as rendering them. The problem I’m running into is that updating those XML files is very tricky. An example of that trickiness is in something as simple as blogchecker. I have a list of URLs that get checked by blogchecker. This check takes about 3-5 minutes to run and at the end of it blogchecker updates the XML file with new information. I’d like to be able to modify the file in the middle of blogchecking, or at the very least have a clean way of locking individual pieces of it. If I modify the file while blogchecker is running my changes will be lost when blogchecker finishes and rebuilds the XML file as it last understood it.

Alright I made a small

Alright I made a small fix to the order the comments are displayed in. It is now numerical instead of alphabetical. So no more playing hunt the wumpus to figure out who wrote what when.

I’ve also started building development and live versions of the blog (I just spelled that blug what a different world we’d live in if blugs existed) because tada I have new simulpublishing capabilities to both. This blog is going out to all my homies in ljland and gnumatt.org land. Also I’m wrapping up work on a freelance web project which will free up time for me to do important things.