Sysloggin' one day at a time.
This was on the bottom of my SoBe bottle cap today. 50 points to the first person who can, without referencing any source outside their own skull, leave a comment telling us where this quote is from (sadly, I already know so this is just for fun):
NEO-MAXI
ZOOM
DWEEBIE
As a tip o’ the hat to good ol’ Marketing 101 — that is, if it ain’t sellin’ change the labelin’ — and rather than create any decent/clever/relevant content, other than links, for the blog, I took some time to install/configure/customize a new theme for the site. Nifty, ain’t it? :) Check out the archives link (top of the page) — it’s all generated on-the-fly. Also, supposedly, (registered) users can create (or maybe it’s just add) ‘tags’ to posts, although I have yet to explore this feature to see if/how it works. If anyone wants a tag created, and can’t do so yourself, I’ll more than likely be happy do so. (And, of course, if you can create tags, I’ll happily delete any with offensive names.)
Feel free to leave comments on this post with your opinion(s) of the new look. Comments on new posts are open for seven days.
Speaking of comments, I upgraded SpamKarma (the plugin for helping cut down on/eliminate comment spam) so if you have any trouble posting comments please let me know (jbala at jimbala dot net).
It’s Talk Like A Pirate Day again! Which also means I’ve been running WordPress for a bit more than a year… Oooo aahhhh.
Just finished upgrading WordPress to 1.5.2 from 1.5 and I have to say… I must love pain. I’m sure it’d be a breeze if I didn’t have much, or any, customization. But, as you may be able to tell, I have a Freakin’ Load(tm) of them. No customizations: upgrade in 5 minutes. With all of mine (all plugins; no personally coded hacks): no less than 3-4 hours.
And, as you may also notice, the hover text that says how long ago things were posted (under the Recent Activity sidebar) is a wee-bit broken. Once you get past the first 3 or 4 items it gets sane again. I don’t feel like debugging it. :P As it is, I’m amazed I managed to get as much working as I did.
The article itself is interesting but I love the line I’ve excerpted below. Nothing sexist intended; I just find it humorous that “educated” people continue to view women as any less capable than men in any characteristic, psychopathic or otherwise.
Quiz: Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
…research suggests psychologists have underestimated the psychopathic propensity of women.
I’ve been catching up on reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Book One: Quicksilver the last few weeks. During last night’s reading session there was a conversation, between two of the characters, constructing an analogy between a heart pumping blood (both in and out of itself) and certain other characters’ excessive letter-writing with each other, the implication being that the act of writing, and the writing being read, is like pumping blood to and from the vital organs. All of which led me to construct this:
Writers are the heart pumping, circulating blood through the body; their writing is the blood being circulated; the readers are the vital organs and, for that matter, the entire body.
There’s a symbiotic relationship between the blood and the body it travels throughout, including the heart (don’t get too empirical on me here); there’s an identical connection between the writer and the reader. Neither can exist without the other. (I’m not including those who write privately without reading their own work as they write it. Minority that they must be; or, genetic anomaly, to stay within the metaphor.)
It occurs to me just now that this gives new meaning to the phrase “written in blood”.
What do you think?
Wawona Journal
WAWONA
JOURNAL
by TOM BOPP
These pages will include bits of history, news, local
ephemera, and my own musings, as there is time.
“What’s the hottest thing you’ve ever seen?”
“Two people kissing, like they mean it.”
From boingboing:
Cory Doctorow:
Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette has an amazing, balanced, in-depth profile on John Gilmore, the guy who Sun hired to write their first code, the guy who co-founded EFF, the guy who won’t show ID to get on an airplane:
In post 9/11 America, asking “Why?” when someone from an airline asks for identification can start some interesting arguments. Gilmore, who learned to argue on the debate team in his hometown of Bradford, McKean County, has started an argument that, should it reach its intended target, the U.S. Supreme Court, would turn the rules of national security on end, reach deep into the tug-of-war between private rights and public safety, and play havoc with the Department of Homeland Security.
At the heart of Gilmore’s stubbornness is the worry about the thin line between safety and tyranny.
“Are they just basically saying we just can’t travel without identity papers? If that’s true, then I’d rather see us go through a real debate that says we want to introduce required identity papers in our society rather than trying to legislate it through the back door through regulations that say there’s not any other way to get around,” Gilmore said. “Basically what they want is a show of obedience.”
(Thanks, Brad!)
Screw Star Wars! Make way for Vogon poetry!
A post inspired by my friend Mary:
ThinkGeek has this Swiss Memory USB module/knife geek-thingy. Mary apparently saw it at some point and sends me this email saying she doesn’t know why it would remind her of me *wink*. Hmm… me either. (Not.)
Here’s what I said to her about the Swiss Memory USB geek-thingy:
I’ve seen this item before and it’s not quite geeky enough. I mean, really, what self-respecting geek walks around with less than a gigabyte of pocket-sized storage in a single device? ;->
Seriously though, I’ve been looking at these type toys for quite a while and can’t see anything less than 1GB being useful. Now that 1GB devices are available, I can’t think of anything I’d really care to use it for. That’s kinda like Willy Wonka being indifferent to chocolate and not knowing why, heh.
A few minor plug-in related things to finish up, but mostly it’s done… four hours later. Not bad, I guess, considering all the plugins and other customizations I have installed. Not a lot of swearing at the computer either which is a pretty good measure of degree of difficulty/annoyance in the process. :) Of course, if you take WordPress’ word for it, it’s a 5-minute deal — sure, if you’re using nothing but what comes in the “box”, as it were, and, really, how many people are doing that? I know of a few; and by a few I mean “can count on one hand.”
Anyway, if ya notice anything clearly broken please post a comment on this article (hopefully SpamKarma will let you).
Speaking of comment spam: I apologize ahead of time but I’ve had to make it a requirement that all comment posters register and be logged-in in order for a comment post to be accepted. I thought the spamming was bad before but in the last three days there’s been so much (attempted) comment-spam posting that the machine is overall much slower to respond to anything. :(
Do not use the Publish button when writing a private post. It over-rides the ‘Private’ radio button without warning. :P
I hope, anyway.
To all those who in the last couple of months may have legitimately attempted to post comments and got rather brashly denied, I profusely apologize for not properly testing and configuring the comment-spam filter software I installed and stupidly assumed would “just work” with little modification. I should know better.
Argh.
I’ve now tested the filter system more thoroughly and figured out which part isn’t working, then disabled that part; comment posting then worked again. I don’t have any way to test the system from far-and-wide places though so there might still be something lurking, and the real-time blacklist part of the system is still enabled; if you’re on that list, there’s not much I can do to help.
If you find that you still can’t post non-spammy comments, please send me a note at stillbroken at jimbala.net…. If you can include your IP address used at the time of the comment it would be very helpful.
Excerpt from:
Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
Until not long ago, just about until electricity became ubiquitous, humans used to have a sleep pattern quite different from what we consider “normal” today. At dusk you go to sleep, at some point in the middle of the night you wake up for an hour or two, then fall asleep again until dawn. Thus there are two events of falling asleep and two events of waking up every night (plus,
perhaps, a short nap in the afternoon). As indigenous people today, as well as people in non-electrified rural areas of the world, still follow this pattern, it is likely that our ancestors did, too.The bimodal sleep pattern was first seen in laboratory animals (various birds, lizards and mammals) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, i.e, before everyone moved their research to mice and rats who have erratic (un-consolidated) sleep patterns. The research on humans kept in constant conditions, as well as field work in primitive communities (including non-electrified rural places in what is otherwise considered the First World) confirmed the bimodality of sleep in humans, particularly in winter.
[…]
Popping melatonin pills is one of the latest crazes. Melatonin failed as a sleeping pill and its uses as a scavenger of free radicals are dubious at best. It can shift one’s clock, though (rebeldoctor.blogspot.com…). However, it cannot help against jet-lag or effects of shift-work (shift-lag) as melatonin is likely to shift only the main brain pacemaker in the suprachiasmatic nuclei. The problem with jet-lag and shift-lag is dissociation of rhythms between cells in different tissues, i.e., your brain clock may resynchornize to the new time-zone/schedule in a couple of days, the clocks in your heart and lungs in a week, and in your stomach and liver in a month. In the meantime, everything in your body is desynchronized and you feel really bad. If you keep changing your work shift over and over again, you never get to achieve complete synchronization, leading to long-term effects on health, including significant rise in heart attacks, stomach ulcers, and breast cancer.
Well, intercontinental flight is here to stay, and some shift-work is neccessary for the modern society to survive. It is now understood that some people (chronotypes) adjust to night-shifts and even properly executed (non-rapid, phase-delaying) rotating shifts, better than others. People have always tried to self-select for various schedules, yet it has recently started to enter the corporate consciousness that forcing employees into unwanted shifts has negative effects on productivity and safety, thus bottom line. See Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdese and Three Mile Island accidents – all caused by sober but sleepy people at about 3am, just like thousands of traffic accidents every year.
Salon.com… Technology | Turmoil in blogland
Publishing tool LiveJournal nurtures a dazzling array of unorthodox subcultures. But will diversity continue to flourish in the wake of its purchase by blogging start-up Six Apart?
Excerpt from:
Bloodletters – Hack Yourself
Stop assigning blame. This is the first step. Stop assigning blame and leave the past behind you.
You know whose fault it is that your life isn’t perfect. Your boss. Your teachers. Your ex-lovers. The ones who hurt you, the ones who abused you, the ones who left you bleeding. Or even yourself. You know whose fault it is %u2014 you’ve been telling yourself your whole life. Knowing whose fault it is that your life sucks is an excellent way to absolve yourself of any reponsibility for taking your life into your own hands.
Forget about it. Let it go. The past isn’t real. %u201CThat was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.%u201D If we’re not talking about something that is real and present and in your life right now, then it doesn’t matter. Nothing can be done about it. If nothing can be done about it, then don’t spend your energy dwelling on it %u2014 you have other things to do.
I may sound cruel, I may sound simplistic, I may sound like I’m saying you should just %u201Cget over it,%u201D by suggesting that you should let go of your past. I’m sorry for that. But life won’t hold still and wait for you to lick your wounds. The race is still being run. Get up and keep moving. You can’t do anything about yesterday.
You can do something about tomorrow. And about the next day. Focus your energies there.
If you post a legitimate comment on an article here and the system rejects it, sending a rather unpleasant email I think (default/built-in content, not mine), please let me know via email (jbala at jimbala dot net).
I’ve recently installed new comment spam software and I am still adjusting its settings. Recently, several IP addresses showed up in the blacklist and I didn’t receive any notification that those comments had been rejected/deleted; it’s supposed to notify me when any comment post is deleted.
If your comment, not being spam, was rejected/deleted, I apologize for the trouble. I’ve significantly decreased the software’s sensitivity level but I still don’t have any real idea what will or won’t trigger a automatic rejection/deletion. But hopefully it will behave more nicely now and still catch most or all of the spam comments.
Yeah, baby! 8-) But, this sucker’s got 390 Calories in six ounces (21g fat; 51g carbs), which is practically a diet compared to a Cold Stone milkshake (3200 Calories) but still not something you want to be imbibing very often. Nonetheless, I’ll be at Starbucks on Jan 8; count on it.
Starbucks Gossip: Early review of Starbucks’ Chantico chocolate drink: “That stuff is really yummy”
One of the Evanston Starbucks is asking “guests” to sample the new CHANTICO — they call it a chocolate bar in a cup — which is coming out January 8.
Chocolate has more holidays than any other candy. Can’t argue with that, heh.
Candy USA!
Need a reason to celebrate your favorite candy item? Check out this list of fun candy holidays.
Fed up with television executives and studios, the star of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers set up the website last month as a vehicle for his humour and personal philosophy. Cleese is promising to update the site every day with new sketches, pictures of his home life and biographical information.
BBC NEWS | UK | 1914 ‘football truce’ anniversary
This Christmas is the 90th anniversary of the World War I truce when British troops took on the Germans at football.
The soldiers sang Christmas carols before leaving their trenches to play a match in sub-zero temperatures in no-man’s land near Armentieres, France.
Excerpt:
Salon Arts & Entertainment | “Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists, by David Brin
Anyway, I make a good living writing science-fiction novels and movies. So “Star Wars” ought to be a great busman’s holiday, right?
One of the problems with so-called light entertainment today is that somehow, amid all the gaudy special effects, people tend to lose track of simple things, like story and meaning. They stop noticing the moral lessons the director is trying to push. Yet these things matter.
By now it’s grown clear that George Lucas has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. After four “Star Wars” films, alarm bells should have gone off, even among those who don’t look for morals in movies. When the chief feature distinguishing “good” from “evil” is how pretty the characters are, it’s a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look.
Excerpt:
Poynter Online – What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers
Blogging isn’t just a Wild-West free-for-all of publishing with no rules or ethical guidelines. Bloggers are making up the rules of their emerging and increasingly powerful medium as they go, and they do indeed have ideas to offer those practicing traditional journalism.
Excerpt:
Poynter Online – What Bloggers Can Learn From Journalists
The principal difference between traditional journalists and the vast majority of bloggers is: an editor. The lack of one is one of the charms of blogging, of course. The blogger ponders, perhaps reports, analyzes, types, and publishes. It’s fast; it’s creative; it’s different from mainstream journalism.
Something to keep in mind, but not get too worked-up about. Personally, it hadn’t occurred to me but that’s probably because I probably wouldn’t say libelous things about someone while using their full name in print; that’s just asking for trouble.
Bloggers Warned They Can Be Sued for Libel
Libel law, as it applies to this new Internet form of journalism, is still being worked out in the courts. But bloggers and those who post comments on chat boards should be aware that in most cases, the same libel and privacy laws that govern the conduct of professional journalists also apply to them.
Well, I have no idea what being on this site means but it seems cool enough.
I have no… words.
ACCOUTREMENTS – Sushi Air Freshener
Sushi Air Freshener
Just say no to pine trees! Our selection of Air Fresheners features fun images and enticing aromas! Each one measures about 4″ (10.2 cm) and comes with a string for hanging. Bagged with illustrated headers.
Finally! And from the looks of it, many, many people will be spending their holidays (literally) watching and listening to what’s on this set.
dOc DVD Review: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Extended Edition) (2003)
This extended edition of the third film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a fitting final chapter to Peter Jackson’s expansive epic. The extra fifty minutes of added footage, a mix of new and extended scenes that push this version well past the four-hour mark, are each important in their own way, especially if you fall in the “I can’t enough of this stuff” camp.
As with the other extended editions in the trilogy, it is almost like seeing a completely different film. Then there’s the extras%u2014four commentaries featuring over 40 participants, plus hours and hours of detailed documentaries, production photos, sketches, and a couple of funny easter eggs.
And if that weren’t enough, if the hours of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews had not fully sated you, there is a half-hour docu on a teenaged New Zealand filmmaker, hosted by Peter Jackson, that will positively move you to tears, and forever change the way you hear the closing song Into the West
This is how special editions should be done.
Certainly one of the year’s most anticipated releases, it should be no surprise that this come highly recommended.
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