week 19, 2002 archives

i'm on a roll with this whole sponsors thing. of course, the real benchmark of success will be when some person or company that i don't know sends me something. (and for the puritan at heart, be forewarned that you'll probably not want to click through to the current sponsor....)

sam ruby wonders if it is time to build a community of open-source weblog developers. there's already the weblog-devel list, which doesn't restrict itself to open-source developers. but truth be told, i don't know that weblog software is all that exciting to talk about. it's like the “hello world” of web applications.

simon st. laurent has been writing all sorts of interesting stuff about xml in his advogato diary. his latest on mixed content is no exception. that's still one of the sticking points for people who want their rss feed to contain html markup (including html entities) in the title and description elements. (and some people still don't get namespaces.)

mark mothersbaugh, originally of devo fame, and more recently of numerous soundtracks fame, admitted he has inserted subversive subliminal messages into his commercial work. like “sugar will rot your teeth” in a gummi savers commercial. (also reported by salon, which says “question authority” lies in the background of the soundtrack for the rugrats movie.)

more than you ever wanted to know about shaving your head. (via mefi, where the reviews of the site are a bit mixed, but there is a lack of any better advice. going electric seems like a good call to me.)

the call for participation for apachecon 2002 (in vegas this year) is out. (ignore the bits of the web page that refer to apachecon europe. they just haven't been updated yet.)

the article functionality of my weblog was broken. this is what allows me to mark a long entry as an article so only the first paragraph appears on the front page and in the rss feed, and adds 'more' to the link below the entry.

this was the essay i wrote, about twelve years ago, that served as my college application essay and the essay for the national merit program. this is from a not-quite-final draft, i think, judging from the number of obvious typos that i fixed when typing it in.

(besides testing this article functionality, why put this up? to save it for posterity. i have an unhealthy fascination with everything i've ever written, and my “early works” are in short supply.)

My life is a mix of a bowling ball, an egg, and a watermelon. That may seem like a strange analogy, but I cannot think of a better one.

Like a bowling ball, my schoolwork and academic performance has been solid as a rock, with only a few holes that enable me to get a grip on it. It has been decorated with numerous nicks, scratches and dents, but these are not the result of abuse and punishment as one might first conclude. Instead, these are the rewards of hard, consistent work, akin to the many academic awards I have lain claim to since early in my life.

The watermelon seems to dominate my life, and it represents the real-world education gleaned from a stream of jobs. On the outside it may not look so great, but inside, or in close scrutiny, it is sweet, quite beautiful, and definitely worth living for. Working at a fast-food restaurant is very unappealing to some, but I have found of heard of no better place to interact with people in both long- and short-term relationships. I've worked my way up through several jobs, each more challenging and rewarding than the last, and have found each to have its own indigestible part, like the seeds of a watermelon. Some parts seem to have more seeds, but the sense of accomplishment is greatest when the work is hardest.

Last, but definitely not least, is the part of my life that is an egg. It may not appear exciting on the outside, just as the watermelon may not, but inside is a golden center, my friends and family. That is the ultimate prize of my egg, for it sustains and nourishes me. But in turn, it is supported by the vast egg white, the interests I hold dear to me, though not all-important in comparison to the golden prize. Music and sports, family and friends. Those are the attributes I must take care and handle the most gently, for if it shatters, it's a real mess, but if served right, it's a real delicacy.

These three objects, these tree parts of my life, are what I juggle in my life and take great precautions to keep out of each other's way. For in a collision, none would escape unscathed. The egg would be shattered, the watermelon would be split asunder, and the bowling ball would be the nucleus of a great big mess.

That is the direction I hope to lead my life away from. The watermelon will come to dominate my life more and more, as the bowling ball becomes only an old friend of life, to lean on in times of need, not an active participant. The egg will continue to grow, giving life to my life. And still, the three will remain seperate.

i just had to bring up writing. here's a standalone paragraph from my (oft neglected) writing notebook, from jan. 20, 2001:

change is an evolutionary process. the constant application of force to an inertial existence. revolutionary change is standing in the same place and looking in a different direction. it can precede evolution, or be a part of it, but it isn't a vital component.

i wish there was a place with the prices of rackshack that used debian. i'd be happy with freebsd, too. (the popularity of redhat on servers is totally baffling to me.)

paul prescod wrote nine simple rules for “extreme web services” (but you have to wonder what the tenth rule in what was obviously supposed to be a list of ten rules was.) i would extend his rule #5 a bit, to recognize the non-xml and non-http standards that are still important. (particularly mime and smtp.)

(side note: i hate yahoo groups.)

there's been some hand-wringing about the recent car chase in los angeles that got a lot of media coverage. i actually tuned into the last half hour or so, mainly because i had seen the whole mess go by on the hollywood freeway (mainly when the half-dozen helicopters flew by). i hadn't realized it was getting national attention.

good news for the game industry, i guess: electronic arts posts record annual sales. (hmm, e3 is coming up, so i guess we can expect lots of game industry news to hit in the next couple of weeks.)

a nice piece from salon about the use of email in corporate politicking. (here's an observation: you can surmise a lot about how a person reads by how they write.)

san diego tops a recent ranking of the best places to do business, according to forbes and the milken institute. san jose, at the top of the list last year, took a dive to #61. the rankings are based purely on “objective” economic factors, not taking into account things like weather, cultural attractions, or crime.

after some futile searching for a badmailto patch for qmail, i finally stumbled across the badrcptto patch. (i'm using this to reject messages to bogus addresses at php.net at the smtp level, rather than endure the inevitable deluge of double-bounces or just blackhole mail to those addresses.)

i guess i should really be looking at qpsmtpd, but i wanted to pick the low-hanging fruit first.

because of his brilliant track record, the infamous seamus blackley is forming his own game company. not quite a publisher, not quite a developer, it apparently just exists to vacuum up money from the middle. and this guy has plenty of experience with things that suck.

i wish slash sites would make their journals more accessible. they're currently hidden behind “search for a user” walls, and don't talk to services like blo.gs, so there's not a lot of ways someone might stumble upon interesting things like matt's journal or gnat's journal.

anthony edwards' exit from er was the lowest-rated er cast exit. something that had been bugging me for a while is the thought that they had switched in a different actress to portray his daughter (which they did: #1, #2). what really made it stick out is that they actually re-filmed a scene originally played by #1 to use in the “previously on...” clips at the beginning of the show. i think it was funny they got michael ironside to make an appearance in the funeral scene, considering he was in a whopping five episodes. i guess william h. macy dissed them.

i said it before, and i'll say it again: it's going to be a lazy dog-dangling afternoon. then again, i haven't had a whole lot of afternoons in the last year that couldn't be classified that way. i guess if i were really motivated, i'd be checking out the starscene carnival. (and then next weekend is the noho theatre and arts festival.)

i've been trying out various mayonnaise recipes. the latest i tried is from alton brown, but my first taste leads me to believe that using more lemon juice and less vinegar might have been a good idea. i also haven't really hit on the right oil to use. low-fat mayo may be something to try.