March, 16, 2003 archives

there's a billboard for lavalife near where i live. the tagline on the billboard is make your married friends jealous. now, i haven't polled my married friends to be sure, but i'm reasonably confident that they wouldn't be jealous about an online dating service. call it a hunch.

i didn't expect much of bamboozled going into it, and i wasn't disappointed. i wouldn't call it a bad film, it's just as subtle as a bag of hammers. there are some great performances (by mos def, jada pinkett-smith, savion glover, and a few others), and the photography is amazing (especially considering much of it was shot on consumer-grade dv cameras). the plot just sort of lurches along, and there were points where i wondered if i had nodded off and missed some scenes that would make it all more coherent. (and spike really needed someone on the commentary track with him to provide a little more fuel for conversation. there are points where the only commentary is him repeating some key lines spoken by one of the characters.)

i added some code to blo.gs and a note to the plugin_weblogs_com plugin page explaining how to use that to to ping blo.gs.

i can understand why it does it (reduce dependencies), but it is a little funny that the plugin calls out to lynx, curl, or wget to do the ping, instead of using LWP::Simple. (even better, the default is left empty, so the plugin simply does not work without going in to set it up, even though curl is bundled with mac os x by default, and mac os x is ostensibly the primary platform for blosxom.)

and, unfortunately, it certainly looks to me like the ping_weblogs_com plugin has a major flaw: it pings before touching its state file, which means that the ping will result in the service loading the page, which will decide that it needs to ping the service, which will result in the service loading the page, etc. note: need to defend the blo.gs server against this.

there's nothing like an impending book due-date to inspire some weekend reading. after maxing out the renewals, i finally buckled down and finished the great thirst and learned much of what there is to know about the history of california as it relates to water use. fascinating and terrifying stuff. and totally unsurprising that the heavily subsidized agriculture industry spreads its stink over the whole issue.

now if only infinite jest weren't a book i owned, i might get motivated to start plowing through that again. my stack of books to be read, or finished, is getting a little out of hand. part of the problem is that i haven't carved out a regular reading time.

david post does a good job of puncturing the the market went [up|down] today because of [some random event] headlines.

cnet news.com has an article about the low-priced (five gig) ipod's extended unavailability. i hope the speculation of it hitting the $199 price point come true. i'd buy one of those lickety-split.

for a while, i was holding out for ogg vorbis support. that would still be great, but i'm not exactly eager to re-rip 5000 songs. and i considered holding out for a forty gig ipod, because it would be nice to have it fit all my music and have room for use as a bit of a backup device, but it would be cheaper to buy a smaller ipod and a fat drive in a firewire enclosure.