November, 13, 2004 archives

los angeles downtown news repots that dash ridership up 35% in the last five years, higher than the 20% national average for public transit. i probably don’t take as much advantage of it as i should.

last month, i more or less decided that i want to buy a digital projector, in particular the benq pb6200. there was a $200 rebate running until the end of october, but i was still waffling about the decision then, and decided to wait until november and see what rebate offer they came up with for november, because as you can see, they’ve had a rebate every month this year. except that the current offer is still the one for october, which is no longer valid. curses!

glenn re-raises the rss bandwidth issue. i’ll admit i’m lazy, and haven’t implemented if-modified-since handling for my own aggregator (which only polls hourly, and only news sites — i don’t read blogs via an aggregator), or if-modified-since handling for the rss feeds i produce (particularly the scraped feeds).

but one thing i have done is implement a system that serves up 403 responses to people who poll the scraped feeds more than once an hour. it blocks over ten thousand requests a day. what’s amazing to me is the number of persistent attempts in the face of repeated errors. for my polling, i am emailed errors when they occur, so i would know pretty quickly when i’ve been blocked.

blo.gs does make if-modified-since requests. of course, since it is only making requests when there should be changes (it only does so in response to pings, it doesn’t poll), it doesn’t make much difference.

my big fat obnoxious boss is a spoof of the apprentice (which i’ve never watched) in the spirit of my big fat obnoxious fiancé. i finally got around to watching the first episode, to decide whether to set up a season pass for the rest. it is brilliant, and i added the pass. like my big fat obnoxious fiancé, there are just enough moments that are hysterically funny to make up for the weak parts.

aaron swartz’s weblog has become a diary of his experiences as a freshman at stanford. loads of great stuff, and i particularly love his coining of the acronym TGIQ (for “the girl in question”).

(as i type this on my laptop while sitting on my couch, i am particularly annoyed that safari’s undo does not recover from having selected a bunch of text and typing over it, as i am prone to do inadvertently in this position.)