blogwaffe

Greg says I should put a little shoutout to DrLP whenever sprachwaffe get’s updated. Come on, Greg, ever here of RSS?

But, really it’s not a bad idea. Who in their right mind would feed off of sprachwaffe. Except me, of course, but it’s for administrative purposes, I swear. And I think Paul.za does too. Him I have no excuse for.

But speaking of technological incompetence, what do you get when you cross William Gibson, Bruce Springsteen and a fifteen year old script kiddie? Some form of heinous, ill-formed, leeching invertebrate who is but one example of the hoarde of “beta users” WordPress has managed to accumulate.

The upcoming version of WordPress is in beta at the moment and is in need of testing. Since nothing here is terribly important (I think we can all admit that, right?), I decided to make blogwaffe a testbed for WordPress as of the now passed alpha phase of the development. WordPress is an extremely open community; I didn’t have to sign up for the privilege (if you want to consider it as such) of doing this, I just downloaded the software and had at it. And I’ve kept having at it all the way through alpha and into beta in the here and now.

Read more…

The one week mark has come and gone. I offer no apologies. Anyone who reads this site is used to it :)

(So Bert is better at blogging than I am. Get over it.)

The title of this post, such as it is, comes not from a lack of timely content, but instead from a project with which I probably should not have involved myself. I’ve… sort of… volunteered to write up a good chunk of the basic end user documentation for the new version of WordPress (currently in beta, and currently powering this site) on its new wiki. The long of it: I’ve been spending time I don’t really have on culling data from other documentation and writing up new stuff. The short of it: I can’t stop typing in wiki markup.

It’s actually pretty convenient, I’ll have to reevaluate my stance on things like Markdown and Textile. Previously, I’d thought they were for sissies. Perhaps my opinion hasn’t changed, but instead I’ve simply admitted to myself that I’m a sissy.

At any rate, the project is going reasonably well, but a bit slowly. I’ll be quite happy when it’s over (this weekend?).

My first Ph 3 lab this term was today. You simply would not believe how hard we rocked out on our Joule’s calorimetry experiment discussion. Would. Not. Believe.

A truly generic “look at me, I have a ‘blog'” post:

Jon Stewart wins, CNN cancels Crossfire. For the piranhas out there: more from Google News.

The day of that “interview” will go down in American Media History, I think. As will some hopefully comical pictures of a certain bowtie wearing personality.

In fairness, and as Ars points out, Jon Stewart’s interview is doubtfully the cause of the cancellation, but it’s certainly correlated.

McSweeny’s has an amusing site in which quotations from Dubs are altered so that any reference to God is replaced by a famous name found in Trivial Pursuit.

I should point out that I found this via the most random internet related event that has ever happened to me; I found a truly bizarre confluence of web pages.

I googled “America the Book” in hopes of finding why the Open Letter to Sean Penn was not in my edition, but was in the edition I saw at Vromann’s last month. I ended up at Comedy Central’s site where I noticed that Jon Stewart et al. will be reading from their book at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on January 13. All proceeds from this ticketed event will go to 826nyc.org, a “nonprofit writing center designed to help students ages 6-18 develop their writing skills.”

But, that begged a certain question; what is the significance of “826”. It’s not their address. I looked around on the site, but didn’t see any explanation.

Several hours later I was looking at mertner.com where Allan posted some useful advice on multiblogging with wordpress that I’m using here. Another user of the site, Morten, linked to Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software. A pretty interesting read. Anyway, in his about page, Joel paraphrases something from Timothy McSweeney’s mcsweenys.net, the provenance of the above article. And what else do I find there but a faq about 826NYC.net.

To quote Keanu Reeves: “whoa”.

That’s the long of it. The short of it is that I still don’t know why my copy of America the Book doesn’t have the letter to Sean Penn in it nor what “826” means.

It wasn’t much different than any other day. I didn’t go to campus because it was raining all day (and was that thunder I heard?) and just read stuff here in the SLR. To mix things up a bit, I pissed Greg off by solving his new rubik’s like invertable tetrahedron. Sukah.

More gratifyingly, I also headed over to amazon to spend a gift certificate (LotR:TT&RotK) and ended up donating to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund for the victims of the December 26 Tsunami. So far, Amazon has amassed over $13 million from nearly 170 thousand contributions.

A few clicks, and it could be more.

What I said I was going to do while I was gone: read P&S, read N&C and do all the prelab problems for the lab I’m TAing.

What I actually did while I was gone: read Linguists and Aliens, the Engines of God, Lemony Snicket, America the Book, and watched Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, Bad Boys, and The Incredibles.

As mentioned before, one of the more entertaining aspects of Christmas this year was going home and seeing how well people recognized me. Mom and Dad seemed to have no trouble, but a lot of people at church had no idea who I was, even when I was sitting with my family.

The best comment was given to my mother after church: “Now, when Michael came home, were you expecting him to look like that?” Hilarious. A close second was the reaction given when I was introduced by Mom to someone at the dollar store. She looked honestly afraid and took her first opportunity to back away and leave the store.

That kind of reaction I don’t really understand. I mean, go ahead, think I’m ugly; you won’t bother me. But why did long hair and a beard incite fear into this (presumably) otherwise nice middle aged lady? Does scragly facial hair instantly turn me into a rapist or a murderer or, worse, a hippie?

Well, I passed the gramma test, anyway. She didn’t bat an eye. And none of my other relatives took much notice either, likely because I was upstaged by a cousin of mine with a tremendous beard and significantly longer hair.

I was thinking about getting rid of it all come new years, but now I think it’s here to stay for a while.

Hope everyone had a joyous day today.

Mine was excellent. I sat around reading America The Book which my fantastic brother graciously gave me for Christmas, watching HP3, and having a wonderful dinner with some family friends. I’ve been doing a lot of that, lately: socializing, that is.

Sunday: Church. Monday: “Movie Night” with some teenaged friends of the family. Tuesday: My parents’ annual St. Thomas’ Day party – sixty-six in attendance (thankfully nowhere near the record). Wednesday: More church. Thursday: Freedom, sweet freedom… to shop for the people I had not managed to get presents for already. Friday: Christmas Eve service. Saturday: Christmas dinner for thirteen. And that brings us to today.

The best part about coming home this year was seeing how well other people recognized me. Perhaps more on that when I’ve got more data.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Seattle, so the inconsistency with which this site is updated will temporarily become consistent. In the I-doubt-I’ll-post-anything-during-the-next-week sense.

And a preemptory Happy New Year! to everyone.

For any out there with a Celtic connection, or with some knowledge of music and history, what does Waltzing Matilda have to do with traditional celtic music?

Dad has a CD titled “Celtic Carols”. One of the titularly referenced carols is, indeed, Waltzing Matilda. And, as a side note, there’s the Pogues.

Is it a celtic tune better known to Americans by it’s Australian lyrics?

Or is the CD produced by a bunch of crackheads?