No, I don’t really care for April Fool’s Day on the Web. I find it amusing for exactly 90 seconds when the occasional, well-done, online April Fool’s prank shows up, but when sites like Slashdot and others have every other item an April Fool’s joke, it gets really old really fast.
Month: March 2004
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Governator No More
Sadly, it appears that The Governator Ale is to be no more. Lawyers for Schwarzenegger basically issued a cease-and-desist. I mean, really. Where’s the harm? Arnold should’ve snatched up a bottle and gotten into the fun: like saying, “Hasta la vista, baby” and then drinking it, or, “I’ll be back… for more Governator Ale!”
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Some nights I just hate computers…
God damn the computers are pissing me off tonight. All evening our broadband cable connection has just been running slower than molasses, so it takes forever to accomplish anything online. And then I’m trying to get my wife’s computer fixed up, it’s been running really slow lately and locking up a lot. So I rolled back the Windows ME that was installed on it (have I mentioned before how I hate Windows ME??) to Windows 98, which by and large worked well enough, but now can’t get the blasted TCP/IP to work properly.
It tells me it’s assigned to some 169.* address, and the DHCP server is “255.255.255.255” (yeah, sure), instead of being sensible and using the perfectly acceptable DHCP server and IP address assignment that has worked with every other computer we’ve had in this house. And the worst part is, I’m sure I’ve encountered this same problem at work, and solved it, but I can’t remember what the solution was. I’ve already tried uninstalling and re-installing TCP/IP, so I don’t know. Maybe it’s just time for the straight low-level format route. Son of a bitch.
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Frontier Doctor
I was browsing at Barnes and Nobles this evening and found a book that looks very interesting (so I bought it): Frontier Doctor: Observations on Central Oregon and the Changing West. It’s the autobiographical account of a doctor during the formative years of Bend.Urling Coe came to the new town of Bend, Oregon, in 1905, a young medical student graduate seeking adventure and opportunity in the West. Frontier Doctor, Coe’s autobiographical account of his thirteen-year residency, details the extraordinary experiences of a young physician in frontier Oregon and offers a vivid social history of town and ranch life on the Oregon high desert.
Cool! Looks very much like a fun and interesting read.
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Bend.com Needs RSS
Okay, Bend.com seriously needs an RSS feed. I’m seriously considering writing a script to scrape their archive page for headlines and producing one myself.
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Conspiracies in Web Tracking
Despite my headline, I’m not really going to go all Mulder on you and start ranting about Big Brother and privacy issues and all that. Instead it’s just some thoughts I’ve been entertaining lately on technology and tracking people and habits on the Web. Some people may choose to see the things I’m writing about as conspiratorial, and that’s fine for them; they may not want to read on, though
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South Sister Quakes
Sweeping the local news this evening is the South Sister earthquakes: more than 100 shook the area three miles west of the South Sister today, with a magnitude of up to 1.5 on the Richter scale. Bend.com has the best writeup on the story I’ve seen online.
The quakes were occurring in the northeast part of an area centered three miles west of South Sister, in which the ground has undergone what scientists call “crustal uplift” (but others have called “the bulge”) by as much as 25 centimeters (about 10 inches) since late 1997….
The magma appears to be accumulating at a depth about four miles below the ground surface, and measures about 50 million cubic yards in volume.
Interesting stuff; of course the entire Cascade Range is geologically active, so it’s not really a surprise, but with the South Sister about, oh, 30 miles away, this news has more than a few people worried, I’m sure.
Personally, I’d expect Mount Hood to be the one to erupt first, of all of them.
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Oregon Weblogs
Just wanted to give a few plugs and props to one of the better weblog-related sites out there, Oregon Blogs.
I thought about trying to describe what it does, but the best I could come up with is that it’s equal parts RSS aggregator, group blog, and weblog directory rolled into one; really, the way to find out about ORBlogs is to just visit it. It’s one of the more solid, useful and innovative blogging apps I’ve seen (even if it is written in ASP!
:)), and continues to surprise me with new features; for instance, clicking on the “info” link for a blog reveals a detail-rich page devoted to that site, including a snapshot of what the site looks like, state and city-scale maps showing where the blog lives, metatag data gleaned from the HTML source (much of it clickable), and the most recent blog posts.Definitely a great site. Worth looking at even if you’re not from Oregon.
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Button Trendsetter
After I last posted about the buttons (see “Button Sites” from March 14) on Web sites, and the button maker, I’ve noticed that others are taking notice, and it’s popping up elsewhere:
- Wil Wheaton: stay all day if you want to (March 23)
- Jeremy Zawodny: Politically Incorrect Blog Buttons (March 22)
- Boing Boing: Fun Web button maker (March 19)
Damn, I’m ahead of the curve! I must be some kind of trendsetter!
… and if you believe that, I have some lovely oceanfront property in South Dakota you might be interested in…