Month: February 2006

Crap. I was sure I would get my “blogiversary” right this year. It’s at the end of February – the 26th, to be exact. Not that difficult to remember. Of course, I kept forgetting what date I am currently living in, which is why I just noticed that today is the 27th. Yeehaw.

Anywho, it was three years ago (yesterday) that I wrote my first “real” entry on neverhood.net. Yeah, there’s that silly one back on January 14th, when I first re-installed b2 in an attempt to blog – but it wasn’t until the end of the following month that it became at least a semi-regular occurrence.

I’d like to say something more impressive after all these years, but I’m at work right now. And the only thing really on my mind is lunch (yes, I tend to eat lunch this late). So I’ll save the profundities for tonight.

If you happened to see it, please just ignore the fact that I originally called this entry “Enter year three” – I temporarily forgot how to count.

Playing around with that fastr game (in which you try to guess the common tags between random pictures on flickr), I’ve realized the biggest drawback to folksonomy: people are generally bad at tagging things. For example, a selection of photos came up in which pretty much each one focused on a single flower – most of them zoomed in to the very center of that flower. We’re talking macro enough that no other plant life was in frame. Oh yeah, and one picture featured a fox laying down in a patch of grass. You know what the tag was? GARDEN! I’m sorry, but absolutely none of the photos that came up should have been tagged with “garden” as none of them actually showed a garden.

It seems that many people want to have as many tags as possible on photos and other such entries to make sure they’ll come up in appropriate searches/sorts. But most of the time, they shouldn’t. I mean, should this entry be tagged “garden” just because I used the word as an example of misuse? Maybe it should be tagged “office,” because that’s where I currently am sitting?

I’m not just pointing the finger at everybody else – my tags tend to suck, too. I’m just wondering how useful a scheme can really be when it is so open-ended.

I feel the need to apologize to my feeds. The feeds that I read, that it. I had to make a very difficult decision the other day. Regardless of difficulty, it NEEDED to be made. And thus, I deleted all of the unread posts that were older than a day or two for my less-than-daily reads.

Sure, I’ve been keeping up with Livejournal – afterall, I actually know you guys from somewhere – and theRegulars (see the list to your right). And the photoblogs and funny stuff, for the most part. But the tech feeds and news and sports and irRegulars, etc? I’d just fallen ridiculously behind, and it was about to tear apart my life.

So there will always be something that I missed, but at least now I might be able to enjoy my Internet browsing once again.

Hey all you WordPress users. I’m sure you think you’re ultrcool, running k2 just like everybody else. Why not give some other themes a chance? If..else is posting a new theme each day… FOR FREE! Now, of course they won’t be as complex or sophisticated as other offerings out there (with such a limited time constraint and all), but they still look great. Keep up the great work, Phu!

I’m hoping to put together my own theme before the upcoming THIRD BLOGIVERSARY of this site. Most likely it will be a mashup of the various wonderful offerings out there, with a smattering of my own personal touches.

Let it be known – when I manage to redo my basement into the bar/entertainment complex that exists in my dreams, these fixtures shall be used.

(Thanks to Owen)

For starters, I’m still trying to catch up with a couple months of disorganized RSS feeds with my aggregator. The problem lies in figuring out which feeds I really find interesting or useful. At least I have my regulars segregated so that I can keep reading them on a daily basis. I really think I’m at the point that I have to delete all of the old items and just start reading as though I’m new to these sites.

In the meantime, I’m finally making my way through Kottke‘s Best of 2005 Lists. While there are some real gems involving the unexplainable, the amusing, the intriguing, and the amusingly intriguing. Unfortunately, it’s also filled with lots of disinteresting articles, poorly reasoned/researched essays, and the same egomaniacal speech every Mac fan seemed to drool over. I understand that not everybody is going to enjoy the same material, but there’s a lot of links there to go through and some of them I just make me wonder how lame 2005 was if they were “the best.”

P.S. Don’t take this to be a dis on Jason – I’ve actually just shifted his blog into my frequent reads because I realized how much I miss out on by not keeping up regularly.

When I moved over to this new domain at the end of December, I left at least one bit of “hacking” undone. All of the old content at neverhood.net continues to receive all traffic from links, searches, etc. even though it’s been moved over here. I knew this would be a fairly simple .htaccess trick to pull off, but not until today did I bother to actually do any research.

Thanks to John (of My Life in Photographs), I was able to take care of this in a timely manner. First I backed up the old .htaccess file. Then I created a new one and added this line:

Redirect /blog/ http://thomnottom.com/blog/

Sure enough, going to neverhood.net works just as before, but once you click on any of the posts *WHOOSH* you are magically transported over to said post on this domain. Wanting to go one step forward and hopefully make the search engines realize the error of their way – I then added the “permanent” directive into the line”

Redirect permanent /blog/ http://thomnottom.com/blog/

Someday I will want to create a new site at ye olde domain, and I don’t want all of the traffic to turn out to be the unwashed masses legions of my adoring fans that haven’t figured out how to access this site directly. And eventually when people want to find out who hates Macs, they’ll still know that I’m #4 in the world (which reminds me, I must write about about how much Google sucks if that stupid entry is the fourth result on that search – AND WHY THE HELL DIDN’T AN ANTI-MAC POST BRING ME LOADS OF TRAFFIC!).

Next task for this site will be to clean up errors in old entries due to plugins (namely LZIL, which means I need to determine if I’ll keep using that nifty photo plugin or switch to another).

My downfall has been announced – please welcome to this world the Canon EOS 30D.

With the purchase of the house, the wedding, and the subsequent honeymoon all expanding my credit cards at the same rate as the national debt, this purchase is obviously not on the immediate horizon. But I do hope to be able to upgrade my kit by the end of the year. What a fool this mortal be!

You’re vacationing in Hawaii and find a lost camera. Do you:

a. keep it, and thank the universe for the luck.
b. report it to the authorities, and help the original owner find their lost possession.
or…
c. both.

That’s right, just in case you had started to gain faith in humanity, some jerkoffs always come along and ruin it. A Canadian couple found this person’s lost camera during their vacation in Hawaii. They taught their nine year-old son that the proper thing to do was report it so that they might return the camera to its rightful owner. Then they taught him that if you would actually prefer to keep whatever you found, that’s alright too.

Granted, it’s a story on the Internet and you never know for sure, but if this is true… What is wrong with those people? Just keep the camera and pretend the universe was smiling on you for once. Don’t act like stealing it is actually deserved, and that the owner should be thankful for you swindling them.

Those people should be ashamed. The kid doesn’t have to worry about the diabetes nearly as much as the lack of humanity his parents are passing along to him.

P.S. Assuming all legal recourse fails, I’m all in favor of posting their information.

(Thanks to Geof Morris)

W00t! I am online once more. I do have to give Comcast props… at least their workers. All of the installers that I’ve dealt with have been really great. At the last apartment, the guy ripped out all of the old cable and ran new stuff from the street and neatly tacked down three new runs exactly where we wanted them. This time the guy actually showed up early (wow!), and was very quick to get us up and watching the Olympics – not that I kept that on very long.

Sadly, we were already surfing on the Internet before he could even get one of the TVs on. It was as though we hadn’t had a drop to drink for two weeks and just couldn’t wait any longer. LET THE INFORMATION FLOW! There’s just not enough e-mail and webpages to check to make up for the lack of connectivity we’ve suffered. Once the boxes were up and running, I think we just left the TVs on for no reason other than to feel like a part of the world again.

The biggest surprise of the day was checking out the DVR. I left it hooked up at the old apartment for at least a week after we had moved out to try to narrow the gap of missed shows. I was completely oblivious to the fact that Arrested Development bid farewell with the final 4 episodes being shown in succession! I can only hope that Showtime picks it up, but at least I can feel satisfied with the way it ended for now.

I’ve got lots more to share, but for now just rest assured that my life is returning to normal. Oh yeah, and radiators work much better when you open the input valves…