THOMnottom

Yet another weekend is passing by without any progress on the closets that are to become bookcases. Yes, that is their official name. Eventually they will get to be called simply “Built-in Bookcases” or “The Library” – but for now, they must go by the longer name.

But as I am finding out with homeownership, there’s always plenty of things to do and planned projects often give way to needed projects. Yesterday it was a faulty outlet in the bedroom. I realized the thing was crumbling apart, so it became the fifth outlet that I’ve upgraded to 3-prong status. Today it was the office light. A couple days ago I was stretching my arms, and accidentally whacked the overhead light in the office. Our ceilings ain’t exactly high, and the sucker hangs a little low in the middle of the room. I didn’t think it was a big deal until a day or so later I had trouble turning it on. And a day after that, I couldn’t get it on at all.

So today I decided I better deal with that first, seeing as how doing anything in the office was becoming difficult. My original plan was to kill the circuit just long enough to do the work, while allowing my computer to keep running some stuff on the UPS. That last until about 15 minutes in, when I realized that the wires were completely ripped out of the lighting fixture. Time to kill both systems and concentrate on the task at hand.

After a little disassembly, it became obvious that the old fixture had to go. The obvious part was when I tried to unscrewed the contacts and snapped them clean off. Yeah, that’s not gonna work. Fortunately we have an old overhead lamp from Ikea that wasn’t being used. Unfortunately I couldn’t disassemble the incredibly basic, 3 inches of plastic that comprised the socket. Instead, I hacked the cords apart.

Stripping a power cord, and stripping electrical wiring are two different things. In this case the cord was molded around the electrical wires, making it damn near impossible to get off. So I started doing all sorts of inadvisable things with my Leathermen. Not too surprisingly, I cut myself. Somewhat surprisingly, I managed to get TWO fingers. And really not surprising in the least, I continued this process immediately after bandaging them. I guess the biggest surprise in the end is that I didn’t cut myself again, managed to not drip blood all over the place, and actually got the light working.

It’s a little under-powered for the room, but that can be fixed later – probably a different bulb would be enough. There is a certain sense of accomplishment in even the smallest of home improvement tasks. But that’s quickly erased when you realize that you spent the entire day fixing a light that was working 4 days ago and your computer that was working 4 hours ago and managed to make zero progress on your list overall.

Oh joy, and tonight’s the Oscars. Normally I’d skip them (I think I managed to miss just about every nominated film), but with Jon Stewart hosting, this is quite a popcorn affair. I’ll just tell Lisa that she got me sick, and that’s why I didn’t do anything…

What do you get when you cross a bunch of clueless, idealistic (is that redundant) 20-somethings, half a dozen cars, and some video cameras? This time you get a very misguided “demonstration” against speed limits. Oh sure, it sounds like a great idea – have 4 cars drive the speed limit side-by-side to illustrate the fact that it is set too low. But the premise that they were driving legally is completely bogus. Yes, they kept themselves at the speed limit, but they still refused to pass in the left lane and conspired to obstruct traffic.

This is not a group of people demonstrating against an unjust law – this is some college student pissed off because he got a speeding ticket.

Listen, I’m all for a restructuring of speed limits so that those outside of certain areas (such as school zones) properly reflect the 85th percentile rule. But an improperly-realized, hipster-wannabe protest film like this is not the way to do it. Especially when you start whining about how you had to pretend to be on your cell phone so that people wouldn’t be pissed! Great way to break even more laws and show that you can, indeed, drive both slow and recklessly.

I don’t know where this originated, but one of the dorks involved posted a comment on ritilan.com.

(courtesy of MeFi)

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!