Search on Blogger

It seems to be broken. Go ahead search for 'caveat' or 'orison'. Both should turn something up, but both don't seem to quite cut it.

As an aside, you can also post pictures with Flikr And supposedly it's cross platform. I'll have to investigate and get back on this.

Definition of Tied to your Job

Tied to your Job(n): See Me.

Yeah it's kind of scary when you are up at 12:29am and checking email at work so that you can keep abreast of the situation and show up to work in the morning smelling like roses.

With all the diaper changes however, I doubt that is what I smell like. Man crying babies are cute. Sort of. Well, when they are yours. Other people's children aren't nearly as adorable as mine when they are wailing like a banshee. Or is that beaun sidhe?

Pipe Mud

Sometimes a corn cob pipe or a briar will get a burn out. This is when the fire burns clean through to the outside. Some people then go and throw out the pipe.

Not me.

I take the pipe and fill it with ash and then some water. Make it a slurry and cake the hole up. Suck some flame through it and repeat. It forms a clay plug. Seems to work just fine. Heard of this recipe before in alt.smokers.pipes and it was called pipe mud. Seems appropos. And now my corncob lives to smoke another day.

Ah Hello caveat

Once the pictures are on the blogger server, it appears they are up there forever.....

Example 1

Learning Curves

Learning Curves are the bane of my existence. What is a learning curve you ask? Well it's the time it takes to learn something plotted out on a graph. It's kind of like climbing a mountain. The shallower the slope the easier it is to get up to the summit. Likewise, as time wears on the hill gets steeper and you don't get as far to you goal.

Why do I bring this up? Well applications aim for a shallow learning curve for 90$ of the product. If it takes a long time to anything on the application then there is a good chance that there will be a competitor that makes it simpler or people just won't use the application at all.

My learning curve idiocy today was with Hello. There is a seciont in the preferences as to what size do you want the pictures. I though it meant that it was the size it was going to be on the page itself. Turns out I was wrong (suprise suprise). It is the size that it is stored as on the server proper. While I think that the WebDAV idea is still good, I can now post pictures at a size closer to what I wanted in the first place. And wow, these hotkeys in the editor are nice. Google has got that down I have to give them props for that. Granted saying 'give them props" or "kudos" is sooo 90's.

MSU-Bozeman Classified Position Vacancy Announcement

MSU-Bozeman Classified Position Vacancy Announcement

This is Luke's old job. Scary, eh?

Hello, again or "My Beef with Hello"

So Hello is a neat program. Sure it's a little feature sparse, but that's due to my not having climbed the learning curve. I think. Anyways, my beef with the photoblogging here is a) there is no linux/unix client b) there doesn't seem to be any opensource way to post new pictures.

Now for some folks this isn't that big of a deal. Especially with the massive amount of windows and macintosh users. But for those of us that don't have either or don't want to push closed source or semi closed source products we are in the cold.

I don't like that. Now, my idea to fix this: Make a webdav server. Keep the quotas low and have a bot scan for new files. Pick new files up, mangle and resize them and then post them to the server. Since jpegs are able to have comments in them, make it so that it reads any comments and uses that as a preliminary blog entry, possibly with ImageMagick. Sure it would have be retweaked for some pictures, but at least then it would be open source protocols and more platform free. And since there is still a way to do this via windows and mac's it would be an add-on rather than having to abandon a useful business partnership. In addition, if it were labelled an 'Advanced Feature' there would less of a chance that the tech support would have to scale upwards to deal with user questions. I know my grandparents would choose the windows Hello client rather than try something that they *know* isn't at their level, yet.

Hello and Blogspot

It's a good idea. On paper. The only problem is that I have some pictures that I *really* want larger than the small size that Hello changes it to before posting it on their server. . . Not sure I really like that.

The Blog that wasn't

You know what is weird. When blogger times out and says that there is a java.io error. I thought this was all written in python. Shows how much I seem to know.

VRVS

Hm, some people really want me to do this at my work. I like AG myself, but eh, someone out there might know something better.

Futurama in a header

For those of you fortunate to have something unix-y:

lynx -dump -head http://slashdot.org | grep "\(X-Fry\|X-Bender\)"

Now *that's* funny.

Formatting and Hello

Hello to pictures on my blog. ::Dance::
With that said in order to get comments to work, I'm going to have to go with one of the newer templates. Yuck. Oh well, I'd really like to have someone tell me that this or that is neat or not. . .

Zelda the Return

Here are some hard core folks. I mean super hard core. And they are into zelda. Well not so much the original game but taking the concepts of the character and making new legend of zeldas in the old NES sense of the word. It's just too cool. You know, I'm not really sure where I got this link from but it could have been Slashdot. A lot of the neat things I find there tend to make their way to this blog.

Oops

Yeah looks like orison is indeed a prayer. A fervent prayer, to a deity. So OnyxOrison would be a black prayer. Ick. Hm, I need to find someone to blame this on. Oh wait, just me. Definition is right here.

Yet another linux

You know, one would think that people would get sick of seeing new linux's all the time. Not me. Ubuntu is just one sort of linux. It's Debian related so it's got that apt-get funkiness. Anything that comes with apt-get or yum by default is a-ok in my opinion. Well, it's not gentoo's portage, but there are so few perfect package managers out there. I *love* portage.

Opera

Normally I pimp Mozilla and FireFox. The thing is that they have stopped being able to be compiled for my machine at work. So I've started using Opera. It's pretty straightforward and much smaller than I would have though given that it does come with an email and irc client as well as a browser. It was under 3.8 MB and that's tiny even when compared to FireFox. Neat neat stuff.

Dice Pouches

This is a kick ass site. They sell custom made dice pouches. And they are not just for dice either. You can get them for cards as well. That was a neat ass idea.

Links that Are Important

• Google News


• Kevin, the Legend Continues


• Wil Wheaton, Linux Advocate


• DesignTechnica Reviews (eHome)

Well they are to me at least. WHenever you change your template on Blogger you lose that link section, esp if it doesn't exist in the new section. They just haven't been able to figure out how to parse the important parts out of a tinkered page. Can't say I blame them, esp with html.

My Son

Apple Stickers

Apple Stickers! For the geek that wants it all. Now if only someone would get me Thom's kick ass Ganesh sticker.

HashCash

No I don't think it'll go anywhere. But it's a neat idea. Ok, synopsis from freshmeat, people have to pay computationally to send you emails. Since cycles are finite, this creates an artificial economy [or an agreed upon economy] and therefore makes it "hard" to spam.