News Goat

Wondered Whatever Became of Me

2005-02-28T22:57:36-06:00

Wow, that was a long time without an update, huh? I have a very good reason, though. I’ve spent the past month working on a new design for this site. I’ve noticed I tend not to post anything right before a redesign. I guess it seems like a waste — I’m not sure. Of course, that doesn’t explain the lack of updates in January. But, some things just can’t be explained. Anyway, this is fair warning: This site is going to be torn down and rebuilt. Hopefully it will done tonight, but if it’s not, well, that’s ok too. It will get finished. In the mean time, expect some strangeness. And if that’s not good advice for living one’s life, I don’t know what is.

Organizing Feeds

2005-01-03T21:54:08-06:00

While discussing RSS reader market share, Nick hits on something that has bothered me about FeedDemon: Perhaps more importantly, FeedDemon only automatically updates feeds in the current channel group. … It makes far more sense to me to regularly update only the feeds you regularly read. While this does make sense, I think it probably works counter to the way most people use aggregators. I organize my feeds by subject — web design, news, humor, etc. Having a “most read” category that I had to keep updated with whatever I found most interesting at the time sounds like a lot more work than I’m willing to put into an aggregator. Rather than just disagree, I would like to offer a couple of ideas. These are just off the top of my head, so I don’t know how feasible they are, or if FeedDemon (or any other aggregator) already supports any of this: Feed Labels — Users could apply any number of different labels to each feed. Not every site fits into only one category — for example, I would have Zeldman under Accessibility and Web Design. The application would have a list of labels; clicking a label would list all feeds with that label. Then, Channel Groups could be used for organizing based on frequency of reading. Auto Adjustments — FeedDemon could adjust how often it checks sites based on how often it finds new posts. If, for example, it defaulted to hitting my site every 3 hours, but found after a week that I was averaging once a day, it could automatically adjust to checking every 24 hours. This should probably be a rolling average over a time period set by the user. And, of course, it should still respect the tag. With this, I think FeedDemon could automatically update all Channel Groups, but still not be a bandwidth hog. Anyway, those are a couple of ideas. Like I’ve said before, FeedDemon is the best standalone feed aggregator I’ve ever used. It’s just not compatible with the way I think. Lots of things are like that. :-)

End-of-the-Year Clearance

2004-12-31T20:41:08-06:00

Around this time last year I wrote about my 2004 resolutions and plans for the upcoming year. So, this seems like a good time to look back at how I did, and make some plans for next year.

Presentation Tomorrow

2004-12-15T20:29:23-06:00

Just a quick note while I avoid working on it: I’m doing a presentation tomorrow for the Computer Club of Oklahoma City on creating PDF files. What can I say — they were desperate, and with such short notice I didn’t have time to come up with a topic, so I took the one they gave me. Anyway, it’s in Suite 201 of the Centre 3000 Building located at 3000 United Founders Boulevard, Oklahoma City, OK, if you’re interested in seeing it. It’s free and open to the public. I’m afraid I don’t have much else to report right now. Business is keeping me busy. It’s funny, last year at this time things were kind of slow. I assumed most people were waiting until after the first of the year to start any new projects. This year, I’ve picked up a lot of work in the last couple of months. I guess you just never know. I’ll do an end-of-the-year post in the next couple of weeks to talk about what’s happened this year and my plans for next year. January will probably also see light blogging, but hopefully things will slow down just a tad in February and I can get back in the rhythm. Update: The presentation went well. If you would like to see the slides you can find them here. I used Eric’s S5 for the presentation, and it worked great. It’s perfect for us hand-coders that are more comfortable with XHTML than we are with Powerpoint.

Meet Pumpkin

2004-11-17T22:29:51-06:00

Pumpkin showed up on our doorstep last year on Halloween night with a bunch of Trick or Treaters. She was such a friendly cat, and kept coming around, that we decided to put some food out for her. Well, of course, she continued to come around. As the nights started to get colder, Angela & I started to worry about her — the cat looked like she might be pregnant. So, we decided to take her in. The first thing we did was take her to the vet. No, she wasn’t pregnant, she was just fat — apparently both our neighbors were leaving food out for her as well. We decided to name her Pumpkin because of her color and because of her showing up on Halloween night. Her introduction to Miss Kitty wasn’t the smoothest “first contact” ever, but they’ve settled their differences. And, by settled, I mean they attack each other constantly. I’m pretty sure they’re just playing. There’s no hissing involved, just cats chasing each other, pouncing on each other, and wrestling each other to the ground. In a friendly sort of way. Like Kelly, Pumpkin loves people. It doesn’t take her long to decide someone is ok. Once you pass inspection, you’re her life-long friend, and she will be constantly walking up to you and wiggling her bottom so she can bump against your leg. Pumpkin is also quite mischievous. I keep telling her the story about how curiosity killed the cat, but I’m not sure she gets it. Or maybe she doesn’t know she’s a cat. Regardless, she has a habit of sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. It’s cute, in a rotten sort of way.

Meet Kelly

2004-11-17T22:08:17-06:00

Kelly has been with us for about a year and a half now, and I can’t believe I never got around to posting her picture here. She was given to us by somebody we worked with at the old place. That person had found her on Kelly Ave. (hence the name), and since she already had seven dogs (I. Can’t. Imagine.), thought she should find a new home for Kelly. Angela & I are complete and utter suckers, so we took her. Around people, Kelly is the sweetest dog in the world. Her only goal in life is to be touched. Whenever she sees us she makes this strange cooing growl, as if we’re in trouble for being out of her sight for so long. She’s the kind of dog you want to have around when you have company, because you know she’ll be the hit of the party. Around other dogs, however, Kelly is a complete bully. She and Bernie have an understanding, but anytime she gets around other dogs she gets very aggresive — so much so that we don’t tend to take her out in public much.

Podcasting Article

2004-11-17T00:18:54-06:00

As mentioned previously, here is the article I wrote about podcasting. Nothing shocking, but if you don’t know what podcasting is already, you might find it informative. I’m trying to get caught back up on blogging. Expect more, soon.

Communicating with Customers

2004-10-26T10:11:10-06:00

Imagine this scenario: You visit a museum for the first time. After walking around for a while, you go up to someone who works there. You: Hi, I really enjoy this exhibit! Where is the bathroom? Employee: Thank you. That exchange is followed by awkward silence as you realize you are not going to get an answer to your question. Of course, the setting doesn’t matter — this could just as easily be in a store, a salon, etc. No matter where it happened, it would be just as bizarre. Unless, of course, it happened in email.

Washington Fat Cats

2004-10-24T19:57:19-06:00

This MSN article about obesity rates by state caught my eye because I always like to see how Oklahoma does on such charts. Fourteenth. I figure, by the end of football season we should be at least third. Anyway, I started noticing how many southern states were in the top ten. Which made me wonder: Is there any correlation between obesity rates and how a state votes for president? Oh, c’mon. You were wondering the same thing. Admit it. So, I took the data from the article and matched it with the current map at the Electoral Vote Predictor. Here’s what I found: Average adult obesity rate across all states: 22.8% Average adult obesity rate among states voting for Kerry: 21.3% Average adult obesity rate among states voting for Bush: 23.4% So there you have it: Scientific evidence that weight determines a person’s political affiliation. Or vice versa. Or not. More importantly, if you hurry, there’s still time to register fatsosforbush.com or anorexicsforkerry.com before the election.

I've Always Wanted to Pretend I'm an Architect

2004-10-20T23:26:18-06:00

I had a professor in college who would often talk about software projects in terms of hiring someone to build you a house. Once the blueprints have been drawn up, you can ask for anything you want and they’ll do it, but they will charge you. And, it won’t me a small fee, either. Maybe that’s why I got such a chuckle out of this: If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers… It’s along the same lines of something I wrote recently. (via Keith)

The Internet: Not a Good Hiding Place

2004-10-19T23:53:27-06:00

Comics are one of those things that just make sense to subscribe to in a newsreader. If it doesn’t come to you, you probably won’t bother to go get it. That’s why I really appreciate the feeds at Tapestry. When Tapestry stopped carrying feeds from UComics (because he was forced to by the people at UComics who don’t understand how to treat their customers), I decided to throw together my own feed for my own use. After I’d been using Bloglines for a while, I discovered that other people were subscribed to my comics feed as well. Now, I didn’t really mind, since the bandwidth use was almost nothing. But, I didn’t want to have the UComics people coming after me for republishing their comics, like they did to Tapestry. So, I moved the feed, and when I subscribed to the new feed in Bloglines, I chose the option, “Access: Private.” Yeah, no, that doesn’t do what you think it does. It keeps the feed from showing up in your personal blogroll, but it still appears in the Bloglines directory. Which means people found it again, so I’m moving it again. But, to show I’m not completely, “sellin’ out to the man,” I’m putting the code here for people to use if they want to setup their own private feed: Download mycomics.php It’s pretty simple. To use as is, just unzip it and upload the file to your web server. You could add more comics to it — the UComics “formula” for URLs isn’t hard to figure out. Anyway, it’s released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, so do with it what you will.

Community College

2004-10-15T22:28:49-06:00

I watched the presidential debate the other night. Actually, I’ve watched all of them. I keep hoping to see one of those movie moments where someone says or does something and everybody knows that’s it: The tide has turned because of that one moment. Because of that one moment, we will have a clear winner on November 2, not the debacle that occurred last election. Unfortunately, that never happened. Thank the Commission on Presidential Debates. It’s their job to insure that nothing significant happens at these events. They’re very good at what they do. However, lost among all the issues was one little statement that really irritated me. When asked what he would say to a worker who lost their job to outsourcing, President Bush responded: …Here’s some help for you to go to a community college. What a lovely idea. Why didn’t the 140,000+ white-collar workers who have lost their jobs to outsourcing, most of whom probably already have at least a bachelor’s degree, think of that? They can just go to a community college so they can get a completely different job that makes no use of their current skill set. If they work hard, in 10 years they just might make it up to the same salary they were at … when they took their first job out of college. Now, I don’t know what should be done about outsourcing, but telling people they just have to start over isn’t a very encouraging answer. And it wasn’t just what he said, it was how he said it. As if professionals should be happy the government will help them throw away all their training and experience and get a lower paying job. Personally, I would prefer a president who offers hope instead of defeatism. Help people keep their current jobs, or get better ones. Instead of sending them to community colleges, pay for education that will advance them in their current career field. Better yet, spend that money on research and development that will create new markets and new jobs. Then, everybody wins. I debated about writing this (Debated, get it? Oh, well, nevermind then.), because I’m trying really hard not to write about politics. But, since I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else, I felt it needed to be said.

Podcasting

2004-10-05T17:09:04-06:00

I’m excited by what I’m reading about podcasting. Ok, excited is a little strong. Ritalin-controlled excited is more accurate. The potential for greatness is there, but the landscape is pretty desolate so far. Once more interesting podcasts pop up, then I’ll be really excited. Podcasting is the term used for being able to automatically download stuff (songs, radio shows, etc.) from the Internet to your iPod (by which we mean any popular, large-capacity personal MP3 player, by which we mean an iPod). This is done with a news aggregator that knows what to do with RSS enclosures. I hope this becomes wide-spread. I’d love to be able to get feeds of NPR shows that I could carry with me and listen to all day, or save up for a road trip. If you’re interested in finding out more, Engadget has a good overview. I’m working on an article about this for the next eMonitor and I’ll post about that when it’s done.

Food as Sport

2004-10-03T21:58:03-06:00

You know what I like about the State Fair of Oklahoma? It’s obviously not the web site. No, it’s the culture. It’s the free exchange of ideas. It’s food on a stick. The state fair is a place for artisans to display their crafts. Whether you’re an artist, performer, or even a pie-eater, the state fair is a place for you to demonstrate your talent. I am proud to say my wife did just that. Besides winning two first places (this pin and this card) in the craft categories, Angela’s name was drawn to participate in a pie-eating contest. She wasn’t the winner — audience cheering decided the contest, and the winner brought quite a posse. However, I think she did pretty well for herself. You be the judge — Angela is the third pie eater shown: Pie-eating contest — Dial-up connection (215KB) Pie-eating contest — Broadband connection (2.5MB)

Vote Early, Vote Often

2004-09-22T10:39:17-06:00

I don’t write about politics very often. There are a variety of reasons for this, the main one being that I just don’t like writing about politics. In the past few years I’ve become very interested in the political process, so I read a lot about it and try to follow the current issues and trends. But, in this particular area, I’m a sponge and not a faucet. There are many people who write about politics much better than I could, so I leave it to them. I’m making an exception today for two reasons: First, I truly believe this year’s presidential election is one of the most important in U.S. history. There are so many issues that have been building up over the past twenty years or so that will be coming to a head soon, probably within the next decade. It is so important that we make informed decisions now to insure freedom and prosperity in the future. My other reason for bringing this up is also about prosperity in the future: I would really like to win a hundred thousand dollars. But, I’m not just thinking of myself — you can win a hundred thousand bucks, too. If you are a registred U.S. voter, go to Vote or Not and sign up for their sweepstakes. Not registered? You can do that while you’re there. And, if you win, I win. Isn’t America great? Now that you’re registered and have that all-important right to vote, make the most of it. Visit Project Vote Smart and learn about the candidates and where they stand on issues that are important to you. Then, choose wisely.