Don't Back Down

I was reading today that the average wedding costs nearly nineteen thousand dollars. On March 22nd of this year, Denise and I were married and ours cost less than $8000, including the rings and honeymoon.

The secret? We kept it small. We started off trying to figure out who to invite. The first problem we ran into is that we were planning on getting married quickly. No, she wasn't pregnant. We were trying to avoid having to make two house payments, so we wanted to combine things as soon as possible. This automatically excluded a number of people who simply wouldn't be able to make arrangements on such short notice.

Read "Wedding Bills" »

I came across a post by someone who found something I wrote to be useful. That's cool. I'm glad someone is reading.

One thing that this post reminded me of, that I didn't mention previously, is the MIME type of the document being served. In the case of HTML, the longstanding tradition has been to serve the document as text/html. This is what we've always done, and this is what most people continue to do now.

Read "Serving Content" »

I generally listen to Bob & Tom on my way to work. Like most radio shows, they are often (but not always) entertaining. Some days they just float by in the background and I'd be hard-pressed to remember what is said.

Quit giving me those looks. Listening to Howard Stern or John Boy & Billy does not mean that you enjoy more sophisticated humor. Ace & TJ aren't any better, either- it's just that the jokes are a bit more suitable for family entertainment. Bob & Sheri? Please. It's all noise, it's pretty much all juvenile, and we all enjoy our own flavor. Fair enough?

Read "Watch Out for Beavers" »

I had looked around for a way to create a calendar in my blog that worked like the <MTCalendar> container, but for a week instead of a month. There are all sorts of plugins out there that come close.

Brad Choate has a plugin called onthisday, that allows you to show entries from the same day and different years. Kevin Shay offers DateTags, that probably does everything I want, but looked too complex to me.

Even Movable Type has the days="7" function that comes close - but it includes only entries, and not the days without. So I wrote my own.

Read "MT-SomeDays 1.0.0" »

The Internet is a pretty interesting phenomenon. It often seems that once something is published on the Internet - and published is a very loose term, often applying simply to email that appears to be from a source of authority - it becomes gospel.

Let's look at the most recent entry. The power blackouts of the Northeastern US (and parts of Canada) resulted in a number of blogs pointing out this alleged picture of the US as seen from space on the night of 8/14. There's at least one site taking this picture one step further and claiming that it is evidence of an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse). Of course, this site apparently sells emergency survival supplies, so it's naturally in their best interest.

Read "Hoaxes Everywhere" »

When I actually went to implement MT-SomeDays, I found some problems.

First was a non-numeric message when using the <$MTSDWorkDate$> tag when used in conjunction with the format option. It would actually work correctly, so long as your format pattern did not include hours minutes or seconds, but it would return messages.

Read "MT-SomeDays 1.1.0" »

My aggregator of choice, Bloglines, continues its evoluationary journey to world domination. Recently the site introduced yet another new feature. This one allows me to share my subscriptions with you. This way if you'd like to know what I'm reading, you can find out at any time. And yes, I do subscribe to my own feed. As if you don't subscribe to yours.

The other day I talked about the amount of wedding bills piled up by your typical couple on their special day. About a week ago, I went into the lifestyles that seem so prevalent these days. When was it, exactly, that our lives changed so much that they revolved around these material things?

Was it when the bumper stickers first told us that The One Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins? Or perhaps when Madonna first regaled us with Material Girl?

Read "Dilbert Finance" »

An excerpt from a letter published in the September 3 issue of Creative Loafing:

One program which would at least help to reduce the spread of HIV would be a clean-needle program -- the distribution of unused, sterile syringes to anyone, no questions asked. As a former public health nurse, I know that these supplies are cheap and easy to obtain....I have had the onerous task of informing a 19-year-old girl that she was HIV positive, and I'm betting she was already well aware of its causes. For her it was (she said) a contaminated needle. Twenty-five cents or so from a local health department for a clean syringe could have spared her this devastating news. -- Amy Keith, RN, Charlotte

Read "Spare Change" »

Yes, having a sequel to a final vote is a little strange. But that's what it is, after all. Nonetheless, the names are up for vote (again) and those votes are rolling in. Perhaps rolling isn't the best term. I think there are twelve votes so far.

Read "Final Vote II" »

Three times in the last week I received comment spam. If you happened across it while reading one of my entries, I apologize for not getting to it quickly enough. All traces of those comments should be gone, but if you notice more, please let me know about it. Ads for penis enlargement simply aren't wanted here.

Read "Combating Comment Spam" »

Okay, so I'm a moron. While it was an entertaining exercise, yesterday's bit about using PHP to block IP addresses probably wasn't completely necessary. Yes, that's right - Movable Type has IP banning built right in. So I just add the IP address to the list, and the only functionality that changes is that the user cannot leave a comment, nor can they send a trackback. Geez...

Read "Moron IP Banning" »