Don't Back Down

We already know the Treo 600 is on the streets. Now we see some pictures from the device. Are they real? Who knows. But are the sweet? You bet. Thus far, the biggest complaint I've seen about this phone is that the battery isn't removable. All in all, that's not a long list. No phone, but still want to access the web from anywhere? Take a look at Intel's Hotspot Finder to locate an access point near you.

Cringely put together some more compelling thoughts this week, this time tackling the issue of hive computing. That is, how a bunch of pieces can act together without necessarily knowing the larger picture of the whole. Pretty cool stuff. On a slightly related tangent, the Game of Life (no, not the Milton Bradley board game of the same name) was in the air this week. This "game" shows how parts of a whole can interact based only on a set of rules and no larger concept of the whole to produce some interesting results.

In the That's Disturbing category, we have two entries this week. First, apparently the government has created a group of Nasal Rangers who roam the midwest looking for farms that smell too bad. Not my idea of a dream job. The most disturbing news of the week comes out of St. Louis, where a team of researchers has developed a strain of the Mousepox disease that overcomes already-vaccinated mice to, well, kill them. Doesn't anyone watch bad science fiction anymore, where someone does this, the virus breaks loose and everyone dies? Whatever the case, you might want to stay away from the midwest. Apparently their farms smell and they are willing to die from a mutated virus because of it.

Whew. Enough serious stuff. How about some fun? Tired of your own town, but don't know what to do about it? Maybe you should try the City Creator, where you are able to create things to your liking. Use different times of history, a variety of buildings, and even some people. The people don't move, unfortunately. Perhaps that will come later.

If that's not enough online fun for you, check out one of the more obscure Quizilla tests out there by determining What Horrible Edward Gorey Death You Will Die (from Rod). If you haven't seen the Gashlycrumb Tinies, pay them a visit. Again disturbing, but in a good way.

My death isn't pretty: You will be sucked dry by a leech. I'd stay away from swimming holes, and stick to good old cement. Even if it does hurt like hell when your toe scrapes the bottom. Assuming no leeches are around between now and then, I'll see you next week!

No, not the recent movie with Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson (though that was fun). I'm talking about real-life anger management. Okay, the life of a professional football player might not be too real-life to the rest of us, but it is someone's real life, so bear with me.

Almost a year ago, Carolina Panthers receiver Steve Smith pummelled fellow receiver Anthony Bright during a meeting. Smith received orders to go through anger management counseling and was suspended for a week.

Read "Anger Management" »

I heard an interesting tidbit on the radio this morning. I wish I had heard the whole piece, but I think I got the gist of it. I have to say that I was impressed - I hadn't actually thought of things in these terms. First, an illustration: When you go to vote, do you always cast the maximum number of votes allowed? If so, why?

Let's say that there are four available seats in a given election. Yet you only like three of the eight candidates. Do you still cast that fourth vote? Why is that? There is no law that I know of that requires you to do so. In fact, by doing so, you may even be hurting yourself in the long run.

If you instead vote only for the three candidates you support and withhold your final vote, you have actually influenced the voting process to an even greater degree. Rather than throwing a bone to another candidate that you might not like, and potentially giving them an edge, you withhold that vote so that no one else gets it, thereby not artificially increasing the total of another candidate just because you want to press another button (poke another Chad, check another box, whatever). Think about it!

Yesterday, I received the first items ever from my Amazon.com wish list. Eli Cochran sent me CGI Programming with Perl and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Sweet. Thanks, Eli!

Read "This Thing Works!" »

Recently Denise and I took our second wine trip. This time we decided to head south rather than North. Unfortunately, South Carolina doesn't have a whole lot of wineries that we could find.

Our first stop was Carolina Vineyards, outside Chester, roughly 45 minutes from Charlotte. While we weren't initially impressed with this winery, we were pleasantly surprised by both the proprietor and the quality of his wines. Even though it is a smallish winery by most standards, the quality was quite good. The prices were even better. We bought a bottle of the 1999 Chambourcin and also a bottle of the 2002 White Catawba.

Unfortunately, that was the high point of this trip.

Read "South Carolina Wine Trail" »

The Way means inducing the people to have the same aim as leadership, so that they will share death and share life, without fear of danger.

Last night on NPR, I heard an editorial piece about the use of designer steroids. Specifically, how the Olympics have spent $25 million on testing for steroids this year, and how that amount is only likely to rise in the years to come. For years, America has been fighting a war on drugs in general.

The problem with these "wars"? They aren't particularly successful. The reason? Because for the most part, the people don't agree with the leadership. Just as the public is allowed to poison their body with cigarettes or alcohol, surely they should be allowed to do the same with their drug of choice.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that everything should be legalized and kindergarten students should have easier access to heroin. But if you are of consenting age (whatever age that is determined to be) and choose to pursue this pastime without causing harm to anyone else, why should it be a crime?

There really is little downside. Increased addiction? Sure, it's possible. But in a world where you are responsible for your own choices, why should it be up to the government to protect you from the results of those choices?

Oh, the quote? That's from Master Sun in The Art of War.

Tony has put together a nice list of blogs from the Old North State. If you were born in, live in, have lived in or would like to live in North Carolina, and you're not ashamed of that fact, you might want to check out the North State Blogs. There are some other minor rules, but there aren't many and most of them just make good sense.

While there are other groups in the state, notably the Carolina Bloggers and the Tar Heel Bloggers, this seems to far and away be the most vibrant of the communities.

I've been working on a new site design for a while now, and finally seem to be getting things to come together. Over the next few days, you should start seeing some new layouts on the pages as you browse the blog. Of course, if you're reading via RSS, you likely won't notice a thing.

The first piece of the site to get the new layout is the search result form. This wasn't entirely intentional, but I started using it in conjunction with the test layouts, and I wanted them to look the same. Rather than hacking at it to allow a test search result form, I just decided to take the plunge.

One of the things you'll notice is that there are a lot more XML buttons around. I've finally finished working on the search.pm module, so I can provide dynamic feeds of each individual entry. This is useful as it allows you to subscribe to a single entry in order to keep up on the comments for that entry and only that entry.

Too many times, I've found myself wanting to keep up on stories, but have been unable to find the time to keep visiting the site. Hopefully this will help that and allow conversations to flourish because everyone can keep up. The links to these feeds are somewhat sporadic for now, but you'll see them popping up as I continue to rollout the new design. In the meantime, if you are looking to subscribe to a particular entry so you can monitor its progress, let me know and I'll get you the URL.

In addition, I've added some options to the search. The basic search is still the same, but when you get to the search results page, you'll see a few checkboxes to control your next search. You are able to search on partial words (default is full words only), to match the case (default is case-insensitive), submit regular expressions in the search (good luck) and even have your results returned to you in an RSS 2.0 layout so that you can subscribe to the results.

Enjoy, and please let me know if you run into any problems!

A lot of fuss is being made about spam (as always). Luke doesn't like it, but then, who does? One of the more popular collection methods used by spammers is accomplished by harvesting email addresses from web pages. So you might not want your email on a web page, right? How do you get around it?

Luckily there are some options if you have your own site. If you have access to PHP, the fine folks at EmbiMEDIA have created a quick script to allow you to easily encode your email address so that it's not immediately legible to harvesters. There are Javascript solutions too, but I tend to shy away from JS as not everyone uses it.

If you don't have access to PHP, then you can always encode the characters the hard way, by hand. What's that? Don't know the characters in their URL-encoded form? Turns out that we can help with that too (thanks Tony). What I really don't understand is why these harvesters don't use the same technology as browsers to translate the characters. Seems easy enough, but they apparently don't.

For those of you who missed it, Google continues their march to world domination with the introduction of the Google Deskbar. A close cousin of the Google Toolbar, the Deskbar allows you to put a Google search right there on your toolbar. The search even supports Google operators such as define: and the Google Calculator. What's more is the Deskbar is easily accessible from any app by pressing Ctrl+Alt+G. Very cool stuff and perhaps one reason why Google allegedly rejected a takeover offer from Microsoft.

In fiasco news, the government has decided to ditch the goodwill generated by the unguided robot race from Las Vegas to Los Angeles by making sure only 20 contestants can compete. Unfortunately, several teams more than 20 have their sights set on the race and are likely to be left out in the cold. Your Department of Defense at work. Come up with a challenge, ask people to meet it, then tell them that you can only take a certain number of entries. Sounds like the same old, same old to me.

Looking to pass the time on a dreary Saturday morning? Check out the maze generator or the church sign generator (thanks Jeremy and Les) and you will likely be able to amuse yourself for hours!

Until next week...

Earlier this week, I met with two new experiences. In the first, I received some goodies from my Amazon Wish List, courtesy of a presumably happy customer of one of my Movable Type plugins. In the second, that same person asked if I'd be interested in doing some Perl work for him on a project he was working on.

Read "Am I a Consultant Now?" »

I think I've fixed the index to the point where it should work as expected with the new design. Please, please, please let me know if you see any problems. There are still a couple of areas that I'm not completely happy with because I can't seem to figure out why they display correctly sometimes and not others.

One of those is the sidebar. It looks good in Mozilla, but occasionally in IE it will disappear (actually it just moves down the page) when you increase or decrease the default font size. The other is the bottom banner. Seems it gets out of whack from time to time on IE. I don't know why, and often a refresh will fix it, but sometimes the spacing just isn't right.

Other than that, I think that this is the design I'm going to go with. Let me know your thoughts (even if you disagree). Thus far this is only the second page I've updated, so it's easy to back out at this point!

Update: I've got a couple things that aren't quite valid in both the CSS and the XHTML of the new layout. They're on the list.

Last night, Denise and I visited the Off Tryon Theatre Company for their production of Quills. I actually enjoyed this stage production much better than the 2000 movie starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix and Michael Caine.

Unlike the innerVoices production of Rocky Horror that we attended a couple of weeks ago, this production was quite refined. Instead of a nearly empty set with minimal furnishings, the designers of the Quills set did a fine job, splitting the stage area into three sections, two of which are used regularly as the office of Charenton Asylum and the cell of the Marquis. The third section of the stage is used sparsely but effectively throughout.

Read "Quills" »