Don't Back Down

A recent article mentioned that Tamyra Gray, fourth-place finisher in the inaugural American Idol season, thinks that you have to be really careful what you say and do (on TV, presumably). Here's what I don't get. Ms. Gray mentions that when talking about La Toya London, who said she was already a winner. To me, that sounds like positive thinking, and I really don't understand. Sounds catty if anything.

For a better example of watching what you'd say, I'd look to Ms. Gray herself. Near the end of that article, she is asked where she would be if she hadn't been on American Idol. Her answer? Probably Broadway. That sounds much more like a boast to me. She may have gone to Broadway, and she may or may not have made it - she does have some talent - but to simply assume she would be working there? That might be a bit much.

And while I'm talking about Things Idols Say, what is up with Fantasia Barrino? This year's Idol winner said in her acceptance speech that she had worked for everything she had. I'm sorry? I don't begrudge Ms. Barrino anything, and out of the competition she faced, I think she was easily the most talented. But we're talking about a 19 year old who gets picked for a reality show, wins it, and gets a recording contract. Even fourth-place finisher Gray has had spots on TV shows essentially thrown at her. Where exactly does the working part find its way into the story?

Apparently the time has come to purchase yet another license from the City of Charlotte. Lucky me. Turns out I got one for half price just two short months ago, as there was only one quarter of the year left. Figure that out.

Read "Voluntary Licensing" »

I admit it. Advertising rarely works on me. I'm much more likely to get excited about seeing a 160GB hard drive for $100, listed in plain text in some obscure computer catalog, than I am to be impressed by the fact that some athelete gets paid to say he eats Fruit Loops. And while I did happen to purchase such a hard drive a while back, I don't currently know where such a deal is available. Sorry.

I've talked about this before. I think it's because I don't understand it. Maybe my brain is just wired differently. A fact that I'm thankful for, to be sure. But I don't get why I should be impressed about the official fast food restaurant of a sports team (that makes sense) or by the fact that some company pays someone millions of dollars for a sticker to put on their race car. I don't see why that should drive my buying habits.

Luckily for those companies, there are some who do.

Recently I completed my first extension for Mozilla. It was a good experience. Though not particularly well documented, the extensibility of Mozilla is excellent. I thought I'd share a few tips on the process. I had to dig for most of this, so some of my conclusions may not be completely accurate and I might not use the appropriate terminology in each case.

Read "Mozilla Extensions" »

I often have difficulty understanding how the government views money. For instance, why did they choose to spend fifty-three million dollars on an advertising campaign to tell everyone about their wonderful new money and that it's worth the same as the old money?

Read "Moron Government Money" »

Okay, I'm not even going to talk about the subject of the post. Draw your own conclusions. But that's what they said they wanted.

Read "Using the Tool" »

Since I upgraded to Movable Type 3.0D, it wasn't possible to syndicate the search results. I finally had a few minutes to get the changes in place, and so syndicated search results should again be possible, for multiple results or a single entry. Please let me know if you encounter any problems with it (or anything else).

Update: Okay, I'm having some problems with the search results when they go through any template other than the default one. Seems the results time out and you don't get anything. If you refresh right away it generally works, but that doesn't help those who poll the data once an hour. I'm going to create individual archive feeds, which will also help with the processing load on the server.

Update: I've created individual archive feeds, which can now be accessed from the XML links on each entry. This will replace the functionality of the search-based results, which means your results may be available more frequently than they were due to timeouts and the like. The 'old way' of doing it through the search and generating the XML dynamically should continue to work too, though you may run into some problems with actually getting the feed. Let me know if you run into any problems.

At least one person agrees with my fiscal worries. Naturally, others don't.

Maybe the problem isn't just the government. Maybe the problem is that people are so used to what they are getting that they come to look at it as an entitlement instead of something that must be constantly earned. I'm sure I'm guilty of doing the same thing from time to time, but it seems to be the rule in our society, rather than the exception.

When I lost my job earlier this year, we had to make some changes. Not a lot of them, but we definitely had to start paying more attention to where our money was going. We still don't have a budget, but we do try and stay on top of things. And one thing that has really come of it is that we realized just how important it is to hold on more tightly to the things that really matter, and how completely unimportant it is to continue getting caught up in the ridiculous things that we only think are important.

I finally took the plunge and installed Movable Type version 3 on the site. I've been toying with it since the early alpha, but didn't have the motivation to really get it installed and working until now. Why now? That's a very interesting question.

Read "Version Three" »

First, some disclaimers: While forensic is probably accurate in at least one sense, I'm not an examiner of any sort or by any means. All observations are simply casual observations, nothing more. My deepest sympathy goes out to the family of this - and any other - person killed in pretty much any situation. But most often in one such as this where the whole world shares in that moment and you simply cannot get away from it.

In case you hadn't guessed, I was recently able to watch the video. Okay, that's probably not completely true either. I watched a video, which I am led to believe is the video. Based on the comparison of the clips I've seen on TV, I'd say it's a reasonable assumption.

Read "Forensic Video" »

Being that I've only had this host for a few days, and that there was an expected yet unexpected spike in traffic recently, I figured it would be worth looking at the stats to see how things were going. Naturally, I've attracted a bit of Mozilla (and Firefox) attention in the last couple of days. No surprise there at all. What did surprise me was how that traffic was split up into different browsers.

For the first time in recent memory, a browser that is not some version of IE has found its way to the top of the list. Very impressive. In the last 5 days or so, it seems that Mozilla (no version given) has topped all other browsers, with 35.3% of the traffic. Including other Mozilla-based browsers, that number increases to 36.9%. Second place goes to IE 6.0, with 32.6% (all IE versions combine for 39.4% of traffic).

As to the other browsers, Safari rings in with an impressive 3.9%, NetNewsWire 1.6%, Netscape 1.0%, Opera 0.8%, Galeon 0.3% and Konqueror 0.2%. A handful of others are scattered about with less than 0.1% of traffic. I'm assuming that since NetNewsWire shows up in the list that the 14.9% of traffic attributed to unknown browsers is actually due to those reading via an aggregator of some sort.

Naturally, this breakdown may vary on other sites, and as interest in the Bloglines Toolkit for Mozilla winds down, Mozilla traffic may taper off a bit. But I still think it's an interesting exercise. While giving too much weight to Mozilla is probably a bad idea, giving too much weight to some of those other browsers is probably a bad idea too. I, for one, would not have expected to see Safari with nearly 4% of the traffic. Now I'm going to have to get a Mac for testing!