Dave Kellam

Hi, welcome to eightface.com (or not if you’re a feed junkie), I’ve been doing this for awhile now. About half a decade, that’s a long time in dog years. If you’re pissy and want to get technical (ie. whois LOLZ!!1!), eightface.com has only existed since August 16, 2000, but the weblog has been going strong since May 9th, 2000.

Around that time I discovered Blogger and thought it was man’s greatest creation since the waffle iron. Until that point I had been updating various versions of my sites through the wonderful ftp process. In hindsight, I could have used a shell account, but they were only available on more expensive hosting plans back in the day.

FTP is great, but was hard to update from someone else’s machine because no one usually had a client installed. Blogger meant I had a nice easy-to-use web interface that I could login to from anywhere. Somewhere along the lines, there was a period of instability for Pyra and Blogger, so I felt the need to host the database in my server space, with my own content management system. I started using Movable Type in March 2002. And continued to use it for a number of years, before switching to WordPress in January of this year.

If you’re still with me, we can even dig through the archives: May 2005, May 2004, May 2003, May 2002, May 2001, May 2000.

It’s been awhile. I started it at the end of high-school, I’m now about to graduate from university for the second time. It’s a different world, both on the web and off. No one had link blogs, every weblog used to be a bunch of quick one-off links and a paragraph or so describing what was going on. But posts started getting longer as people started becoming more comfortable and perhaps more eloquent. We never used to have a title field for posts. Back then, Bush and Iraq were so 10 years ago. This post is now almost over and I may attempt to wait another 5 years before writing such lengthy and self-indulgent filth.

That’s about it. Except for the incredibly self-indulgent part — the pimping of some recent additions to the weblog:

• Turning my degree into a paper airplane
• iPod Possum
• Dissecting Queen’s Alumni Spam pt I
• Dissecting Queen’s Alumni Spam pt II
• Links, Template Land and Personal Design
• Making an infrared webcam
• Buy my stupid t-shirt!

Now it’s over.

As Gregory pointed out, there’s not really an easy way to figure out your Flickr user id number. The only thing you can really do is take a look at the source of your photostream and pick the id out of the RSS feed address.

To remedy the situation I threw together Flickr idGetter, a little page that finds the user id for you. It essentially does the same thing you would, grabs the page, looks at the source and finds your id.

And you wonder why everyone gets so many parking tickets around here. I guess it’s how the city makes money.

Finally got around to seeing Sin City a couple of days ago after a number of aborted attempts. It seemed like time conspired against any attempts to actually get out to a movie theatre. I won’t make this long because there are tons of other reviews you could read at this point. I’ll say that stylistically it’s pretty amazing and definitely worth checking out in the theatre before it goes away. It’s also worth it to see Elijah Wood in an incredibly creepy post-Hobbit role.

My only complaint would be that the dialogue was a tad on the stilted side, then again, it reflected the comic book style. If I had to complain about something else, I’d say that it took me awhile to figure out what the hell was going on in the film.