Dave Kellam

Had a good day yesterday; ventured downtown and spent plenty of time browsing the bookshelves at indigo and the liquor shelves at the liquor store. I stopped by Dave’s place and bounced around some ideas about creating a media/recording company. My purchases from the bookstore included a cheap copy of The Hacker Ethic (hardcover with cool minimalist binding), a copy of Frank magazine, and some things for Alanah. The liquor store presented me with a couple bottles of wine, both from the Rhone Valley in France. I did a short exchange there when I was younger and liked the wine from around there.

After that was food shopping and cooking. Alanah came over, we had some wine and cheeses, then we cooked up a couple of steaks, some crazy potatoes and onions (with lemon, butter and brown sugar), a tomato and mozzarella salad type thing and some garlic bread. Ate with candles burning, sat around drinking wine and talking. She gave me a copy of Pattern Recognition, Talkie Walkie, some chocolate covered coffee beans and some Glenfiddich. All in all, a great night.

I’ve been doing some updates to the writing section as well. A good chunk of the things I’ve written for the paper this year are online (and by that I mean the eds).

Atom is a new specification standard for regularly published content. Ranchero has a beta version of NetNewsWire available that supports the feeds. I also put an atom feed up, there already was an rss 1.0 feed.

I remember hearing about this book on weblogs when it came out, but forgot about it. Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing) relicensed the book and is offering copies for free. I just started reading a copy on the palm.

My Zire has meant more reading for me this year. I’ve been through the five books in the hitcherhiker’s trilogy by Douglas Adams and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It’s mainly because I tend to have the palm around with me a lot; whenever I goto meetings or have my schoolbag with me. If I have to wait for something and get bored, I can pick up a book easily. Also, professor’s don’t mind you tapping away on a palm, they don’t seem to like people flipping through novels though.

Update: Doctorow’s second book is also available for download online.

I’ve done a bunch of a backend work and integrated the sidebar/quicklinks into the main block of posts rather than on the sidebar. It’s only on the main page, the archives will stay as they are, although I’ll make quicklink archives available. I spent some time over the last month or two overhauling how the quicklinks they were entered into moveable type, meaning I went through post by post to change them to a nicer format.

It involved a bit of work and a couple of mt plugins, but the integration wasn’t that hard. Here’s a good tutorial on how to do it, although it won’t give the setup I have. I did some tweaking and put the links at the bottom of the day’s posts rather than the top.

Omar has achieved victory. Global domination will commence shortly.

I took this BBC psych test (via tavis) where you’re supposed to identify whether smiles are genuine or not. I concur with his hypothesis that british people are ugly. I ended up scoring a 19/20, whoo.

I was playing around with photoshop this afternoon and made this graphic (small), it’s nice and colourful. It’s basically just laying a bunch of gradients on top of each with some layer effects.

Read this interview with Bush. He doesn’t come across that well. I guess that’s what happens when you have to speak off the cuff. Some excerpts:

President Bush: I’m a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind.  Again, I wish it wasn’t true, but it is true. And the American people need to know they got a president who sees the world the way it is. And I see dangers that exist, and it’s important for us to deal with them.

Every president except Jimmy Carter has been involved in a war of some sort. That makes all but one president a war president.

President Bush: Now, I know I’m getting repetitive, but I’m just trying to make sure you understand the context in which I was making decisions.

Repeating yourself?

Russert: [about Kerry] Did you know him at Yale?
President Bush: No.
Russert: How do you respond to that?
President Bush: Politics.  I mean, this is—you know, if you close your eyes and listen carefully to what you just said, it sounds like the year 2000 all over again.
Russert: You were both in Skull and Bones, the secret society.
President Bush: It’s so secret we can’t talk about it.

Ahhhh yes, the secret society that’s so secret that no one can talk about it. And the “If you close your eyes and listen carefully to what you just said.”

Update: An article about the speech that’s worth reading as well.

I’m giving serverside spam filtering a shot right now instead of the Apple Mail junk filters (which do a relatively good job). We’ll see how it goes, it shouldnt be bouncing anything, but if it gets filtered poorly i might not see it for a couple of days. So far, it’s not doing a great job, it let three spams in right away. I’ll give it a chance though. Now to deal with the referer log spam that I’m getting.

I’ve said before, when I’m busy I post and when I’m not busy I don’t post. Well, that’s a lie. There are sometimes that you really are busy and internet surfing procrastination (to extensive weblog levels) is impossible. It should be scaling back a little bit this week, allowing more opportunities to peruse the interweb.

Uhh, news news news… nothing too exciting. Janet Jackson showed her tit on television to shift media attention away from her brother. Oh my god! Look that was a tit on television! OMG! Shock and awe. Something something blah cultural values blah blah children fuck blah whatever. The Europeans and millions of American’s with specialty cable channels are waiting for you in full bare-breasted splendor on this side of the curtain. Join with us and we shall ride over the edge of this cliff, hand-in-hand with the devil.

Other news items to check out this article on the underground community of virus writers. Like most of the computer intelligencia they fell mistunderstood. Also take a look at this ad (local) for Microsoft FrontPage with new professional coding tools that will help you produce clean code faster. Look for the part of the ad where the make an html mistake. Oh! Laugh riot.