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An Open Letter to Newspapers, Re: Blogs

Dear Newspapers,

I know you’re threatened by the Internet. It’s completely understandable. And I know you’re interested in getting in on some of this sweet blog action. No rules, no fact-checking, no standards. It’s a sweet life.

So welcome to the world of blogging. Enjoy yourselves! But do me a favor: if you’re going to call part of your website a blog, you have to provide a feed for it. And no, a feed for your entire site doesn’t count. A blog is an informal, irregularly scheduled collection of writings that you can subscribe to. Mixing that with your wire service articles isn’t cool.

Thanks,

Jemal

p.s. The same goes for podcasts.

September 30th, 2007 · Category: News, Technology, Web Sites · Tags: , , , · 1 Comment »

Jared Reaches out and Touches Someone

Jared made his first phone call the other day. He dialed the phone and made contact with a perfect stranger. This is actually a big step for Jared, and he was able to communicate effectively, giving his name and age to his new friend. Of course, his communication skills weren’t perfect.

I’m guessing that Jared was prompted to call by our trip to the Fire Expo on Saturday. Jared got to ride in the front seat of a fire truck and work the sirens. He got to man a fire hose. He got to spray a fire extinguisher. And he got to eat cotton candy. A very exciting day, all things considered. So you can imagine that he might want to tell somebody all about it. But I guess he wasn’t entirely clear about what was going on.

So when the operator from 911 emergency services called back, he was under the impression that we needed an ambulance. Instead, Kellie had to inform him that Jared was just really excited to see a fire truck.

I guess we’ll have to add the phones to the list of things that have to be kept out of Jared’s grasp.

September 30th, 2007 · Category: Autism, Family · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , · 2 Comments »

Better Debugging

I spent some time this morning trying to upgrade this site to WordPress 2.3. I’m running a whole slew of plugins, and have pretty heavily modified the theme, so I wasn’t very surprised when pretty much nothing worked.

First the Similar Posts plugin made everything die - and I mean everything. I couldn’t even deactivate it through the WordPress interface and had to move it out of the plugins directory. Then I discovered that trying anything to do with comments was spitting out nasty error messages. I could delete comments, but I got an error. I could add comments, but I got an error. I tried disabling all of my plugins, but that didn’t seem to help. I took out a bunch of my theme edits, but that didn’t help.

The most confusing part of the problem was the error message: I was getting two errors, one complaining about the headers already being sent which is often a cookie problem, and the other complaining about not finding the post2cat table that was dropped in the update. From what I can tell, the problem was with the Google Sitemaps plugin, but the Wordpress plugin upgrade page seemed to suggest that 2.7.1 would work. Either way, deactivating the plugin didn’t solve the problem, so I gave up.

I’d really like to see better debugging info from WordPress. PHP has pretty lame error messages to begin with, and it’d be nice if the WordPress team could come up with a better way to deal with errors than to just crap out with the lame PHP messages.

Luckily, Dreamhost has automated database backups that are easy to restore, and their one-click software installer always backs up your files when you perform an upgrade. Even though I couldn’t solve the problem, I was at least able to get things to the way they were before.

For the curious, here are the plugins I use with WordPress:

September 28th, 2007 · Category: Site Stuff, Technology, Web Sites · Tags: , , , , , , , · 7 Comments »

Second Night of Scouting

Jared didn’t exactly have fun at the Cub Scouts pack meeting last night. First he was upset because he wasn’t getting merit badges, and no amount of talking would convince him that kids who have been scouts for a week can’t get merit badges for going to camp the previous summer. Especially when his friend Nick got a badge for going camping with his big brother’s scout group last summer. Ouch.

As bad as that was, and we had to keep walking in and out of the gym all night because he was bursting into tears every time he thought he had missed out on going to camp, the worst was at the end. They had handed out programs, and as you might guess, Jared was very concerned with what was going on and in what order. One of the last things on the program was a song, a strange little ditty about “the little engine that could” sung to the tune of “Yanke Doodle.” The pack leader’s wife asked for a show of hands, and the kids voted not to sing the song. This put Jared back into a tantrum, and I had to drag him out while the Webelos were retiring the colors.

The good news for me was that they also skipped the prayer. Thank Kevin for small mercies, eh?

They also announced that each kid should try to sell $100 worth of popcorn this year to meet the area council’s goals. I thought that was a bit high until I noticed that item A on the form was $50 for 5lbs of candy. Who is going to eat that much candy? And how is it going to stay fresh?

Anyway, there was also good news: they encouraged us to check out the county fire station’s safety day this Saturday. Jared will get to watch cars chopped in pieces by the jaws of life, watch cars set on fire, watch car fires extinguished, and maybe ride on a fire truck. Let’s hope he doesn’t get chopped, burned or dropped.

September 27th, 2007 · Category: Autism, Family · Tags: , , , , , , · 6 Comments »

Giraffe Fight

Until you’ve seen this video of giraffes fighting, you’ll never realize how flexible those necks of theirs are:

After watching that, I want to see a kung fu practitioner demonstrate giraffe style.

[Via BB]

September 27th, 2007 · Category: Web Sites · Tags: , · 4 Comments »

Irony in Action

Do you know why I watch reality TV? For the delicious, delicious irony, people.

Tonight on America’s Next Top Model, the girls learned that Heather was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Then they all talked loudly about how Heather hd no social skills while she was listening from 15 feet away.

Also, several girls commented that Heather wasn’t up to their level of competition, after which the judges called her name first, the traditional indication that she performed the best overall for the week. Whee!

September 26th, 2007 · Category: Autism, TV · Tags: , , , · 2 Comments »

UFC 76 Wrap-Up

It’s a good thing I didn’t get around to posting any picks for this event because I was wrong about every single fight on the main card. After the first three fights, I turned to my buddy and said, “I feel bad for Shogun Rua and Chuck Liddel.”  And lo, their asses were kicked.

Forest Griffin impressed with his first big win over a top contender, and Keith Jardine proved what everyone has been saying since the Rampage fight: Chuck is a good kick-boxer who can eat whatever wrestler Dana White spoon-feeds him alive, but he doesn’t like getting punched in the face, and his odd (to be kind) fighting style is easily picked apart by anyone with a technical striking game. Evolve or retire Chuck, for your own good. I mean, aren’t you glad that he found this out before Wanderlai Silva had a chance to make him each knees for 15 minutes?

The one thing I think I can add to the internet clamor about the fights is that I wasn’t really impressed by John Fitch or Tyson Griffin. They won their fights, by the traditional measures, but mostly they just seemed to stay out of trouble without working to finish the fight. Griffin’s fight was great to watch, but mostly because of the BJJ clinic that Thiago Tavares was putting on. Fitch did a great job escaping from Diego Sanchez’s many submission attempts while delivering the occasional “monkey punch,” but it was the submissions that made the fight great.

They both won on the basis of superior wrestling, but never really put their opponents in any real danger. I’m not saying that Sanchez or Tavares won those fights, just that they did more to win them. Call it “Sprawl and Stall,” call it “Lay and Pray,” I don’t care: I don’t like watching wrestling, and I certainly don’t want to watch it when I’m paying to watch a fight.

Again, they were clearly more athletic than their opponents, and clearly had great hip control, but let’s seem some fighting. Is that too much to ask?

September 23rd, 2007 · Category: Sports · Tags: , , , , , , , , , · Comments Off

Top 25 Most Played

I was looking around my iPod today and decided to check out my “Top 25 Most Played” playlist. I’ve only had this iPod for about 8 months or so, and I’ve only really been listening to it in the car. I was pretty surprised by what I found, presented here in the order they were listed on the screen:

Since some of those are kind of a bit obscure, here’s a breakdown of the ones you might not have heard:

Belle & Sebastian

Introduced to me by my friend the genius Kevin, B&S are a great Glaswegian indie band that will remind you of The Smiths with more melody and artistry. The hidden punch behind the beautiful music is the lyrical twists that you weren’t expecting.

Dean Gray

His mashup album, American Edit, brings together music and lyrics from Green Day’s American Idiot rock opera with everything from Oasis and The Bangles to the themes from Doctor Who and Mission Impossible. Strange and excellent.

The Postal Service

The Death Cab for Cutie side project that is better than the original band. The most amazing thing ever produced on what sound like broken Casio keyboards.

Jonathan Coulton

The geek troubadour, he rose to internet fame with his Thing A Week project that produced a new song each week. An early hit was his acoustic cover of Baby Got Back, but Code Monkey and Re: Your Brains are internet classics.

The Magnetic Fields

I have no idea what to say about them, but Kevin’s recommendation comes through again.

Yosha Bourgea

This song, written especially for Jared cured him of his “I’m stuck” phase and has delighted him ever since. Amazing.

Assorted Mashups

Best of Bootie 2005, The Grey Album and The Black and Blue Album are pretty much the only way I listen to pop music: ripped form its original context and mixed seamlessly with music I can stand to listen to.

What’s in your top 25?

September 23rd, 2007 · Category: Music · Tags: , , , , , , · 5 Comments »

What is Wisdom?

And for that matter, what is maturity? And common sense? All answered in today’s (well tomorrow’s, really) Questionable Content.

You don’t read QC? It’s one of my favorite web comics, along with:

Anything else that I’m missing worth checking out? I used to read MegaTokyo, but some of the characters looked too much alike and I kept getting confused with the long form stories.

Update: Following the directions from this comic, XKCD fans had a gathering yesterday! Signs were hung, games were played, costumes were worn, t-shirts were stenciled, and apparently a good and strange time was had by many! Flickr stream, Slideshow.

September 23rd, 2007 · Category: Web Sites · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , · 2 Comments »

Radiohead is serious music, this is serious thread

Macworld UK is reporting that:

At issue is Apple’s insistence that artists allow fans to buy individual tracks unbundled. Radiohead object to this, as the band wants to sell its albums as they were meant to be heard – complete.

In accordance with their wishes, I hope you will join me in my solemn oath to uphold Radiohead’s wishes that their songs be allowed the artistic integrity that they deserve:

1. I pledge to boycott listening to Radiohead’s music on the radio or purchasing singles, since it is so important to listen to their songs in the appropriate context. To help others enjoy this music, I will call in and request radio stations not to play Radiohead’s singles.

2. I also pledge to only ever listen to the album in one sitting, without pausing, rewinding or skipping from track to track, as the artists intended. Otherwise, I’d just be ruining this amazing music, none of which any of us have heard.

3. I will write to Radiohead to ask them to please release the CD as one single track to encourage this kind of behavior. If they could rig it so that it won’t allow pausing, rewinding or fast-forwarding, that would be great as well.

4. Since allowing people to rip the album will give them even more control, I will ask them to include software on the disk to prevent that sort of whole-sale destruction of the integrity of their album. If they could make said software install itself into a hidden area on any computer that it is inserted into, that would be ideal.

5. I will also ask Radiohead if they would never play any songs off of their albums live unless they intend to play them in the order that they are on the album, and with the same exact transitions.

This is, after all, serious music.

Or these jumped-up nitwits could get over themselves and stop trying to control how people enjoy their music and just appreciate the fact that they have a huge following of rabid fans who will buy any damn fool thing they produce, no matter how indulgent or pretentious. Also, they should realize that allowing people to purchase a sample song off of their album without purchasing the entire album will generate them more sales, not less.

September 21st, 2007 · Category: Music, News · Tags: , , , , · 1 Comment »

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