chuggnutt.com

Been offline most of the holidays, but I thought I'd post some pictures we took of Bend's big snowfall.

Here's a good idea of how deep the snow got (Bend ended up with 11 or 12 inches overall). Click for full size

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'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my hand, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!”

—Clement C. Moore

Been slow to post anything the last couple of days, mostly because we have the flu in the house, and we've been nursing sick kids. It's mostly run its course, but turned into an ear infection in our oldest, and we got antibiotics for that today.

And no, we didn't get flu shots. I've never bothered to get a flu shot, and have never gotten the flu. If I caught it from the kids (hey, there's a first for everything), it turned into a head cold that's pretty much gone. Of course, I rarely get sick as it is, so maybe I just have an iron-clad immune system.

As promised, here's my proposed database schema (using MySQL) for my Spokane Personal Publishing System. It's long and technical, read on at your own risk.

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Jeremy Zawodny had a post imagining a corporate worst-case scenario involving that ubiquitous Movable Type-developed technology, TrackBack. I'd been musing over TrackBack for awhile, and two things yesterday got me looking deeper into it: Zawodny's blog entry, and the link to my site from Ensight that I detailed in my previous entry.

I'll admit, before yesterday what I knew about TrackBack was fairly minimal: it was a way to let sites know when other sites were linking to them (by sites, I suppose it should be clarified I mean blogs)—which to me is basically the equivalent of scanning the webserver's referrer logs. Hence, I've more-or-less ignored implementing it in my own software.

I'm rethinking that decision now, largely because of the Ensight link. You know how I found that link to me? Technorati. (I would've seen it in the Apache logs, sooner or later, but I've been behind on those lately.) It occurred to me, though, that if I hadn't checked Technorati, or if the post containing the link to me had scrolled off of Ensight's front page and off Technorati, then I might never have known that I had been linked to.

TrackBack might change that. I say "might" because I'm still on the fence, as far as it goes. I can't deny that if I had a TrackBack implementation in place, I would have gotten a notification of linkage in this case—Ensight runs Movable Type, which of course runs TrackBack. So I looked into the TrackBack specs yesterday to educate myself.

Here's my official "from the fence" opinion:

TrackBack is a rather ugly kludge, albeit somewhat clever.

It has its good points, and its bad points. Here's the good points:

• The concept. It's good, I admit it. However, it took a close reading of the technical spec to get it across to me. The most important thing about the concept is that it can transcend the weblog world; done right, this could be a powerful tool for all sorts of Web applications.
• It uses plain-vanilla HTTP calls to ping other sites. Simple, easy to implement, firewall-friendly.
• The autodiscovery concept—having your client try to automagically retrieve and ping a site based on the link you give it is neat.
• Adoption. Almost all Movable Type and TypePad blogs I've seen use it, and a good number of other blog tools use it too. It's got the inertia.

Now, the bad:

• It's too vague and confusing. Prior to yesterday, I only had an inkling of how it worked and what it did, and I'm pretty savvy at this stuff; I just couldn't grok what exactly was going on when viewing sites that use it.
• Related to the previous point, the name itself doesn't work for me, it makes me want to only look in one direction for links (back) while the spec several times emphasizes it's a peer-to-peer technology (ie., two-way). Too much confusion and vague imagery doesn't breed a good market presence.
• The execution leaves me a bit cold. That's tough to quantify, I know, but it just seems to me to be too Movable Type-centric, and hence too limited to be the real-world peer-to-peer communication framework it wants to be.
• The autodiscovery solution, while clever, is an ugly hack: embedding RDF into the HTML of a page? Worse, having to surround it with HTML comment tags to avoid breakage? Ick, ick, ick. Seems to me a better solution would have been to embed the autodiscovery stuff in HTML meta tags, like the RSS autodiscovery link you'll find in many sites (including my own). Even something simple along these lines, like:
  
  <meta name="trackback" content="http://www.example.com/tb.cgi?id=1">
  
  would do. And it would play nicely. I've noticed more than once that sites with that embedded RDF cause script errors in my browser.

So while TrackBack, conceptually, is good, its execution is kludgy and ugly. Because of this, I probably wouldn't give serious consideration to implementing it on my site... except for the fact that it's being highly adopted, and as a community-building tool it's better than nothing at all. Do I want to miss the boat? I don't know, yet.

Other thoughts? What do you all think? Is TrackBack good enough? Or could it be better?

Jeremy Wright over on Ensight has wrote up some good commentary to my Thoughts on Content Management post from a few days back. He's hit on the exact points that prompted me to explore this topic: "most CMS's are piss poorly designed" (which is exactly right; most are piss-poorly designed, I'm just as guilty of this as anybody), and "there is no need to choose how you are managing your content until it is actually time to manage it." (Emphasis mine.) Right on.

And, here's some kudos from Jeremy that caught me entirely off-guard:

Jon, over at Chuggnut.com, is one of my favourite writers. Balanced, fair and most importantly, intelligent.

Wow. That's a damn nice thing to say, Jeremy—thank you! (To everyone else, sorry for the ego-stroking; I'll try not to let it go to my head... too much.)

Jake over on UtterlyBoring is having some serious back problems and could definitely use some support. So, if you can, donate to Jake, or maybe buy something from his Orty.com store. If things are tight, hey, I understand, just send him some email or link to his site. Every little bit helps!

Busy busy weekend. Most of it was holiday-oriented, though, and you can see the fruits of a good part of that in our nice six foot Douglas fir that's laden with ornaments there on the right. Click for the larger image in all its glory.

And of course, I couldn't resist including a picture of the prize ornament (gotta click to see!):

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This article on Gadgetopia links to my content management post I made yesterday (er, today?) and brings up a drawback to my system that I forgot to include: searching.

Within the relational database world, you can do precise, structured queries against specific fields in your tables. In a properly normalized database, this is all-powerful.

However, when you bundle a bunch of content up in an XML package, and stuff that into a single field, you lose this functionality of doing atomic searches against those fields. In the example I wrote up—a geocaching XML record with latitude, longitude, etc.—there would be no way to this type of query:

SELECT * FROM content WHERE longitute BETWEEN -122.5 AND -120.5;

So, a problem. A big problem, since searching data is a pretty fundamental concept in content management—hell, in any application. I have some ideas that address this, but they're still percolating. More to come.

I've been thinking a long time about content management systems (which isn't surprising considering developing various types of website CMSes is what I do for a living), how they pertain to weblogs and similar types of content, how to implement them in PHP and MySQL, and what type of system I would really like to have. Now, content management is a big topic, so let me clarify and narrow down what I'm talking about before I go on.

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Installed NetOffice, PHP project management software, this morning to better manage my various Web projects. Once it's up and working, it's a pretty slick piece of software. Had some trouble installing it and getting it to work initially, though.

First, after it's installed, it prompts to you log in to start using the software—with a username and password. The only password I gave it was an administrator password, and the documentation I had didn't indicate what the username is to log in with. I correctly guessed the username was "admin," but then the system wouldn't let me in, it kept giving me a "Session error" message. I was finally able to make that go away by disabling NetOffice's custom session management routines and letting the system default to PHP's native session handling. The files I had to modify for this were includes/library.php, general/login.php, and projects_site/index.php.

Pain in the ass, but that fixed it, and now it works pretty well.

My friend/business partner and I are launching several new websites, and I'm pointing to one here: BendBuzz. He's taking the lead on this one, but I'm totally behind it. It's a weblog-type site devoted to Bend and Central Oregon—not necessarily news per se (which Bend.com has pretty well covered), but for anything we can think of. Kind of like Slashdot for Bend. Check it out. It's brand new, so there's not much content to see yet, but that'll change quickly. Also, I encourage anyone local to Bend to head over and feel free to contribute. We're open to just about anything.

Late tonight. I'm actually working on 2 big articles to post here, at least one of them will be up tomorrow sometime. They're long, geeky passages on content management, PHP, data modelling, metadata, and stuff that's been floating around in my mind for awhile, and it's about time for it to come oozing out. Be warned.

Come on—who wouldn't want The Complete Far Side for Christmas?

For some reason that I now forget I started digging around online tonight to see what the current state of beer brewing software looks like. The last time I'd played with any such software, I installed the evaluation version of ProMash on my old computer and tried it out. It's probably the best piece of software for brewing out there, and to be sure it worked well and did a good job, but when you look at it you can't help but notice the Visual Basic GUI-clutter-itis that prevents it from breaking through to the best-in-show program it wants to be. (See a screenshot here to see what I mean.)

The two lists I found are Lee's Brewery Guide to Brewing Software and the Open Directory beer software category, and I'm disappointed to report that the state of brewing software is right about where I left it. Even ProMash looks the same.

Here's a bit of a wishlist of features I'd like to see in brewing software:

• Simple layout and navigation.
• Visual color indicator—I want to see what color the 30+ SRM porter will be.
• Staggered complexity by usage—if I'm brewing from extract, I'm not worried about seeing all-grain stats and figures to tweak on the recipe formulation screen.
• Open source—open code, open databases.
• Perhaps web-based. (I tend to see everything as having a web-based solution these days, go figure.)
• Custom report generation.
• XML data transfer. Data storage in a database is great, but I want to be able to export to XML for whatever I might need.

To be sure, ProMash covers most or all of this quite nicely—its layouts and colors make my eyes bleed, though, and it's not open source.

Of course, complaining about the current state of affairs for a particular genre of software, accompanied by listing a bunch of desired features for said software, is usually followed by the self-same person announcing that they're going to develop the ultimate version themselves. What can I say? I'd be tempted to do it, but I really don't have the time—there's too many other irons in the fire right now. Plus, I haven't even brewed a batch of beer in over a year, so I'm not even qualified. Sometimes, though, you just gotta vent. :-)

It had to happen, read about it here—there's a free Commodore 64 emulator for PalmOS. I'd love to download this for my Clié, but alas, it requires PalmOS version 5 and my Clié only has a version 4 variant.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone out there!

We've been seeing a fair number of movies lately, so I thought I'd post some thoughts here. I'll probably be spoiling some of them, so only click the "More" link if you've seen them.

The movies I'm writing about are The Hulk, The Italian Job, Terminator 3, and The Core. You've been warned.

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"Tapestry is a series of RSS feeds for online comics." Very cool. I've just subscribed to a bunch of them, now I'll get the day's comics delivered right to my computer automagically!

Update: Forgot to give credit to Jake at UtterlyBoring.com for the link.

I've recently been playing with phpAdsNew, a PHP ad server system, for a work-related project, and I have to say, it's a pretty solid piece of software. I'm very impressed.

It installs quick and painlessly, and you can add advertisers and build ad campaigns in no time. It comes with very nice PDF documentation—user, administrator, and developer guides. It has a good admin interface and rolls out a ton of stats and reports that blew me away. It's definitely a "best of breed" PHP application (and those are rare).

This has got to be the scariest picture I've ever seen.

Just in time for the holidays comes Jones Soda's newest beverage—Turkey & Gravy Soda!

Wow.

With the addition of Bravo to our cable channel lineup, I've noticed that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is suddenly on at our house quite frequently.

Now, of course, I think there should be a new, similarly-themed series: "Straight Eye for the Queer Guy." That kind of show would just write itself, I think.

What is it with weird eBay auctions, like this one? People just have too much time on their hands?

(Okay, I'll confess. That's my wife's auction. I wanted to see if I can flood it with traffic since I'm still getting so many Matrix Name hits.)

This site has implemented the idea I previously wrote about and is generating RSS feeds based on custom eBay searches. Very nice. (I can't lay claim to giving them the idea, only that they had a similar idea to mine.) Via Scripting News.

When I originally wrote the Matrix Name Generator, I always thought in the back of my mind how cool it would be if the thing took off in popularity, but I never really believed that would happen.

Yesterday, the 9th, traffic on my site jumped from around 1500 hits per day to over 41,000 hits all in one day—I was floored with this jaw-dropping fact this afternoon, when I reviewed the site log files, and disconcertingly noticed that the log file jumped from 1.5 megabytes (for Saturday) to 19.5 megabytes (for Sunday).

Holy. Shit.

Nothing—and I mean nothing—has happened like that before. Totally out of the blue. I thought at first I'd been Slashdotted somehow, but when I started reviewing the gargantuan log file, I noticed that it was all for the Matrix Name page.

Where are they coming from? Three main sources:

LiveJournal sites. Apparently I've been picked up by some sort of LiveJournal community, where everybody is on everybody else's friend list and is linking to the page. I haven't been Slashdotted, I've been LJ'd!

Forums. Similar to the LJ sites, people have been posting the link to the page on various forums, and everybody reading that post has followed the link to see what their Matrix Name is.

Webmail, like Yahoo! Mail and EudoraMail. This tells me that a lot of people have been emailing the link to friends. Likely the same LJ users and forum readers.

I guess it took a few days for the latest Matrix movie to hit critical mass, and I'm now prevalent enough in the search engines that I'm getting hit, hard. For instance, my page is the number 1 result on Google for "matrix name" and "what is my matrix name".

So what do I do? Ride it out, I guess, and hope my bandwidth stays affordable in the meantime. Otherwise, welcome, Matrix name seekers!

Adam Curry has announced his new Book Blog:

I've been interested in the Gutenberg Project for some time now, and find it fascinating that so many really well known titles are available online and free from copyright. As an experiment I'm going to upload selected works to a this new weblog, in all available formats (html, rss) as well as a speech-synthesized version in mp3 format. These files are attached to each posted chapter as an RSS enclosure and can be automatically downloaded to your hard disk or mobile mp3 player.

Cool. Along the lines of my ebooks page. I'd been doing some thinking lately about offering the converted books I've done in HTML format as well as Palm Reader format.

This is too good: The Church Sign Generator.

Obviously, I'm going to have way too much fun with this.

Funny entry today on Scripting News:

I don't like Starbuck's anymore. Too strong.... Yesterday I bought a can of Chock full o' Nuts coffee, and it's just fantastic coffee. Lovin it. And get this, I got the pre-ground kind, because it's too much of a hassle to grind my own beans. Maybe it's the west coast Reality Distortion Field flickering off.

There definitely is a Reality Distortion Field out here, especially when it comes to coffee. Too many coffee drinks, too many gourmet whole bean coffees. Know what? I'm sick of grinding my own beans—I hate cleaning out the grinder. Should look into pre-ground.

When it comes to drinking coffee, I'm a minimalist: I like it hot, strong, and black, no additives, the way it was meant to be. If I'm buying coffee in someplace like Royal Blend, I'll either buy black coffee or a café au lait, which is as close to a latté as I typically get. One day someone I was having a meeting with offered to bring me a latté. I told her to get me a café au lait. Her reaction? She seemed offended, so I relented and let her surprise me with some syrupy-coffee-drink-or-other.

The worst part? I had to explain to her what a café au lait was. Jeez, get some culture, people.

I must be having a Luddite moment or something, but it's getting ridiculous, the number of rechargeable and portable electronic devices we have these days. I mean, just in the past few days I've had to charge my PDA, charge my cell phone, charge my cordless razor, charge the digital camera (only to find out the battery was dying and useless), charge the video camera battery (only to plug the camera into the outlet directly anyway), and charge up my mom's laptop as I worked on it.

And it gets worse: flashlights, a portable handheld vacuum sitting on my desk, remote controls for the TV, VCR/DVD, digital cable, and stereo, myriad battery-powered toys the kids have, the cordless phones. Don't yet have a portable music or DVD player, video game system, or my own laptop—but I suspect it's all a matter of time.

Okay. All done. Back to coveting electronics, rather than disdaining them: I'd kill for a camera phone and a WiFi-enabled laptop...

Damn, why is Halloween so cold anymore? It seems like when I was growing up, it was never this cold. Now, every year we just about get frostbite trick-or-treating. Seriously, it was in the teens Friday night. Last year was colder.

Global warming, my ass. :-)

Happy Halloween to all of you who celebrate it!

Whoops! In my Oregon Bloggers post yesterday, I incorrectly said that Jake at Utterly Boring was giving away free TypePad accounts. Jake commented to correct me; they're not free accounts, just discounts for new signups.

Still, it's a good deal. Go get a blog!

If you're a blogger in Central or Eastern Oregon, or you'd like to try it out, head on over to Utterly Boring and check out Jake's offer for a free TypePad account. We want to see more Oregon bloggers east of the Cascades!

It's funny how the world works. Hot on the heels of my blog article on Sony Bend Tuesday of last week, our local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin, publishes a story in Saturday's business section about Sony Bend and the latest version of their Syphon Filter game in development.

"Sony filters out separatist group from Bend designer's video game" is the article. I don't really need to comment on the story as the opening sentence covers it: "Sony Computer Entertainment America has pulled a fictitious Quebec terrorist group from the latest in a series of hit video games created by John Garvin...."

Basically, I just thought it was very interesting to see this article show up in the paper less than a week after I had initially blogged about the company.

This is the second part of the story about Sony Bend I previously posted. This follows up on Mike Berlyn, who was a founding member of the game company Eidetic (now Sony Bend), who left the company in 1997. Read on for the gory details.

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Herewith the first part of an online detective story, with interesting results. If you're interested in any of the following: Infocom, the Sony PlayStation, or video game companies in Bend, Oregon—then you'll probably enjoy this story. Read on.

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My poking around in the world of RSS has inevitably led me to OPML, another XML format created by Dave Winer, and is ostensibly designed to contain outline-structured information. What is outline-structured information? A fancy way of saying a structured list of hierarchical content, like browser favorites or web directories like Yahoo. It seems any list will do, actually.

I'm interested by what I see, but I'm still reserving judgment. It looks like OPML will be/is valuable in the same space as RSS (e.g. weblogs), but I can't find a concrete description of the specification (so far, at least) beyond version 1.0—yet I keep finding OPML files online referring to themselves as version 1.1, and each one has a slightly different set of attributes. Is there a 1.1 spec? Or is it only proposed, letting content creators add features willy-nilly? Hmmm.

We had the most beautiful sunrise this morning, so I went out and snapped a picture of it. Smaller version here (640 by 480), larger version here (1024 by 768, but I recommend this larger version).

It struck me yesterday as I watched my wife surf eBay and eBay-related sites (like DisturbingAuctions.com) that eBay et. al. functions as a vast weblog for some people the same way that "traditional" weblogs function for people like me. Or more precisely, eBay fills the same needs for some people that weblogs fill for others.

(What needs? Well, the first thing that pops to mind is social needs, the kind of social needs you find satisfied by participating in an online community of some sort.)

Probably this has been obvious to many people long before I realized it. But this metaphor of eBay-as-weblog (or perhaps more than a metaphor) has been staying with me, nagging around the back of my mind, so I figured I'd put words to some of the ideas and see what comes of it.

It might be more fair to say eBay can be considered a meta-blog, categorizing and listing the individual entries (auctions) of thousands of bloggers (sellers) (side-note: perhaps eBay is more like an aggregator?), providing means for users to comment (feedback, ratings). Popular auctions are peer-reviewed and the cream rises to the surface, much the same way as in the weblog world.

It would be trivial to graft typical weblog services, like RSS, onto eBay's services. I've toyed with this idea before, I think it would be a great example of the killer app RSS wants to be.

But it makes me wonder: why doesn't eBay have RSS feeds? They already offer a saved searches feature that emails you notifications when new items appear matches your search criteria; that should be a no-brainer for a feed. Or perhaps feeds to supplement the services that many third-party sites offer: collective views of items you're selling, with current hit counts and bid prices.

One problem I do foresee, though: eBay is highly time-dependent. Users want to know what's happening with auctions now, via a browser refresh or an up-to-the-minute email; RSS as it's implemented now is not enough of a "push" technology to make this happen. Sure, you could fake it by setting your aggregator to poll eBay every 5 minutes for a feed update, but what happens when 100,000+ users retrieve an XML file 12 times an hour? Bandwidth dies, of course. EBay would brown-out.

Anyway, that's enough for tonight. I'm still finding the eBay/weblog idea intriguing; I may try to merge both worlds and produce some sample RSS feeds based on eBay searches. If I do, I'll post them here.

I got so caught up in finishing Cryptonomicon this past week that I didn't really go online to post stuff. Damn good book. Longer than hell, but it was worth it.

What else? Oh yeah, bought a PlayStation (the original, not Two) from my brother, along with several games. It's pretty sweet, even though I've only played a few times. I know, I'm way behind the curve, but I'm always behind the gaming curve; before the PlayStation, the most advanced console I have (aside from the computers) is a Sega Genesis. Then a Nintendo, the original one. At the rate I'm going, I should be up to a PS2 or XBox in 2007 or so.

Could've been worse, I suppose, if it weren't so amusing.

According to this article on Bend.com, Jodie Lynn Ackerman was released from jail last Wednesday (the 8th) due to overcrowding. By Saturday night (three days later), she "was booked back into the jail on charges of second-degree theft, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, first-degree criminal mischief and a probation violation." Seems to me that if you suddenly got a "get out of jail free" card, shouldn't you not do something stupid, like, oh, I don't know, steal a car and some beer and evade the police?

(This also showed up on UtterlyBoring.com.)

I've been reviewing the web server logs for my site, and decided to self-indulge and post some interesting stats here online to bore you all. Read on if you're interested.

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I just uploaded the Palm Reader file for Macbeth to the ebooks page, and holy crap, I forgot how messed up that play is until I was converting it. Shakespeare must have been in a very, very dark mood when he was writing it. Enjoy.

For the second time this year I got a dollar bill stamped with the "official" Where's George stamp. The first was at the Portland Zoo back in July, the second yesterday here in town, from the Factory Outlets. For the uninitiated, Where's George is a bill tracker, where users can enter the serial numbers from various denominations of money and their location, and the system will track those bills, and show you a report of where that bill has previously been (if another user had already entered it).

It's a neat concept, one of the first of this type I think (along with other sites like BookCrossing), that came out a few years back. All or most of the original stamped bills were released on the East Coast, I believe, so it's interesting to see them finally circulating out west.

Of course, it's also easy to overlook the fact that this is a massive database tracking the existence and whereabouts of hundreds of millions of dollars across the country, which I'm sure gives paranoid conspiracy theorists nightmares... Myself, on the other hand, I'm a data junkie, and I would just love to get a peek at that database...

So the freak show in California is over and Arnold Schwarzenegger is the new governor.

Lovely.

Reminds me of an old California joke: California's like a bowl of cereal; once you get rid of the fruits and nuts, all you have left are the flakes.

The trailer for The Return of the King is online. December 17th; just over two months.

We (finally) went and saw "Pirates of the Caribbean" tonight. It was a lot of fun, I liked it. Johnny Depp was, frankly, amazing. Go see it, if it's still in theaters where you're at.

I've been reading a lot about how email is broken these days—articles here, here and here are examples—and interestingly, I came across the following passage in Cryptonomicon (published in 1999) that I thought was apropos:

"I hate e-mail," John says.

Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "What do you mean?"

"The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it."

Obviously I've not been very motivated to write much lately. I'm up to my elbows in Cryptonomicon and loving it, so that's been eating up much of my free time. But today I updated several parts of the site, most notably the ebooks page, where I'm rolling out a better layout and feature set for people viewing the free ebooks. It's time for it; my ebooks page is by far the most popular page on this site and most of the site searches are for ebooks, but the search function looks at the blog content only.

The theatrical trailer for "The Matrix Revolutions" is online. If you got the bandwidth, I recommend the big version.

As reported on bend.com and confirmed on our local cable provider BendCable's website, BendCable has dropped UPN entirely. Apparently BendCable didn't want the competition from a new UPN-affiliate that's scheduled to launch here in January 2004. So, they got pissy and as of now, UPN channel 12 is off the air.

The only show I watch on UPN is Enterprise, so it's not like I'm missing out on a lot of TV, but what bothers me is that this is the kind of stupid shit BendCable does. This is a provider that doesn't even offer basic channels like FX or Comedy Central, and up until a few years ago didn't even offer MTV.

Another fun little tidbit reprinted from a friend's daily "Survival" calendar.

Most state laws stipulate that you may use sufficient force to stop the attack, but you may not deliver any sort of punitive retribution to your attacker. Knowing this may save you a costly trip to court.

1. Attack the most sensitive areas of your opponent: eyes, groin, knee, and throat.
   Stay close; if your opponent is large he will need room to hit you.
2. Attack repeatedly and be efficient.
   Make fast, repeated blows to any or all sensitive areas.
3. If necessary, use a weapon.
   Choices include telephones, pens, bottles, books, beer mugs, coffee cups, and keys.
4. Protect yourself from additional attackers by fighting with your back to (but not up against) a corner or wall.

When you have young children, you get exposed to a lot of children's television programming, well beyond the Muppets and Sesame Street of yesteryear. Most of these are good, educational, well thought-out and well written shows, perfect for kids, but if you watch too many of them as an adult—as I do—you begin wish you could apply some grown-up sensibilities to them. I'm going to do that here.

Read on if you like; if you're not a parent, you may wonder just what the hell I'm talking about.

More...

A large part of the process of writing, I think, is just throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks. Doesn't matter if you're writing online content (like blogs), or fiction, or news, or whatever.

Anyway. Some more fun links from around the Web.

Tha Shizzolator is another one of those goofy translator sites, only this one is from Snoop Dogg and translates to "shizzle". It's pretty funny. Try it on my site.

Textfiles.com is a site that is dedicated to collecting and archiving (you guessed it) text files from old BBS systems from 1980 through 1995. Those of you who remember the old Bulletin Board System days (like me) should have a good time with this. Plus, it's important; as is eloquently stated on the site, "everyone finding themselves drawn online should know what happened before, to see where it all really started to come together and to know what went on, before it's forgotten."

So yeah, I haven't been able to think of anything to blog about lately. Sue me! Anyway, here's a few things:

Stealth Disco. I'm behind the curve a bit on linking to this, but who cares? It's definitely out there. Something I could see myself doing back in the day.

Garth Ennis' Marvel comic "Thor: Vikings" is really freaking me out. Zombie Vikings. 'Nuff said.

Urban exploration—I first read something about this on Kuro5hin, and while it's not exactly the same thing, I remember exploring old buildings and such growing up in Central Oregon—the rural equivalent. Pretty interesting stuff.

This rant is something I mentioned here some time back, and I've been mulling it over in my head for a while now; if you're not interested in comics, then you can safely pass this up. It's one of those highly geeky topics that make many people shake their head in bemusement whenever it comes up.

Also, it's long. Consider yourself warned.

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Passing of an American legend: Johnny Cash dies at 71.

Much more suprising, no less tragic, John Ritter dies at 54.

I've just added six new Palm Reader ebooks to my ebooks page that are really short stories from Cory Doctorow's new book, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

There's still one more short story I need to convert, and then I'll combine them all into one big book download. Enjoy. And thank Cory!

Sugar High Friday was an event that I single-handedly started when I was working for Dakotah Direct in Spokane, Washington. Here's the gist of it (hearts and arteries, beware):

Some arbitrary Friday, maybe one Friday a month, there is a suggestion and a mutual consensus to have the Event. There is no overt advertising, simply word-of-mouth, but word gets around. On that Friday, everybody participating brings to work some assortment of candy and junk food in an obscenely sweet pseudo-potluck. And for the entire day, everyone consumes the sweets (often washed down by copious amounts of soda pop) and partakes in the hypoglycemia-inducing, high-calorie bonding. All are welcome, whether they contribute or not.

Sounds disgusting? It probably was. But it was a hell of a lot of fun, and it's one of the few things I genuinely miss about working for Dakotah. Until my current job, I hadn't worked for a company that's had enough people to make a Sugar High Friday a true Event. Now I am, so maybe it's time to try to start it up with a new batch of coworkers.

Spread the word! Enjoy Sugar High Friday in your organization!

Hell, maybe I'll set up a website and truly institutionalize it...

Again reading Larry Ullman's PHP Advanced and finding it okay, but I came across another glaring error.

On page 169, in the discussion about variable order, Ullman's got the variable order entirely backwards. The out-of-the-box order for PHP variables is EGPCS (which refer to Environment, Get, Post, Cookie, and Server variables), meaning that PHP processes input into variables from those sources in that order. The book incorrectly lists these in reverse while claiming it's the proper order.

The funniest part is there's a graphic of a screen shot from the php.ini file, which clearly shows the EGPCS ordering, contrary to the text.

Hello? Editors? Anyone?

I've noticed from the referrer logs that my earlier Friendster post is the #3 result on Google for the search phrase "Friendster is slow", so I figured it was high time I revisited Friendster and poke around a bit more, to see what I could find out.

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Two real-world items that I fully expect to show up in the next James Bond movie:

The Skyray and the Aquada Bond.

I found this document from February 2000 when going through some old files on the computer and thought it was funny; I think it originally came from some email humor.

You might be from the Pacific Northwest if you...

1. Feel guilty about throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash.
2. Use the expression "sun break" and know what it means.
3. Know more than 10 ways to order coffee.
4. Know more people who own boats than air conditioners.
5. Feel overdressed wearing a suit to a nice restaurant.
6. Stand on a deserted corner in the rain waiting for the "WALK" signal.
7. Are amazed by accurate weather forecasts.
8. Consider that if it has no snow or has not recently erupted, it's not a real mountain.
9. Complain about Californians, as you sell your house for twice its value to one.
10. Know the difference between Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon.
11. Know how to pronounce Sequim, Puyallup, Issaquah and Oregon.
12. Consider swimming an indoor sport.
13. See your golf ball bounce, you know immediately that you've hit the cart path and not the fairway.
14. Can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese and Thai food.
15. In winter, go to work in the dark and come home in the dark—while only working 8-hour days.
16. Obey all traffic laws except "Keep right except to pass."
17. Never go camping without waterproof matches and a poncho.
18. Are not fazed by "Today's forecast: showers followed by rain," or "Tomorrow's forecast: rain followed by showers."
19. Can't wait for a day with "Showers and sun breaks."
20. Have no concept of humidity without precipitation.
21. Can taste the difference between Starbucks, Seattle's Best Coffee and Veneto's.
22. Know that Boring is a town in Oregon and not just a state of mind.
23. Can point to at least two volcanoes, even if you can't see through the cloud cover.
24. Say "The mountain is out" when it's a pretty day and you can actually see it.
25. Have more rain gear in your golf bag than golf balls.
26. Put on your shorts when the temperature gets above 50, but still wear your hiking boots and parka.
27. Switch to your sandals when it gets above 60, but keep the socks on.
28. Have actually used your mountain bike on a mountain.
29. Have a heater in your golf cart.
30. Think people who use umbrellas are either wimps or tourists.
31. Knew immediately that the view outside of Frasier's window was fake.

AND.....

32. You know you're from the NW if you buy new sunglasses every year because you can't find the old ones after not having used them for such a long time....

I checked my email this morning and not a single Sobig-infected message came through.

Not one.

Just as quickly as it started, it's over. Very odd. The only thing that makes sense is that there was only one computer infected with Sobig that had my email address on it, and when that user finally patched their computer, it stopped sending to me.

On my ebooks page I've just linked up two new, modern Palm Reader ebooks by Rob Callahan, who is generously offering these up for free (under the Creative Commons license) on his site, and was nice enough to email me to let me know. Awesome! The more there are current books that can be freely downloaded (like what Cory Doctorow is also doing), the more everybody benefits.

Well, it took longer than most cases I've heard of, but I'm finally getting deluged with the Sobig email worm. Started yesterday.

I was just thinking today that MySQL's SET datatype has to be the most underused feature of MySQL, and how I could implement a multiple category system for my ebooks using it, when I got the MySQL AB Newsletter and lo and behold, it has an article on using SET.

I love fun coincidences like that.

We got an email this evening from a friend, one of those types of emails that has been forwarded something like 5 times or more, warning of a serial killer that lures women out of their houses by playing a recording of a crying baby. Something about the way it was written made me think "urban legend," so I dug around a little bit on the Web.

It is an urban legend; the Snopes page debunking it is here. I think it's the first time I've seen an urban legend so new that it's practically gestating; interestingly, the text of the email we received has some slight variations on the one posted by Snopes. Urban legend evolution?

More...

Am I just cynical? Holiday Inn is declaring today Towel Amnesty Day in which anyone who has ever stolen a towel (or anything else, I imagine) from a hotel can tell their story, and Holiday Inn will donate $1.00 to charity (plus 25 lucky people will "win" a souvenir towel). You know what I see when I look at this? A "Towel Information Awareness" (take that, TIA!) database that Holiday Inn can then use to red-flag future customers. "Even stolen a towel? They did? Charge them an extra $10 for this room."

Don't think so? Why else would their entry form ask for your full name, address, phone number and email?

Cynical, indeed.

I always (usually) (sometimes) take notice when someone mentions some of our fine local beers; so my attention was grabbed when I read that Tim Bray enjoyed a Black Butte Porter while waiting for a flight home today. Good choice, Tim.

Black Butte Porter is not only the flagship beer from Deschutes Brewery, but also I think of Bend. It's definitely one of the things we're known for in some circles. In fact, if you ever visit Bend, you must go to the Deschutes Brewery and your first beer must be a Black Butte Porter, it's that good (especially on tap at the source). Should you do so, let me know and I'll join you. I might even buy the first round.

Saw S.W.A.T. on Saturday, and it's a pretty good movie. Most surprisingly, to me, was that it was directed by Clark Johnson, an old "Homicide" alum (who also has a small part in the movie, along with another ex-Homicider, Reed Diamond).

("Homicide" was one of those rare gems of a television show that, when I got into it, I would go out of my way to watch. When it was good, it was the best show on TV, period.)

I had already recognized Clark Johnson (he plays LL Cool J's partner early on), but was totally surprised to find out he had directed the movie; I had no idea he'd jumped to the big leagues. That's cool.

A little while back (a month, maybe two), the "Furball Asian Mart" opened up on the south end of Bend, near the corner of 97 and Brosterhous/Division.

Yeah. "Furball Asian Mart." You're thinking the same thing I did.

Apparently, somebody else thought so, too: Friday when I passed it going home from work, they had covered up the "Furball" so that it's now simply the "Asian Mart."

I just watched the QuickTime trailer for the latest Quentin Tarantino movie, "Kill Bill". Wow, I don't even know how to describe it, other than damn.

Thanks to Scoble for the link.

The big news around here is that George W. Bush came to town. Ironically, he came to talk about healthy forests and programs to help cut down the forest fire danger, but was pre-empted from Camp Sherman to Redmond because of forest fires.

Here are some links:

• Local story on Bend.com
• The CNN story
• One from the San Francisco Chronicle (!), detailing more about the fires
• Story from KOIN, the CBS affiliate in Portland

And Jake over on UtterlyBoring has blogged a bit about it, too, both here and here.

Yikes. For the past, oh, 6 hours or so, I've had this error killing the site entirely:

(Of course, if you tried to connect during that time, you'll know what "/path/to" really is. It's probably already cached in Google, damn it all.)

I'd forgotten the all-important semi-colon at the end of line 394. This comes about because I'd been making changes today, and like an idiot forgot to test the last upload I'd made before heading home. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Just saw the movie version of Chicago this evening, and I just have to say: eh.

I'm sure this will make me popular with those who loved the movie (even my wife loved it, and she normally hates musicals), but I honestly do not see the big deal with this movie, and I certainly don't see why it garnered so many award nominations... unless it's just because it has the label "musical" slapped on it. I'm sorry, but it was just a bit too tedious for me.

Of course, it doesn't help that I don't really like René Zellweger, or that Richard Gere pretty much proved he can't sing his way out of a paper bag. Those aside, it was simply a mediocre plot and thin storyline heavily padded with music and dance numbers.

(I couldn't sit through all of Moulin Rouge either.)

Yep, back from our excellent adventures in camping. It was a good weekend, sunny and hot, the nights not too cold. I was a little nervous about how the kids would do sleeping in the tent this year, but for nothing: they slept better than the adults did.

The campground itself was a bit primitive—no plumbing. Restroom facilities were outhouses, and the only water was from an old-fashioned pump. I didn't mind so much, but others did. Next year's family reunion will be held somewhere slightly more modern. But overall, Cold Springs Campground is a nice rustic little campground, and we had a great time.

The Beach Boys concert on Sunday was cool, too, even though we were dead tired from camping. Free drinks, cigars, steak dinner. VIP indeed. The only drawback was that only the serving areas were tented; all the tables were right out in the hot hot hot sun and we all sat roasting for awhile before some of us figured out we could sit out behind the main tent in the shade and the breeze to cool off before the concert actually started. After that, it was a perfect evening.

Back on the 11th I blogged about the PHP Cruise and quoted the price for 2 as $1199.99 plus $819.99. I wanted to clarify that I was talking about the Full Suite pricing, which is the most expensive (and would also be the nicest for traveling with my wife). Marco from php|architect commented to point out the better deal price of $799.99, for the Inside Cabin fare. Details here. He's absolutely right; re-reading my entry made it sound like it was more expensive that it is. So get on it! $800 is a pretty good price for a cruise in the Bahamas.

I'm going offline this weekend, starting today at noon. We're going to the annual family reunion, and camping out at Cold Springs Campground just outside of Sisters. And then Sunday when we get back, we have the Beach Boys concert. Full weekend. I may be back online Sunday night. Maybe.

More on the California governor race. In order to be fair, federal rules dictate that all candidates have to have equal air time on television, and since there's a huge disparity between the screen time someone like, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger has and someone like, say, Larry Flynt has, cable TV networks have made the decision to pull Arnold's movies. There's a story about it here.

As you might imagine, I have several thoughts on this.

First of all, nationwide cable TV networks are pulling Arnold's movies? Seems unfair to punish the rest of the nation for the consequences of California's governor race. I wonder how long it will take for some litigation-happy idiot outside of California to try to sue the SciFi Channel for this.

But then, wouldn't it be much more amusing (and California-like) if instead of pulling Arnold's movies, they gave equal amounts of screen time to the other candidates? Then there would be nothing on California TV except candidates... imagine the horror:

• Hours and hours of Diff'rent Strokes for Gary Coleman;
• For Larry Flynt, there'd either have to be a Hustler Channel (is there one already?), or just show The People vs. Larry Flynt over and over again—though no doubt some Californians would vote for him thinking they were electing Woody Harrelson;
• Arianna Huffington would be on the air flaming all the other candidates and progressively moving closer to a "gang audit" (in the immortal words of Dennis Miller) by various government agencies;
• Porn. Courtesy of Mary Carey. This might not be so horrible.

If you're interested, the certified list of candidates is here (PDF). All 135 of them.

Here's an interesting tidbit: Google now has a built-in calculator. This is a cool feature to be sure, but AlltheWeb has been doing this for a while now (as an undocumented feature), since at least April 14, 2003. Try it and see.

Here's a first: php|architect is organizing a PHP cruise. I'd heard of the geek cruises before, but I certainly never expected to see one exclusively for PHP. Interesting and slightly off-kilter at the same time.

Prices put it out of my reach, however. $1199.99 plus $819.99 is just more than I could afford. It might be fun, though...

Okay, I've enabled user comments and I'm crossing my fingers. You should now be able to post comments to entries, starting with this very entry, if you're so inclined. Hopefully nothing major will break! :)

Very tired tonight. We had a garage sale today—or more accurately, my wife had a garage sale, I had to work. Only I spent the night before doing heavy lifting to get things ready for it, and spent a good portion of tonight doing heavy lifting again to bring the big stuff back indoors. (And it goes outside again tomorrow.)

The big things? A queen bed set, with headboard. A dishwasher. A lawnmower.

Very tired.

Warning: technical entry. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined. Today I'm talking about RSS.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's essentially a format for delivering data and content in an XML (read: structured) format. What kind of content? Well, any kind, really. Right now, the types of content you'll most likely see RSS being used for are weblog entries and news stories (although some might argue that those are essentially the same thing). The important thing is that if you follow the appropriate standards and set up your RSS file accordingly, then any program designed to read/parse/process RSS can deal with it.

More...

My day at work was certainly a tech support nightmare. Get this: as soon as I walk in, I'm told the server is down. Thinking (hoping) they meant the connection to the internet is down, I clarified the issue.

Nope. The server. Damn.

This is the main file/print server that everyone in the office uses to store their work on. Excel, Word, Publisher, QuickBooks, you name it, it's there. Plus, it houses the intranet I developed (and the MySQL database that backs it), Microsoft Mail server (which thankfully no one much uses anymore), and the Intuit Master Builder server software the company relies on.

(I know, I know, words of caution about putting all your eggs in one basket, I know.)

There had been a power outage the night before, and now the server was completely dead, no power at all; but the server had been plugged into a UPS, which was still on and working. Odd. Tried plugging it into several other outlets, nothing. Tried a different power cord, nothing. At this point I deduce it's the power supply, and that's hopeful because if that's all it is, nothing's lost except some productivity time.

Unfortunately, I don't have a spare, so I have to wait til the local computer store (who originally built the server, so we have an account with them) opens at 9am to get one. Luckily, I get through to someone in the store at about 8:40 when I'm calling to leave a message, and they're sending the tech right over with a new power supply.

And guess what? I was right—the power supply died, and everything else was intact and fine. We got the server up and running again by 9:10 tops.

Talk about sweating bullets. Even though we had a full backup of everything important made the night before, there's still nothing quite like that head-pounding, sweat-behind-the-eyeballs, bowel-clenching feeling that you get when something like this happens.

I suppose most everyone has heard by now, but Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he'll run for governor of California. What a great day for American politics.

Hey, I'm serious; I drank a beer in honor of Jesse Ventura's election to governor of Minnesota. Colorful personalities like this certainly revive interest in politics, whatever people may think.

A quick note to correct a misconception I propagated in my entry on blogs the other day. I said that a blogroll was a "Fancy name for a list of links to other blog sites" and I was only partially right. While a blogroll is a list of links to other blog sites, it is a list that is managed remotely (by BlogRolling, and there may be others) that you can dynamically insert into your site by including a snippet JavaScript or PHP code.

The neat thing is, they've put together a neat little JavaScript trick that allows you to sort of drag-and-drop a blog site to your blogroll list. They also do a few other neat things, including reporting on who's linking to your own site on their blogrolls. So, a blogroll is definitely more than just a list of links.

It pays to know the right people, I'm realizing.

Today we (my wife and I) got invited to The Beach Boys concert at the Les Schwab Amphitheater on August 17. But not just to the general admission—that would be too easy. No, we got invited to join some friends in one of the private VIP tents.

Let me just emphasize the words private and VIP here.

Plus, it's catered by Outback Steakhouse.

Plus, it's already paid for.

Pardon me while I gloat a bit. I don't get to do this very often.

Where did July go? For that matter, where did the first half of the year go? I'm not sure I like this concept of time passing more quickly the older you get, which is what my grandmother always said and that I take to be a general truism. When you're a child, time seems to pass so slowly, like when you're in school or you're waiting for Christmas... but then the older you get, the more quickly Christmas seems to come each year. And before you know it, you turn around and you're 30 and you have 2 kids.

And before you can react to that, 31 is just around the corner...

Having grown up and spent a significant part of my life here in Bend, I still tend to thing of it as a small town, even though it's growing by leaps and bounds. A such, I'm always amused at people's reactions (my own included) when big-name music comes to town—it's hard to imagine why bands would go out of their way to play our little logging town. Then I realize, not so little anymore.

Here's a list of some of the groups that have played here recently or will be soon:

• Smash Mouth
• Willie Nelson
• Bob Dylan
• Trisha Yearwood
• Sixpence None the Richer
• Jimmy Cliff
• Coldplay
• Charlie Daniels
• Lyle Lovett
• The Beach Boys

You get the idea. They may not be the biggest names in the industry, but they're sure a hell of a lot bigger than John Grant and the Rednecks.

(Yes, that's a real band. Or it used to be. I grew up next door to that guy.)

I've enabled an RSS 2.0 feed, which you can view here. Consider it experimental or even beta if something gets wonky.

I signed up for a new online tool/technology today called Friendster. Maybe you've heard of it; it's "an online community that connects people through networks of friends" for meeting new people. So far I haven't really figured out what it's supposed to do for me, because the site is still very much in beta: most of the pages were slow-loading, the people search didn't give me any results (they're rumored to have 300,000+ members, so I'd expect some results), and the site just stopped responding to me after several minutes of use each time I tried.

Perhaps the slowness is due to increased exposure to curious users after the write-up it got in Wired by Xeni Jardin (that's such a great William Gibson-esque name), though I doubt it. I'll play with it some more, and report what I find.

Interestingly, what got me to Friendster was a link on Robert Scoble's weblog for Tribe.net, which is another beta social/community website that's making the rounds—and Xeni Jardin (there she is again) on Boing Boing talking about Tribe.net and writing that she won't be "ditching her Friendster account anytime soon"—all of which made me curious. So I'll probably go and try out Tribe.net now, too, because Friendster is slow.

How's that for making connections and providing links? I think the ultimate social software application is the blog.

This is a bit about the blog software I wrote for this site. If you're into the technical aspects of blogs, or PHP and MySQL, you'll be interested in this. If not, you can safely skip it and not really miss out on anything.

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There's this site called Technofile written by some guy named Al Fasoldt that has this article that I thought was pretty FUDish. I found it because my wife sent me a link to online news source Syracuse.com that had picked up this article. It's about alleged spyware Hotbar, and after reviewing the article, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that this Al Fasoldt doesn't know what he's talking about.

Hotbar is apparently similar to the Google Toolbar (which I use at work, and it's great): a browser plugin that offers information on related sites to ones you are browsing, and additionally allows you to install skins that replace the flat gray on the Internet Explorer toolbar with overlaid graphic images. Okay, no big gotchas here so far.

But to quote the article:

But it's actually monitoring the surfing habits of all users and reporting this information back to a central site so it can be marketed to anyone who wants to buy it.

Hmmm. Sounds like any other website to me. Then the article mentions a problem with slower browsing and crashing Windows, and that there are problems with popup blockers—Hotbar still lets some popups through, apparently. Interesting, but still doesn't really raise any red flags.

Then the article begins spouting off about some "startling admissions" about what Hotbar does, admitted by Hotbar (gasp!) on their own website.

This is funny: it's a direct quote from the article again, itself quoting the Hotbar site:

Here are excerpts from the Hotbar site:

"For every Web page you view . . . the Hotbar software transmits and stores the following information from your computer to Hotbar: Your IP Address, which may include a domain name; the full URL of the Web page you are visiting; general information about your browser; general information about your computer's operating system; your Hotbar cookie number . . . and the date and time the above information is logged."

Excuse me? This is exactly what every webserver on the internet does! There's no conspiracy here, no unethical behavior on the part of Hotbar from this excerpt, this is how the web works.

At this point I pretty much decided this Fasoldt guy has no business writing about technology. All I can see he's doing is spreading FUD without any real knowledge of how things operate.

(Out of curiosity, I checked out Hotbar's privacy policy. It's pretty standard, and it's pretty clear that any additional information they collect about you (aside from standard web log data) is something you would know about, since you have to provide it yourself in the registration forms. I know a thing or two about this type of browser application, too, and I'm pretty sure it's not spyware any more than the Google Toolbar is.)

Hey Al—you better watch out! I'm collecting your IP address, the pages and files requested, the browser you're running, and where you came from too! And I track the dates and times! I even track what you search for when you use the search box feature on my site!!

And oh man, you better avoid any search engine sites, like Google, because not only can they track all those things, they can also track every search term you've ever tried, and if they wanted to, they could track what sites you visited from the results list they gave you!!

Moron.

We're all safe and sound from the 18 Fire, and we never had to evacuate. All is well.

Here is a link to the Forest Service's website on the 18 Fire; they have some really good images of the fire, better than anywhere else I've seen online. Pretty amazing.

We were on evacuation alert last night as a 600-acre wildfire burned only 3 miles or so from our house. We didn't have to evacuate, thankfully, as the fire was moving south, away from any developments, but it sure made for an interesting evening.

Here's two links to local stories about the fire: Bend.com and The Bend Bulletin. I even have a couple of pictures I took myself, of Bessie Butte, where the fire was burning; there's two resolutions: one at 640x480, and another at 1024x768.

The fire is "officially" known as the "18 Fire" and less-officially also known as the "Bessie Butte Fire". It was probably started by a lightning strike (though there's no official word on that yet), and began burning enough to be noticed yesterday (Wednesday) around 1:30 PM. There was a terrific smoke plume; a friend described it as though an atomic bomb had been dropped. It could be seen for miles. Almost immediately they had fire crews fighting it, and the big airtankers were dropping retardant all over the area. I even saw a helicopter with a water bucket lowering to fill up in a pond as I was driving home.

But all is well. I'll post updates if there's any further developments.

This