chuggnutt.com

Here's something I've been looking for for a while now: Blogarama, a directory of weblogs. I'm not sure how good it is yet, but it's a start. And it appears to be developed in PHP, which is always a good thing.

Their categorizations could use some work, but I imagine it's rather hard to nail down a particular blog into a particular category—especially since most blogs already have their own microcosmic taxonomy. We'll see what comes of it.

Watching the old "Scooby Doo, Where are You?" show, I'd always kind of wondered just where all these adventures are supposed to be taking place. For a long time my best guess was somewhere in the Midwest, but recently we caught an episode in which the gang was on their way to a rock festival, and when they stopped to ask for directions, said they were looking for Interstate 5. Well, I-5 puts them on the west coast, possibly the Pacific Northwest but more likely California.

What? You were expecting something more serious?

The topic du jour this week in the weblogs I read seems to be backlash against social networking services, particularly Orkut, the new one from Google. Interesting, but it's not like you couldn't see it coming. I'll have more to say on this soon.

Here's a cool site I found today: Fontifier. They will create a TrueType font based on your handwriting for free. I've printed out the template, but haven't tried it out yet, so I can't report on the quality of the service. But it sounds sweet.

One of those nights where I want to write something here, but I can't think of anything meaningful to say. Plus, it's getting late and I don't want to get wrapped up in writing a long post, so what to do? What to do?

How about this? It's a bit esoteric, but any literary-types out there, guess what this comes from:

He'd a French cocked-hat on this forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jeweled twinkle,
      His pistol butts a-twinkle
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jeweled sky.

Over on Peter David's weblog is this post about Shakespeare. Since I like Shakespeare, I thought I'd link to it, it's a good post.

It's one of those topics where there seems to be little or no middle ground: either you dig Shakespeare, or you don't. Those who don't can be converted, but I ain't gonna bother with that here—I just thought I'd riff a bit and let everyone make up their own mind.

Back in college I took several Shakespeare courses: the typical English-course requirement-type class and another titled "Shakespeare in Ashland" which was a hands-on course in which we studied several plays and then went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland to see them performed. It was a totally great class. All the courses were taught by the same professor, who—get this—had been a cop in Los Angeles before getting his degree and becoming a teacher. He was a cool guy, had a totally pragmatic approach to Shakespeare, not the usual "masterpiece of English literature" approach that turns so many off.

Speaking of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I can't recommend it highly enough. If you ever get the opportunity to see a play performed there, jump all over it. It will likely be the best production of Shakespeare you will ever see, bar none. There's simply nothing like the experience of seeing it performed live, and performed well—especially if it's in the outdoor Elizabethan theater. I've been there a bunch of times and seen about half-a-dozen plays (Richard III and Henry IV Part I really stand out in my mind), and I'd go back anytime for more.

And I just checked the 2004 schedule: King Lear (I guarantee this will be awesome), Henry VI (all three parts, a ho-hum set of plays but I bet they do good with them anyway), The Comedy of Errors, and Much Ado About Nothing (another one that will be really good, I'll bet).

And finally, some gratuitous plugs for my ebooks: Hamlet Palm Reader .pdb file, and Macbeth Palm Reader .pdb file.

The Bend WinterFest is coming up in a little over a week, from February 5^th through the 8^th. Just thought I'd give it a mention for anyone looking for something to do in Bend next weekend.

Me? No, I probably won't attend. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, I know. I think Bend now has festivals for every season plus a few extra thrown in for good measure; the SummerFest used to be pretty decent, when they had a good beer garden and didn't limit where you could take your beer (or wine), but when they beer garden selection got much more limited and they wouldn't let you out of the fenced area (which caused much problems for those of us who had young kids who weren't allowed inside the fence but had already purchased a beer before finding out you couldn't leave), the SummerFest itself became a lot less attractive.

At any rate, for me it's just too damn cold to be out wandering around Downtown Bend or the Old Mill District watching ice carving or fireworks. But if you're interested in going, more power to you.

I tackled the plumbing project today, after all. Yeech.

It took awhile to loosen the bolts (and working in a cramped space under the bathroom sink didn't help much), but when I finally got the faucet apart, I was able to determine pretty quickly that something in the central valve assembly was messed up. So, we ended up with a new faucet for the bathroom. Same brand (Moen), but with a slightly different look than the rest of the bathroom faucets.

Putting it all back together was relatively easy compared to getting the old faucet out. What a royal pain in the ass it was, though, overall. Not a process I'd look forward to repeating anytime soon.

Just got back from seeing The Return of the King. One word.

Amazing.

I just finished watching the DVD extended edition of The Two Towers. Some three and a half hours long. Totally worth it, though, especially for the deleted scenes—most of which cover the additional backstory and events in the books that they couldn't cover in the theatrical release. Good stuff.

All of which is preparation for finally getting out to see The Return of the King this weekend. Cool!

I don't know why I didn't point this out back when I noticed it, but Project Gutenberg has a new site and design—much cleaner, simpler and faster than the old site they had before. It's a thousand times easier to find an ebook (no more multiple windows!). And did I mention it was fast?

The January issue of Discover Magazine lists the top 100 science stories of 2003 (according to them, of course), and coming in at number 96 is the story of the Donner Party cannibalism site unearthed (scroll down the page for their summary).

In case you haven't heard of the Donner Party, here's a capsule review: in 1846 a group of pioneers on their way to California were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains by a blizzard. They had a limited food supply that ran out quickly, and survivors were forced to eat the bodies of the dead to survive. Gruesome stuff.

Anyway, Discover's recap of the story—that archaeologists unearthed what they believe to be the Donner Party camp—spins it so that the Donner Party tragedy was a "legend has it" type of event—i.e., doubtful that it occurred. Say what?

This bothered me, so I went to the source: The book Weird History 101 (great book, I highly recommend it) contains several contemporary accounts of the Donner Party from the people who survived: Virginia Reed, daughter of one of the Party leaders; Lewis Keseberg, one of those forced to eat the dead to survive; and Edwin Bryant, not a member of the Party (I don't think) but who visited the camp in the spring.

"Legend has it," indeed. I can understand the importance of scientific investigations of an historic event, but playing off a well-documented incident as questionable as to whether it even occurred just seems awfully sloppy, and a bit irresponsible.

So on the upstairs bathroom faucet today the cold water suddenly won't shut completely off; I have no real idea why, other than the faucet valve isn't closing all the way, or perhaps something's jammed in there? At any rate, I turned off the cold water under the sink and have been pondering taking the faucet apart or if we should instead just call a plumber.

Following up yesterday's Wine Stories post, today I opened up a bottle of the elderberry wine and tried it.

It's not bad!

It's much more like a sherry than anything else. The aroma is quite good, almost exactly like what I'd expect a good dessert sherry to smell like, with a strong hint of brandy. The flavor doesn't live up to this, though; there are a bunch of different profiles going on in there: a sweet-ish sherry, some fusel alcohols, mild-but-tart fruit, a mead-like dry character (my wife suggested it reminded her of mead). They clash a bit, but all in all it turned out much better than I could have hoped.

I occasionally dabble in making wine and thought it would be amusing to write down some notes about my homemade efforts. I'll start with a disclaimer, though: I am not a wine connosieur by any means. I have enough knowledge, as they say, to be dangerous. I do enjoy making it, however, even though it takes quite a bit longer than beer.

I have five bottles left of a batch of rhubarb wine that I made about five years ago and I've taken it upon myself to work on drinking those bottles up over the next few months as a sort of sideline contribution effort to the moving process. For a homemade fruit wine (an unconventional fruit at that) it's not at all bad, and in fact won a second place ribbon at the Deschutes County Fair a few years back.

It's best served very cold, and has a very dry and very neutral profile, surprisingly pleasant. Not astringent, not sour (as one might expect from a rhubarb wine). I have no illusions about its quality, however: it is very much a table wine and I wouldn't open a bottle as a main attraction for guests, but would keep it on-hand for anyone interested in tasting it.

The very best wine I have ever made was my last batch, a Cabernet Sauvignon that I made for my wife from a kit. It turned out to be surprisingly high quality, despite my reservations about "kit wine." This is a wine that I would serve to guests as the main wine, and have. The only complaint I can make against it is that it seems to turn astringent after being opened for a couple of days more quickly than a wine from a professional winery; I surmise that wineries must add more preservatives to their finished products.

I also have five bottles of an elderberry wine I made about a year before I made the rhubarb wine, but to tell the truth I have no idea what it's like because I'm a bit afraid of it. What happened was I acquired about four, four-and-a-half pounds of fresh elderberries from my aunt and, following a general recipe in my winemaking book, decided that I would use all of those elderberries in a one gallon batch of wine. Four pounds of elderberries is a lot to put into a single gallon, but my reasoning was that I would be making an elderberry port wine, a dessert wine with higher alcohol content.

I let this wine ferment and age in glass for about a year before I got around to bottling it. When I finally bottled it (probably about the same time I bottled the rhubarb), I poured myself a small taster to see what had been happening to it over the course of the year. To my great surprise, it turned out to be the most astringent, puckering, strongly un-sweet example of a wine I had ever tasted. I nearly poured it out entirely; the only thing the kept me from doing it was the amount of effort and time I had put into it up to that point, and besides, what's the harm in bottling up five extra measley bottles?

A little subsequent research into the use of elderberries uncovered the fact that elderberries, in normal proportions (no more than two pounds per gallon), make quite a harsh wine that takes quite a bit longer than a normal wine to age and mellow to a drinkable quality. D'oh! So I haven't opened a single one of those five bottles in five years, largely because I don't know how long I should wait to let this wine mellow, and if—if—it is going to mellow and turn into a decent wine, I'd hate to open one now as a crapshoot on the off chance it might be ready.

But you know what? I think I'll open up a bottle tomorrow to see what it's like. Crapshoot be damned. :-) I'll blog the results, too.

So yes, I know I've been way behind on the Palm ebooks lately. I've got a bunch queued up to convert but just haven't had the time or energy lately to do so. But here's a taste of what I have in the hopper:

• De Tocqueville's Democracy in America
• Sherlock Holmes
• The Canterbury Tales
• James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans
• Grimm's Fairy Tales
• Moby Dick
• The Story of Mankind from Hendrik van Loon

So, I'm getting there. I figure by posting this and including this gratuitous plug for free Palm Reader ebooks I'll get more motivated to do them.

These ideas have been rolling around my brain for a while, fermenting, percolating, but bear with me if they might still be a little incoherent. It's really the first time I've put words to them.

Perhaps you've heard of the "poor man's copyright." The idea behind it is to provide yourself copyright protection without actually registering your work, typically by mailing yourself a copy of your work with the idea that the postmark on the envelope will be enough to prove the copyright. I rather like the idea behind this concept, although in reality there is no legal provision for the poor man's copyright and holds no legal weight whatsoever. In practice it would be easy to fake a copyright in this way.

But this idea of being able to prove and protect the copyright on your creative work (short of registering it) is a powerful one, so it's natural to transfer the poor man's copyright concept to the computer. The problem is, it's even easier to fake a datestamp on an electronic file than on an envelope full of materials, so just relying on Word files on your computer is out.

You could borrow the idea of the PMC more literally and email your work to yourself—or better yet, to someone else. That would provide a better claim to credibility than files on a disk, but it's far from foolproof—dates can be altered and forged on emails too. But now we're moving in the right direction. And that's where RSS comes in.

Post your work into an RSS feed that has a decent number of subscribers, the more the better. Their aggregators regularly ping and download your RSS feed, and your work is suddenly distributed among dozens—hundreds—thousands of computers and users, each instance of your work (ideally) stamped with the date and time it was downloaded (important note here: an item in an RSS feed can claim any arbitrary creation date, so that's why it's important to disinguish the download date at the aggregator level). There would be a standard deviation of several hours to several days, perhaps, of these datestamps. But what would you have? A distributed, decentralized, and dated web of your copyrighted work, collectively becoming a digital postmark on the proverbial envelope.

Fakeable? Sure, if you had access to a small number of controlled computers. But the larger the audience, especially a well-distributed one, the less able you would be to pull this off. That's the beauty of this system: for a large enough set, the likelihood of faking or gaming the system approaches zero. There's no single point of failure or vulnerability.

Other drawbacks? Well, you'd have to have a fairly large audience downloading your RSS feed regularly. That's a bit of a trick. RSS aggregators would have to be sure to accurately record the download date of the feed. Also, anytime you wanted to back up a claim, you'd somehow have to mobilize enough of this audience to check their aggregator archives and confirm your claim in a timely manner and communicate this assertion to the other party securely and independently. Details, details. :-)

Would RSS PMC be any more legal and provide real protection over regular old PMC? In practice, I doubt it. Again, it's the idea that's powerful here and takes us to the next step. You'd have a peer-reviewed network where the group could at anytime confirm or deny the validity of what you claim. An online archived record distributed among thousands of computers of everything you created and loaded into your RSS feed.

It's a double-edged sword, too. If you tried to plagiarize someone else's work and claim it as your own, you'd have the community calling foul and moving against you. And the community has a long memory.

Suddenly, this sounds a lot like an online reputation system, doesn't it? Once you get started thinking about this stuff, the ideas just start rolling out. That's the beauty of this RSS thing—the possibilites and potential it creates.

Something cool this morning: a Flash animation from Mazda showing one of their cars transorming into an Autobot. The only thing missing, though, is the Transformer sound effects.

Found via Boing Boing.

Unusual day at work today. It was one person's last day, and two others are revealed to be leaving by the end of the month.

It's weird to see people leave who have been with the company longer than I have. It'll change the work dynamic, definitely, but the upside is, I get a bigger office space.

Here are some tips and things to consider when you're getting ready to sell your home.

Pack up and/or throw out half of everything in the house.

This does several things. First, you've made your house more presentable to a buyer; the less you have in the house, the more the buyer can picture his or her own things there. Second, it forces you to evaluate your possessions and help you prioritize what's important. Finally, you'll be half packed!

Clean everything. Twice.

Even though you think you've cleaned everything, chances are, you haven't. Clean again. Buyers are like my wife: they'll look everywhere.

Put away all pictures and personal items.

Buyers want to try to picture themselves in the home, and personal items detract from that. Try to make the home as neutral as possible. This includes clearing everything off of the refrigerator door, even if you think the magnets on there are neutral.

Put away small valuables.

Well, you just never know when someone might have sticky fingers.

Get an inspection.

This is a preventative measure which uncovers any nasty surprises that the buyer's inspector (make no mistake, the buyer will have an inspector go over your house) might find and allows you to address them first. It also shows the buyer that you have taken the initiative and are serious about selling.

Fix any problems you can from the inspection, and see if you can get another inspection report issued.

We did this, and the inspector was nice enough to come back and is re-issuing the inspection report at no charge. The fewer the issues that a buyer can try to use as leverage in negotiating the sale, the better.

My wife sent this story to me today, from the eBay forums. I thought it was pretty good.

An old lady gets pulled over for speeding...

Old Lady: Is there a problem, Officer?

Officer: Ma'am, you were speeding.

Old Lady: Oh, I see.

Officer: Can I see your license please?

Old Lady: I'd give it to you but I don't have one.

Officer: Don't have one?

Old Lady: Lost it, 4 years ago for drunk driving.

Officer: I see ... Can I see your vehicle registration papers, please?

Old Lady: I can't do that.

Officer: Why not?

Old Lady: I stole this car.

Officer: Stole it?

Old Lady: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.

Officer: You what?

Old Lady: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see.

The Officer looks at the woman and slowly backs away to his car and calls for back up.

Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car.

A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.

Officer 2: Ma'am, could you step out of your vehicle please!

The woman steps out of her vehicle.

Old Lady: Is there a problem sir?

Officer 2: One of my officers told me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.

Old Lady: Murdered the owner?

Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please.

The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.

Officer 2: Is this your car, ma'am?

Old Lady: Yes, here are the registration papers.

The officer is quite stunned.

Officer 2: One of my officers claims that you do not have a driving license.

The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer.

The officer examines the license. He looks quite puzzled.

Officer 2: Thank you ma'am, one of my officers told me you didn't have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner.

Old Lady: Bet the lying bastard told you I was speeding, too.

Tim Bray is running some good articles on his blog on predicting the success or failure of new technologies. Good stuff. You can find the articles here; the series is still ongoing.

Does this seem counterintuitive? I'm currently reading The Story of America, by Hendrik van Loon, published in 1927. First edition, too, I think. Why? Because I wanted to get a perspective on American history from nearly 80 years ago. This was a time when the booming Roaring Twenties were in full swing, before the Great Depression and World War II, when there was only one "Great War" and there were still people alive that had lived through the Civil War.

This wasn't a planned excursion, mind you; I'd had this book on my shelf for quite awhile (I probably picked it up at a garage sale or a thrift store for cheap) and picked it up when I was looking for something to read.

On the whole, though, it's an interesting and engaging read. Being written in 1927, it's still under copyright for a few more years, but I've noticed that Hendrik van Loon's earlier book The Story of Mankind (1921) is available on Gutenberg. Perhaps I'll convert it to a Palm ebook.

Since it's all official, I guess I'd better blog it: We're buying a new house! (Insert fanfare sound effects here.)

Not just any old house, either, but one that we're buying through the company I'm working for, Pennbrook Homes (so essentially I'm getting even more into bed with my employer, yeah yeah...). Pennbrook builds homes in the area and we're choosing one in the Terrango Glen development up in northeast Bend; we'll be moving across town. Of course, in order to make this work, we need to sell our current home, so the last couple of weeks we've been focused on cleaning, decluttering and packing up half of what we own to make our place presentable. (Yeah, that's the sucky part.)

As an aside, anyone looking to move to beautiful Bend, Oregon? We can set you up with a killer house on a large lot in southeast Bend in a great, quiet neighborhood. Great location!

Heh. Anyway. I'm debating whether I want to blog the home buying and selling process extensively, similar to what Jeremy Zawodny is doing, but I doubt I'll write much. We already know what we're buying and what customizations we get to pick out, so the big question mark here is selling our place. Perhaps I'll write up some tips to selling a home as we go.

Tip #1: Get a realtor! A good one—ask around. The money you would otherwise save is much better spent on someone with the knowledge and expertise that you don't have to sell a home.

Long week, and this turned into a pointless post. Interesting. I've got some ideas for articles to write, but they all take more energy than I have this Friday night.

So, a pointless post that's cluttering up the aggregators and the search engines. Hm. There's a kernel of an idea in there somewhere.

Started playing around with CafePress.com at work today (setting up a basic store for the company), and I'm fairly impressed with it. I've been toying with the idea for a while now of setting myself up with an account and opening a chuggnutt.com store (and play around with others); now I see how things operate, I think I'll do just that. Stay tuned.

I've been meaning to write this article for a while now, mainly to point to some really good PHP applications and spread some kudos.

There are many good applications and classes out there, but I'm limiting to those that I've had hands-on experience with. Even so, this is hardly a comprehensive list; I may do some follow-up articles highlighting more good PHP.

More...

As promised, here's some of my own "Best Of" lists for 2003. All of these are my opinion only.

Best Comic Books

• Smax. This limited series isn't quite done yet, but it's some of the best and most fun Alan Moore stuff since Top 10 and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
• Thor: Vikings. This really freaked me out, but I have to admit, it was really well done, even if it's wack.
• JLA/Avengers. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but Kurt Busiek and George Perez have done fantastic work here.
• Groovitude: A Get Fuzzy Treasury. Not a comic book per se, but it fits here. It's great.

Interestingly, I can only really remember anything a few months back for the good comics list. That's kind of dumb.

Best Movies I Saw

• The Two Towers. Okay, I know this was a 2002 movie, but I saw it early January, and I still haven't seen The Return of the King yet.
• S.W.A.T.
• X2
• Pirates of the Caribbean
• Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions

This is kinda sad, showing you my movie preferences. I guess the best way to comment on this is to say I prefer escapist movies to more "realistic" ones.

Best Stories I Blogged About

• Dell Dude Arrested
• Klingon Interpreter Needed
• Towel Amnesty Day
• Turkey Soda

Most Overrated Technologies

• OPML. I don't know what it is about OPML, but I just can't get into it like I got into RSS.
• Friendster. Slow, and I have trouble seeing the point.
• TrackBack

This is a follow-up to last month's post about NetOffice. I've gotten several emails from people wanting to know specifically what I changed to fix the session error I was running into.

First of all, these fixes apply to version 2.5.3 of NetOffice only. Other versions, you're on your own.

In the file includes/library.php:

Comment out line 23: ini_set('session.save_handler', 'user');
Comment out lines 61-63: session_set_save_handler() stuff
Comment out line 1088, in _sess_mysql_read() function: _sess_mysql_destroy($session_id);
...and add this line instead: session_destroy();

This all kills the custom session handling, instead letting PHP use the default (temp files).

In the file general/login.php:

Comment out line 37: _sess_mysql_destroy($session_id);
...and add this line instead: session_destroy();

In the file projects_site/index.php:

Comment out line 22: _sess_mysql_destroy($session_id);
...and add this line instead: session_destroy();

After that, you should be able to get things working.

From this press release on MacTarnahan's Brewing's website (MacTarnahan's and Portland Brewing are the same company):

Thirty-five million Californians are getting their first taste of The Governator—a new beer commemorating the Golden State's 38th governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Brewed and bottled by Pumping Iron Brewing Company [a DBA for MacTarnahan's], The Governator Ale comes in a strapping, 22-ounce bottle adorned with a flexing beau, paying homage to the Austrian-born bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor.

It's an ESB (Extra Special Bitter), and doesn't sound bad. Anyone in California kind enough to send me a bottle or two? :-) (Unless, of course, I can find it here...)

I also notice that the domain name pumpingironbrewing.com is available for registration.

I snapped this picture today because I found it morbidly funny. (Click the image to view the full 768x1024 version.)

The view is from the end of the deck, looking at the back door that leads to the garage, which right now is our main access to the trash can. I'm now wondering how many times I've been standing underneath that wicked spike, throwing garbage out without ever thinking to look up.

Over the New Year holiday we ended up with even more snow—I measured 13 inches total today, and I'm sure when these photos were taken (on Thursday, the first) it was deeper than that (before it melted down).

This is looking into my front yard from the driveway (it's diagonal, though, so the house you see is the neighbor's). The two mounds are the conifer shrubbery entirely buried, which my brother suggested putting hats on and calling them snowmen.
(Click the image to view the 640x480 image.)

On the left is the patio table on the deck again, giving the pictorial update on the snow depth. I've included the older patio table picture on the right from my previous post, so you can see the comparison.
(Click the images for the 640x480 versions.)

Now that the holidays are over, perhaps I'll pick up the pace again and blog more. I noticed this same trend last year; my blogging nearly died off in November and December. I guess I get distracted by the holidays and rather than blogging, fill my time with other activities when I have the energy, like catching up on reading, putting up decorations, etc.

On a fun note, my brother and his wife who live in San Diego surprised everybody by driving up on New Year's Eve. Hadn't seen them since this time last year, when they got married in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, they have to leave soon—it's quite a drive back. But it's awesome while it lasts.

Happy New Year one and all. Hopefully 2004 will be kind. I've already decided that for 2004 one of my big themes will be “data aggregation.”

Oh, and I'm working on my own "Top X of 2003" type lists just for grins. Should be up in a day or 2. Mostly un-mainstream.