chuggnutt.com

Vacation is about to start. Once I leave work, we're pretty much on the road, and while we're bringing a laptop, there's no guarantee I'll be online much, so this may be the last post for a while. Or not; I'll try to update from the road if I get the chance.

Au revoir!

From Tim Bray tonight comes this amazing fact:

There are five billion new lines of COBOL getting created every year, and there are (wait for it) 220 billion lines of COBOL in production. (Holy cow, now that I think about it, I bet I wrote ten or twenty thousand of them).

I got an email today from someone from the online magazine Preservation Online wanting to get a quote from me about the Crane Shed demolition, since I wrote a bunch about it. Cool. I wrote back letting them know I'd be happy to give a quote, or they could just quote my blog. Since I haven't heard back from them, I assume they'll quote my blog.

How's this for disturbing?

I was just at the Evergreen Village (Bellevue) Safeway this morning, doing my little shopping thing. I was late — I usually do it on the weekend. While wandering around getting my goods, I noticed that the shelves in the produce aisle were looking a bit empty. I didn't think much of it. I never come in on Mondays. Maybe this is what things look like after a weekend rush. Maybe they're expecting a delivery soon. Maybe they had taken all the little fruits and vegetables on a field trip (AHAHAHA).

Well, just heard on the news, the reason the shelves were empty was because they found (and I quote) "a pile of fecal matter was discovered on top of some produce" (from NWCN channel) on Sunday night between 7:30 and 10:30PM. Safeway immediately shut down the produce section, turfed out the produce, disinfected the shelves, and brought new produce in. They're also offering refunds on produce purchased last night.

Via Metroblogging Seattle.

We'll be on the road all next week—well, starting this week, really, since we're leaving Friday night—on our way to visit my brother in San Diego. Road trip!

From Bend, San Diego is about a 16 or 17 hour drive. Since the kids are little, we're spreading that over three days each way, taking it easier than just plowing on through. Of course, the portable DVD player we bought for the car should help out, too.

Needless to say, I'll be mostly offline for nine or ten days, starting Friday afternoon. I have a slightly older laptop computer that I'm taking, but I just got it and it doesn't have network access, either Ethernet or wireless (has the slots for them, though). I may be able to get it set up for network before we go, otherwise I'll just rely on the modem in a pinch.

Or not. We'll just see.

Some more on trackbacks. To my mind, they are simply another form of comment, so that's exactly how I'm treating them. You won't see a special "Trackback" down there next to the "Comments" link. Instead, they'll just be integrated with the comments in chronological order.

I think I saw Sam Ruby doing this first, and it makes much more sense to me to treat trackbacks this way.

I've finally bitten the bullet and implemented Trackback here—well, half of it, anyway. My site should now be able to handle Trackback pings from other sites. I even implemented the RDF autodiscovery crap, but added a bonus: a new meta tag like so:

<meta name="trackback.ping" content="Trackback URL for a particular entry">

So maybe I can influence client software development in some small way with this.

I haven't implemented outgoing Trackback pings yet—i.e., me pinging others' sites when I link to them. I'll get around to it at some point.

For a long time I've wanted to be a writer, and ultimately make a living writing. My biggest problem with that, however, is actually making myself write. I'm great at thinking about writing, though, and I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Herewith some of my thoughts, in no particular format, just rambling (i.e., expect no conclusions).

More...

So I observe over on Ensight that Jeremy has basically sold his blog for something in the neighborhood of $15,000 (Canadian or USD?), and still got a sweetheart deal:

I am effectively considering bidding closed. I have a deal on the table. It's substantial, is from a longtime Ensight reader, allows me to keep editorial control and turns me into a paid blogger.

Right on! It's the blogging brass ring. I've been thinking lately of ways to make money doing this whole blogging/"nanopublishing" thing, and in addition to this highly apropos example, I've been poking around the Weblogs, Inc. sites to get a feel for what they're doing and how.

I'm not necessarily talking about writing in general—that's a whole different topic that I will actually address sometime soon—but rather how to leverage some of these trends and technologies in weblogs toward money. It seems to me that if you can't get someone to pay you to blog, then the best bet is to bootstrap yourself via advertising (Google's AdSense and/or other?), like what the Weblogs, Inc. guys (and guys like Nick Denton) are doing. And perhaps via the "tip jar" method: accepting PayPal donations and the like. And of course this doesn't even address RSS...

Not to say I'm ready to give up blogging if I can't make money at it; I'm not, of course, there's too much of the writing bug in me. But I've got some ideas in mind and I'm wondering, can it be done?

Thoughts?

Quick public service announcement: I've hacked together an RSS feed for the Bend Bulletin. It's a first-pass, I'm scraping their Local, Business and Sports pages and building a summary feed only. If I have time, I may go one step further and pull each article on those pages, and provide a full-text feed.

Either way, here's the RSS feed link. Enjoy!

I don't remember where I originally read this, but it was awhile ago, from a list of "life lessons" that someone had compiled. The only one that stuck out in my head is insanely funny to me:

Never lick a steak knife.

I discovered this site via Slashdot the other day, and given my current fixation on cooking geekery via Alton Brown, I find it pretty cool: Cooking For Engineers. I especially like the nifty recipe tables... very creative use of HTML tables.

In other odd-yet-apropos geek cooking news, Meg Hourihan, the co-founder of Blogger, is giving up the computer life to be a chef. Quite a leap.

Yikes, it would appear that I've taken a blogging hiatus. Not so. I guess time just sort of slipped away from me, and keeps slipping; I've got things to write about, I just always seem to be doing something else. So consider this the recap post for the past few days.

I've been playing with Bloglines as my primary newsreader/RSS aggregator, and I really, really like it. Very well done, the kind of web app that I'm totally envious of when I write web apps. The big plus is it's web-based, so I can comfortably read my RSS anywhere, not just on the one computer at home. Highly recommended.

Fall seems to have arrived a bit early here in Central Oregon. The weather forecast this evening indicated it would be in the mid 60s this week, and 54 degrees on Saturday. I have nothing against fall, but man, where'd the sunshine go?

Cold weather's not the only thing arriving; Simone saw a cockroach at Super Burrito in downtown Bend, Jake picked up the story and now everyone's anti-Super Burrito. Too bad, I liked eating there from time to time. Could be worse, though, we could all live back east or in the South where roaches are a way of life. We're pretty lucky overall.

The variety is amazing: here's a list of various agents, spiders and bots that I've culled from my chuggnutt.com logfiles over the last 30 days that have to do with RSS and/or blogs (specifically blogs, not just general purpose spiders like Google's). These are only the ones I know for sure are blog or RSS related; others in my logs might be also, but aren't obvious about it.

Geek types, note that these strings (with wildcards mostly) can be used as-is when identifying HTTP_USER_AGENT.

• Bloglines: The web-based feed reader/aggregator
• kinjabot: The (currently) beta bot for the Kinja weblog directory/guide
• Feedreader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• PubSub.com RSS reader: Another searchable, web-based aggregator
• FeedDemon: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• fastbuzz.com: Fastbuzz News is another web-based aggregator that scans news and blogs
• ORblogs.com-bot and ORblogs-bot: The crawlers for ORBlogs which compile metadata and RSS for the aggregating site
• SharpReader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• Technoratibot: Technorati's crawler
• UniversalFeedParser: Mark Pilgrim's liberal feed parser which is used in a variety of RSS software
• Feedster Crawler: Feedster's RSS spider
• BlogBot: I think this is Blogdex's crawler, but I'm not totally sure
• BlogPulse: Yet another blog/RSS crawler and indexer
• Slower, Friendlier Spiders (BlogShares V1.35): The spider for BlogShares, the fantasy share market for blogs
• NITLE Blog Spider: The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education's spider for their blog census
• LocalfeedsPageCrawler
• NusEyeFeedCrawler

It was (another) small get-together tonight, with only myself, Simone and Dane. Lot of fun, though. And the Cascade Lakes Brewing Company's westside lodge just rocks! Upstairs is the game room, with a couple of pool tables, real dartboards, and... Donkey Kong.

Oh yeah, you know we were playin' that.

Back when I was a freshman in high school, and had an inadequate grasp of higher mathematics, I came up with an algebraic "proof" that I thought violated, well, something in math. I had "proved" that 0 = -1 using infinity. It was pretty basic. I don't know why I remembered this today, but I thought it would be amusing to post.

It's like this:

The symbol ∞ represents, well, infinity. So, you whittle infinity down to a simple variable and start with:

∞ = ∞

Nothing earth-shaking. But infinity being infinity, you could also say that infinity minus one (∞ - 1) is also infinity, since it still goes on forever. Then you'd have:

∞ = ∞ - 1

Then, following the rules, drop out the variable ∞ from the equation by subtracting it from both sides of the equation:

∞ - ∞ = ∞ - ∞ - 1

Which of course leaves you with:

0 = -1

Proof! :)

Then, of course, you could further apply various equality rules and come up with all sorts of non-zero results equalling zero.

I remember being pretty disappointed when it turned out to be appallingly wrong. Fortunately, I still went on to the Advanced Math and then Calculus courses...

Notice for the next Bend blogging get-together: Wednesday, September 8^th starting at six o'clock at the Cascade Lakes Brewing Company in Bend. That's on the westside, just off the Chandler/Colorado roundabout.

All the usual suspects will be there. And let's mix it up a little! New bloggers and out-of-town bloggers, come on down too!

I don't know why exactly, but for some reason I always think in terms of buying and owning a book when I want to read it. And if the money's not handy (it usually isn't), I resign myself to possibly getting the book as a gift for my birthday or Christmas. Ironically, I almost never think of the library, so it's always pleasant to "discover" how good and useful the library is.

Today I picked up I'm Just Here For the Food from the library, a book I've been coveting for some time now but (of course) hadn't been willing to shell out the $32.50 (ouch!) for. (I just started it but so far, it's a really good book. It already answered one of the main questions I have from Alton Brown's TV show—why does he use kosher salt all the time?) And since I rediscovered how nice the library is, I've already added 3 other books to my account to keep an eye on via the online interface.

Online? Yeah, the Deschutes Public Library website has a complete catalog interface that lets you do, well, anything via the web that you can do in the library: search the catalog, request items from other libraries, place holds... okay, this isn't news to people who are, well, literate and visit the library. But I still think it's pretty nifty.

So go visit a library! They rock!

I plucked this item out of the ORBlogs ORpost RSS feed last night (originally via Acid-Cookie), and forgot to blog about it: Zach Braff, from Scrubs, has a blog.

Pretty cool, but what's off the hook is that the blog's only been active for about 2 months, but he's already getting over 1000 comments per entry. Whoa.

You know... while he's onstage at the Republican National Convention, someone should present Bush with a bag of pretzels.