Monthly Archives: September 2004

Life lessons…

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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.

Roaches use Bloglines in the fall

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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.

Blog bot roundup

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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

0 = -1

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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…

I’m Just Here For the Food

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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!