From katu.com, Big-time movie director holding open casting call in Portland: Gus Van Sant is looking for people for his next movie: …show up on Sunday, Feb. 29, for an open casting call for Portland writer-director Gus Van Sant’s latest movie, a story about rock ‘n’ roll in the Northwest grunge heyday. The casting call… Continue reading Casting Call
Month: February 2004
Is Google Broken?
Elsewhere on this site I’ve stated that I love Google. That still mostly holds true, but there’s been some things about Google lately that are making me pause a bit. The first concerns Google’s apparent abandonment of RSS for (exclusively) the still-incubating Atom syndication format/API. I won’t bother rehashing the situation here; if you want… Continue reading Is Google Broken?
Big Bangs… and Bangs… and Bangs…
There’s an interesting article in the February issue of Discover Magazine on the Big Bang theory—or rather, an alternative to the Big Bang theory. (No good link to the article itself, sorry; Discover only allows registered Discover subscribers to read the full article online.) The gist of the alternative theory is that rather than having… Continue reading Big Bangs… and Bangs… and Bangs…
Bend Gridlock
Bend made the national headlines last week (CNN: Rush minute becomes rush hour) because it’s the largest city in the west without a public transit system. And we’re not going to get one anytime soon, unfortunately. From the CNN article: Public transportation advocates in the city are up against a steadfast car culture reinforced by… Continue reading Bend Gridlock
Overused Phrases on Blogs
Gah. I almost wrote a blog post at the end of the year ranting about the most overused phrases showing up in the blogsphere. (“Blogosphere” itself is definitely an overused word, but I can’t help it. It’s succint.) The phrase at the top of my list for 2003 was “drinking the kool aid.” The new… Continue reading Overused Phrases on Blogs
Amazon Reviews
One of the big online stories over the past couple of days is Amazon.com‘s weeklong glitch that “suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews” (New York Times article here). Turns out a lot of what was revealed was that authors were anonymously writing glowing reviews of their own… Continue reading Amazon Reviews
Happy Valentine’s Day
It’s a little late in the evening, I know, but better late than never, I figure: Happy Valentine’s Day!
Comment Spam
Last night I got my first bonafide blog comment spam! Two comments showed up four minutes apart on an older post (the post titled, “Not Your Father’s Sesame Street“) that have nothing to do with that post—in fact, it’s kind of disturbing that they would show up on that particular one, since it’s about kids’… Continue reading Comment Spam
Writing every day
Since the beginning of the year, I set a personal goal for myself to write and publish something on my weblog here at least once a day, and I’ve actually stuck to it. (Yeah, there’s some gaps on the calendar there, but if you look closely, it’s because the post didn’t get done until something… Continue reading Writing every day
PHP XML Benchmark
Interesting PHP benchmark of parsing XML showed up on PHP Everywhere. In High Speed XML Parsing is Not Intuitive, John Lim tested five methods of extracting the title element from an XML RSS feed. Surprising results; the regular expression match was by far the fastest, and I would have thought the SAX parsing (based on… Continue reading PHP XML Benchmark