Author: cosmo

09/07/2008

My friends the Wyziks celebrated the first birthday of their son Simon today, so I sent them a little note along these lines:

I don’t know if this happened to Simon, but it happened to EVERY ONE of my kids: on their first birthday we’d give them a cupcake or Rice Krispie Treat or whatever with a candle on it, and they’d be fascinated by the candle. So, naturally, being one year old and having the brainpower of cabbage, they’d reach out to touch the magical flickering light.

The results were pretty predictable, and of course we’d all laugh. I’m sure we’re going to Parent Hell for it, but I figure it teaches the little tykes a good lesson.

So if Simon didn’t get to experience his own journey of discovery about fire, I recommend it. Do it now before it’s too late and he’s a 14-year-old pyromaniac lighting M-60’s in your back yard.

Ahh, good times. The sequence below is Zack, circa 2002.

09/04/2008

So last night I was driving down I-25 and there was an amazing sunset over the mountains. Gorgeous.

Since I have this spiffy new e-mail capability, I thought how cool it would be to send a quick message from my cell phone to my blog. So I flipped open the phone and started texting.

driving down i25. beautiful.

It took me about three miles to get that in, because of course I’m flying down the road at 80mph and have to keep at least half an eye on my driving. Then I had to enter the e-mail address for the message, and wow is it tricky to do that when you don’t know how to create an at-sign on a teensy phone keypad.

In the end I decided that mentioning the beautiful sunset could probably wait until a time when I wasn’t careening along at 80mph.

09/02/2008

More updates to the ol’ blog software… I fixed the RSS feed (which has been broken for years) and updated a bunch of programming and URLs so things are more organized and have nicer links.

One of these days I’m going to redesign it and (drumroll please) add commenting capabilities, which all three of my fans have requested.

08/31/2008

With nothing really earth-shattering to do tonight, I decided to hack together some programming to allow me to send an e-mail to my server and have it drop right into this blog. So this is an e-mail– we’ll see if it ends up in the right place…

08/28/2008

Wow, these spammers are getting nasty. Today I have a message entitled “We have hijacked your baby”. I’m not sure how one hijacks a person, but certainly that sounds like bad news. I guess the message is supposed to be some kind of ransom note.

Of course the zip file containing a photo of my “fume” (?) contains an executable that, on a Windows machine, would probably install a nasty piece of software.

Stupid, stupid spammers.

08/26/2008

So Tom abandoned his blog after using it for years, moving over to Blogspot with the masses. I find that an interesting side effect of being a web developer is the subconscious need to “eat your own dog food”, meaning I feel like since I know how to write my own blog software, I should do that instead of falling back to some third-party toolset.

Of course I wrote this four or more years ago, when things like Blogspot didn’t even exist, and I’ve put so much stuff into it that it’s not really worth the effort to move everything to another (perhaps more capable) system. Ah well.

Mmm, dog food.

08/26/2008

So the web development world is abuzz with news of Mozilla’s new Ubiquity plug-in. Apparently it allows you to type things like “define ubiquity”, which will open a web page on dictionary.com or something and display the definition. Or “map 653 Elm St. Hoboken NJ” and hop over to Google Maps.

What’s funny is Konqueror (my browser of choice) has been doing this for years. It has “web shortcuts” built in when you install it, and you can customize it with anything you want. As such I have all kinds of shortcuts– and in fact “define” and “map” are amongst them. Just tonight I typed “wp:transcendental number” to pull open the Wikipedia article about transcendental numbers.

I tell you, it’s hard being so far ahead of the curve.

08/26/2008

It’s official. Cows generally point north.

A group of researchers who apparently had nothing better to do examined thousands of satellite images from Google Maps, looking at fields where cows were pictured. They found that most of the time, the cows are aligned along north-south magnetic field lines.

Just another factoid to add to my armory of party conversation starters.