Archive for the 'stuff' Category

Read these quotes today, courtesy of Peter Shankman, on a listserv I’m on:

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return. 
- Leonardo da Vinci

“Come to the edge.”  “We might fall.” “Come to the edge.” “It’s too high!” “Come to the edge. ” And they came,  and he pushed,  And they flew.  –  Guillaume Apollinaire   

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. Confucius 

Fortune favors the bold. Virgil

Courage doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says, “I will try again tomorrow”. 

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. – Confucius 

Cielos Azules
(blue skies)

Just laugh. Be safe. Love life. 

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” – Anonymous

“Somewhere in the world someone is training when you are not. When you race him, he will win.” – Tom Fleming

The only easy day was yesterday – USN SEAL HQ motto

“The road to success is always under construction”

“The only difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones, is how we use them”

“When you see someone putting on his running shoes,
you can be pretty sure that an adventure is about to happen.”
                                                -  Winnie the Pooh

The reason someone wants to rain on your parade is because they don’t have one of their own.

If someone can deep link to your site, and your site requires login, figure out how to make your “Access Denied” page more inviting. Take for example this page from SocialToo:

I clicked a link from @GuyKawasaki’s twitter feed and the resulting page didn’t tell me why I wanted to create yet another account on yet another system, at all. What is SocialToo? What am I missing out on by not being part of that community? Why should I create an account, other than to read what Guy was linking to?

I’m a busy guy… give me a reason to sign up. You’re missing an opportunity to sell your service to me SocialToo.

This music video choreographed to match up with everything the user is doing on a Mac is wicked cool.

My friend Mark Engelhardt, owner of IntuitiveISP IM’d me last night to tell me about his $1.99 sale on .info domains. $1.99? That’s a great deal… better than GoDaddy or anywhere else I’ve seen them…

I figured it’s too good a deal to pass up, so I registered a few cool short .info domains, and will see if someone wants to buy them in the next 12 months… it’s only $2, right?

Anyways, if you’re looking for a good domain, and the .com, .net, etc. variations are taken… see if the .info version is open, and if it is, go buy it for $1.99 from IntuitiveISP… Mark’s a great guy and gets all of my domain name business and has for about 5 years now.

Oh, sale ends 4/30/2006, so register it this month if you’re want to save a little cash… Domain names make great presents

Here’s the top search queries that brought traffic to this website in September:

Mark Cuban: When will the music industry do it right ?:

This is the only industry in the world that can see thousands of its retailers close, reduce the number of products it sells via cutbacks in artist rosters and albums released, cut back marketing and promotional dollars and then blame a reduction in sales on someone or something other than themselves.

Sometimes outsiders can more clearly see the problem and solution than insiders.

This site posts links to free MP3s as well as a few that are for sale… great stuff.

[via dasme]

Now Steven’s post on the Segway is just too funny:

John Robb: “Everyone who rides a Segway, wants to own a Segway.”

There has been a lot of Segway stuff showing up in the blogging community (and elsewhere) lately. The consensus seems to be that it’s a truly wonderful thingy indeed.

I wrote about my Segway experience back in October. I won’t deny that the technology is very cool, but I can’t say the experience left me wanting one.

Which is strange. Because if it’s shiny, and it’s new, I usually want it bad. So, why not the Segway?

Well, my earlier blog entry pretty much says it all. For distances less than a couple of miles, I’d rather walk (I need the exercise!). For longer distances, I have a car (or a bike, if I ever get around to re-learning how to ride. They say you never forget how. Don’t believe the lies.) This pretty much takes care of my transportation needs. I don’t really even have environmental guilt, which is popular here in Oregon. By my estimates, I drive substantially less than 5,000 miles a year.

There are something like 5 or 6 folks in our office building who all decided to jump in and buy Segways at the same time, and I see them riding down the street or the hallway on a fairly frequent basis. To put in perspective what I’m about to say, please understand that I am a geek. I was picked on all through school, picked last for every horrible P.E. game, etc, etc, but when I see these guys on their Segways, I want to push them off and steal their lunch money.

I’m not even kidding — the simple addition of a Segway turns what would otherwise be a single dork into an entire chess team on wheels. And if it can stir up this type of sentiment in a fellow geek, imagine what the baseball cap guys will want to do to you. I’m having horrible mental images of two high school quarterbacks throwing an 80 pound Segway back and forth over some guy’s head, chanting “You want your Segway? Come and get it! Come and get it!”

What the Segway community needs to do immediately, if it is to survive, is to cop a more “macho” image. Borrow a page from the Harley Davidson folks, and throw on a leather jacket. Liberally apply flame decals to your Segway. Find a way to make the Stirling engine extremely loud.

I am telling you all this as a friend. Act now, before the other side develops some sort of self-balancing wedgie machine.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just jealous.

BTW, this is my first post using the newest NewNewsWire Pro Beta from Brent Simmons (you rock Brent).

Read this today:

Is technology maturing? HP is on the record stating that the technology industry is maturing. While this may provide cover as Carly reduces the once great innovator into a Microsoft VAR, in these recessionary days it’s worth pondering if the tech sector has any growth left. And what does “maturing” mean anyway?

Read More on Winterspeak… It’s an amazing discourse on the economics of the tech industry, in a bite sized chunk.

After reading this post about RSS feeds and costs from Mark Pilgrim, I’ve decided to stop pulling RSS feeds every 30 minutes with NetNewsWire. I was pulling them so often so that I could stay up to date, but, it’s really not that neccessary to pull them that often, so, I’m decided to do my part to save everyone some cash. I’m now pulling RSS feeds once every 4 hours…

… and, actually, I’ll be checking my blogroll more often than that, so that’s enough for me to stay up to date, I think.

(btw, if you have a blog, and aren’t pinging weblogs.com when you update, I’ll probably only read your site once a week or at most once per day, cause you’ll never show up with an “*” next to your site in my blogroll. The “*” denotes that the site was recently updated with a ping to weblogs.com)

Kasia wrote about her recent awareness of someone spamming her referrer logs. I’ve seen the same thing here on inluminent, and didn’t know what was causing it, but thanks to Kasia, I’ve learned that at least its not just me. Kuroshin’s article on it was pretty helpful as it also backs up the fact that this practice happens, and seems to be becoming more prevalent.

I may not have the time to do read all the time, but these books just got added to my ‘buy soon’ list:

Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

I have now harnessed the power of news.google into my RSS Aggregator of choice: NetNewsWire Lite.

Thanks to Bruce for setting up the RSS Feeds for news.google.

Monday was a good day for incoming referrers.

It seems that Tony Pierce finally stumbled onto this little weblog, and thinks that I’m doing it better than him… Thanks Tony. That is terribly high praise, in my opinion. Most of you don’t know this, but Tony’s weblog was the key inspiration for inluminent/weblog. And, I think Tony’s doing a wonderful job on his site.

Rick mused about the reader reactions to this little ol’ weblog. I maintain that the photos might not make some of the potential readers out there happy, but at the same time haven’t received negative comment one, yet, though I’m dreading the day it starts. The goal here with the pictures of beautiful women is not to offend, but rather to spice up what would other wise be considered drab content. And at the same time, hopefully more readership will push me to produce better content… who knows… we’ll see somewhere long term what happens.

Jeremy says that inluminent/weblog is ‘beautiful’. Thanks Jeremy.

Andy’s vote of confidence helps… though I’m hoping he gets a little less busy sometime soon, so he can personally write more.

Scott Knowles reads inluminent/weblog “purely for the articles”. heh… nice one Scott.

The reverse cowgirl has been nice to me from day one (though I can’t figure out why I’m not on her blogroll sidebar thingy)

I meant to blog this earlier in the day, as it’s a great example of why I love Kuro5hin.org.

The other side of greener grass

I don’t know about other countries, but many US homeowners are really obsessed with their lawns. I guess growing grass around your house is better than pouring concrete. Of course, considering the amount of water, pesticides and chemicals poured on lawns annually, maybe there’s a down side… unless you go organic.

Sometimes growing things organically can be more difficult and more expensive, but in the case of your yard, just the opposite is true: For the most part, it’s both easier and cheaper.

You may think reading about lawn care is about as interesting as watching grass grow, but come with me on a short (barefoot) stroll through the geeky side of organic turf maintenance….

There are 11 main points that the author of this article makes about the care of your lawn (which is a big deal to any homeowner in a decent neighborhood) that should be read. Great article. Great community over there. I love it.

pelf \PELF\, noun:

Wealth or riches, especially when dishonestly acquired.

Pelf comes from Old French pelfre, “booty, stolen goods.” It is related to pilfer.

See Dictionary.com for more information.

Let me make this very clear. I hate the Dallas Cowboys. I grew up in Houston, and was a ‘Luv Ya Blue’ kind of kid back in the day, and now that I live up here in Cowboy land, I hate it. I don’t even watch the evening news because that’s all they talk about — the Cowboys.

So, to find out that the Cowboys lost the season opener to an expansion team, and the Houston Texas at that, I was exstatic. Woohoo!

Go Oilers… err… ehem… I mean Texans.

This quick post by Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing helps tell the story of why DRM in consumer devices just plain sucks for consumers. Toshiba’s got a great idea, which they implemented horribly. Again, Apple seems to be the hands down leader in the consumer electronics market, with others just trying to catch up, and failing miserably in the execution.

Ben and Mena posted a list of new features for MT 2.5 yesterday. Some of the Key features I’m anticipating are:

1. Integration of MTSearch
2. Ability to ping blo.gs and other services that accept pings adhering to the Weblogs.com XML-RPC interface.
3. “Keywords/Metadata” field added to entries.
4. More accessible default templates that follow guidelines from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility.

Can’t wait to install it

Phil covers the releases here, mentioning that the update will obsolete some of this hacks.

I’m sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when I get an email from my boss that says “U.S., UK launch major Iraq airstrikes”

100 U.S. and British planes reportedly target military facility, but both sides keep mum.

British media reported Friday that 100 British and American planes have launched the biggest air attack on Iraq in four years, possibly foreshadowing the early stages of a future U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. President Bush, meanwhile, used telephone diplomacy Friday to try to persuade three skeptical nations � China, Russia and France � that action against Baghdad is urgently needed.

I then turn to the BBC, as the MSNBC story is laking any depth. I find this:

Only a small number of aircraft actually released weapons: The overall “strike package” including electronic warfare planes, accompanying fighters and so on, probably numbered no more than 30 aircraft.

Then a co-worker forwards me this article from Sky.com, another UK based pub:

The planes carried out the assault after coming under fire while patrolling a no-fly zone.

Precision-guided weapons were used to hit an air defence command and control facility at a military airfield 240 miles from Baghdad.

Why do the American Media outlets sensationalize everything so much? This doesn’t sound nearly as bad as it does from MSNBC. Argh…