October 2004 Archives

If anybody out there is trying out the Guild Wars World Preview Event this weekend, keep an eye out for me as "Uisge Jack". Don't know how much time I'll waste on it, but this looks like I may finally be able to take a whole weekend off from work.

My uncle jsut sent me an e-mail full of amazing facts about all the horrible things that Democrats have done to Social Security over the years. In fact, they're so amazing that some of them are even true!

If there were any question of why I prefer Football over Baseball, TMQ sums it up perfectly.

In baseball, generally only a few players are involved per play; often as few as three. In football, 22 people are doing something on every down, executing complex tasks. Baseball has a few dozen strategies for pitching, fielder alignment and base running; football has hundreds of plays. Baseball tactics change a little from game to game; football tactics often change tremendously from game to game. Most baseball practice involves individuals honing their own skills; most football practice involves large groups of gentlemen learning to cooperate with each other. Some top college performers never make the NFL level because they can't handle the mental demands of football, whereas a baseball player cut because he could not remember the playbook is rare indeed. In complexity and intellectual challenge, football beats baseball many times over.

It's the strategy of football (which probably took me years of playing strategy computer games to appreciate) that finally got me to take a real interest in sport -- any sport.

I like the term a TV critic uses to describe a number of my favorite television shows, including the wildly successful Lost: Matthew Gilbert looks at the intricate worlds of mythology shows.

Mythology shows tend to attract lively, game audiences. Nighttime soaps such as "The O.C." and "Everwood" require a similar commitment to ongoing plots, but they don't ask viewers to do a lot of work along the way. They explain themselves. A mythology show, however, makes its viewers into cosmic Sherlocks who must keep finding the hidden truths in an only partially recognizable universe. Mythology writers expect rigorous, un-couch-potato-like viewing -- and they get it, sometimes in spades. There are countless websites devoted to the likes of "The X-Files," "Lost," "Millennium," and "Dark Angel," where avid fans turn their theories into communal-shrine art. Many of these sites also publish "fanfic" -- fan fiction -- that finds members spinning their own tales about a show's characters. Unlike most TV viewers, mythology devotees are not passive listeners to the stories the box is telling them.

[via TV Barn]

P.S. Just the same, I'm slightly irritated with ABC at the moment. Just hen I thought they'd decided to try a new tactic in the ratings wars -- that is, putting good shows on the air -- they've returned to their lame trick of playing scheduling games with odd-length shows. They're adding a whole minute to tonight's episode, which I doubt will accomplish anything but throwing off home viwers' recording schedules.

I have my cameraphone now, and better yet, I have flickr set up to post to this weblog direct from e-mail. So now I can take and post pictures (like this one of my lovely coworker Amanda at work yesterday) practically anywhere. I think this is going to be fun!

It seems like everyone around me is all hyped up about the Cards' playoff run. While I wish St. Louis fans the best, I'm really kind of indifferent to the team. Now that I've found a sport, and a team, that I really take an interest in, I find myself unwilling to hop on the bandwagon just because the local team is doing well. I'm just not interested in baseball, though I don't have the antipathy for the sport that I do for hockey. It feels like it would be vaguely disrespectful to the true fans, who follow a team through thick and thin, to ride their coattails only when the team does well.

Mind you, I did get caught up in Mark McGuire's record-setting season with the Cards way back when, but that felt a lot different. It was more about a partular individual, with a great story, who came across as a really nice guy.

As FlickrBlog says, this is the kind of shot that justifies a cmeraphone.

I've given into temptation and ordered what I hope to be a good cameraphone. Hopefully, I'll get it sometime this week, and won't have any trouble activating and/or using it.

On May 6, 2003, the mutilated bodies of three children, missing since the previous afternoon, were found in West Memphis, Arkansas. Three young local men were tried and convicted for the murders despite improper police procedures, an inaccurate "confession", and questionable testimony. Now, a decade later, one of the chief witnesses in the case has come forward to claim that her testimony was fabricated in response to police pressure. [via Brad]

I'm not sure what to say about Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire except that you should watch it while the video is still available for download. [via TeeVee] Or at least read the transcript. Jon starts off great, taking Carlson and Begala to task, but by the end, Stewart looks miserable. I can't tell whether he's thinking, "I'm never going to live down going all Larry King when Kerry came on TDS" or "How did I let these two nimrods drag me down to their level?"

I'm glad I usually do some research before I buy electronics. Following up on my current obsession, I asked a cow orker a few questions about his cameraphone, an LG VX6000 model, and then started poking around on the web for reviews. While he hadn't had any trouble with his phone, I found a disturbing number of web comments relating tales of woe due to "water damage". I still wasn't ready to write off that model completely, until I stopped by my cellular provider's local store on my way home from work to see what kind of selection they had. I overheard another customer describe the same symptoms as various web posters; in reponse, the store rep said something about "water damage". Sure enough, when I asked the customer about his phone, he said it was a VX6000. I think I'd best take some time to do a bit more research, and maybe I'll even get over this little obsession.

I have come down with a bad case of cameraphone lust. When I replaced my aging cellphone earlier this year, I couldn't quite justify to myself the extra expense of a camera model. After all, I didn't expect anyone I knew to get a cameraphone anytime soon, so I didn't expect to find anywhere to send photos. I've got a good digital camera that I don't use as much as I should, and I can always upload photos from that if I want to e-mail someone.

I should have known that some justification would appear over time. I've been looking at the Flickr photo sharing site lately, and it looks pretty neat. I haven't uploaded anything from my full-featured digital camera, since I have my own gallery for that. However, Flickr's e-mail and syndication features look like they might make cmeraphone pictures a lot more appealing. And while I usually have my camera nearby, perhaps having another right at hand with the ability to post right to the web might encourage me to take more.

Christopher Reeve died this weekend. His courage in his personal battle against the paralysis caused by his spinal cord injury was far greater than that needed against any threat he faced in his role as the big-screen Man of Steel.

With all due respect to Jay Allen, the best defense against comment spam on Movable Type weblogs may be to close off new comments on all your old entries. I've done it here, and helped Pete do the same. There's a plugin that's supposed to do this automatically, but if you want to do a one-time lockout of comments on all entries before a certain date, it's easy enough to do, at least on a SQL-based Movable Type install. (I don't have the perl-fu to do this on the default Berkeley database.)

Just run the following SQL statement on your database:

UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_comments = 2 WHERE entry_created_on < '10/1/04'

Just change to cutoff date to your liking. Naturally, it would be wise to backup/export your Movable Type entries before you take direct action in the database.

Mind you, this will lock out all new comments on those entries, legitimate or not; you can still re-open comments on individual entries as you wish. For me, leaving most of my old entries open just isn't worth the headache of spam management.

It's kind of hard to call this an actual redesign, since it's just a couple of tweaks to an off-the-shelf template. Still, I've added some proper sidebar links for the first time in longer than I care to remember, and may stick some more content over there, so I'm going to call this a v3.2 design.

I'd really like to find some inspiration and time to revitalize this weblog and do a proper redesign, something to recall the glory of my v2.0 / Blogger days. The purple backgrounds! The Plover font! The rounded corners! The...

I'm scaring you, aren't I? Sorry.

Movable Type 3.11 is in effect. Now I can use the latest technology to neglect my website. I've also switched my installation to use a MySQL database, which probably means bugger-all to you. To me, it means I can use my l33t database skillz to manipulate old posts, like switching most of my old entries to closed comments. This will probably do more to stem the tide of comment spam than MT-Blacklist does.

I might tinker with templates and/or comments in my copious free time. My apologies if anyone has trouble posting comments.

By the way, I've also (finally) entered captions for the quilt gallery I created for my mother.