Category: General

The Star Tribune recently redid their website….and they did a good job. They site appears to be built for Firefox and most amazingly, they have RSS feeds available. They also cut down on the number of articles you have to be registered to view.

I’m sort of stunned.

I don’t expect an old media outlet like this to be this on top of things. I expect disasters like the NYT who decided to put their columnists behind a pay to view service, thus rendering them non-existant in all internet debates. With ABC making some of their shows available on iTunes and NBC putting the nightly news up for download, they might slowly be getting it.

– I’ve been listening to List of Demands by Saul Williams lately. I’ve had the mp3 on my computer from the big SXWS download earlier this year. There are so many songs in the collection (2gb) that its hard to listen to everything. I put the SXSW collection on shuffle a few days ago and this gem popped out. There are several artists I’ve found from this and I hope SXSW does this again for 2006. You can get the 2.6 gb 2005 collection via bittorrent from here.

– I’ve run into several people the last few days who were unaware of RSS. Some of them were people who are involved in technology as a profession. For those who don’t know what it is, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. If you look on my site, you’ll find a button that says RSS in the lower left column. If you click on it, you’ll see a bunch of confusing looking code. When you cut and paste the URL for that page into and RSS reader, it will go and grab the new article from my site when they get updated.

I’ve been using reader.Google.com as of late. Its not perfect but it has several things going for it. 1) its online, so it will keep track of items I’ve already read from wherever I access it. 2) its free. I had been using Onfolio with Firefox as my RSS reader. Onfolio is made by the guys who made Cold Fusion, so I have a natural desire to see them do well. Its a good product. It is probably the best RSS reader out there. However, it costs $30 and it only works on one computer. Google reader is good enough and with the cost and online advantages, it makes it hard to beat.

*Update* When I read this very post in Google Reader, it put an audio control at the bottom of the page to play the mp3 I linked to above. Neat.

Q: What is better than a straight guy getting a fashion makeover by 5 gay guys?

A: A straight guy getting a fashion makeover from 3 hotties.

On Saturday, I spend most of the afternoon with Haley and her two friends Kerri (left) and Emily (right). They went through my closet, took me to the MoA, and had a grand old time having me try stuff on and letting me buy it.

In the proess of buying me clothes, I threw away my sneakers that I’ve worn since 1997, and had strong pressure on me to throw away my old jeans which are 2 sizes too big for me. (which I have yet to do).

As it turns out, I have no clue what is “fashionable”. (well, I guess I knew that). Hence, the need to bring in professional help in fixing my wardrobe.

Even thought I might not have showed it at the time, I actually had fun, which might have been the first time in my life I had fun buying clothes. It was an experience to go from store to store with three women fussing over you and picking stuff out.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the trip this last week. Some things I need to do:

Get SCUBA certified. I’ll have opportunities to go diving and I’d like to take advantage of it. It shouldn’t be that hard as I have a diving center about a mile from my house.

Upgrade my amateur radio license so I can use HF bands. I’d like to take a small HF radio with me to talk to people on the trip. Probably the most popular thing in amateur radio is DXing, which is just racking up contacts in different locations. I’ll be in enough different locations that I should be a good contact to do DXing with.

As an interesting side note, what constitutes a “country” is different for different things. The UN has 191 members and a few countries with observer status (Vatican and Palestine). The Travelers Century Club recgonizes 315 “countries”. Amateur radio recognizes 425. The UN only recognizes sovereignty. The other lists make distinctions between politics and geography.  Example: To the UN, the United States is the 50 states and all territories. To amateur radio, it is several units. The continental US is one, Alaska and Hawaii are both separate, and then there are separate entries for Guam, American Samoa, USVI, Puerto Rico, Johnston Island, Baker and Howland Islands, Midway Island, Guantanamo Bay, Jarvis Island and Kingman Reef, Wake Island, Kure Island, Navassa Island, and Descheo Island. 

I will also be taking some classes on video and photography. My current level of knowledge is not sufficient.

• What sex is your brain? Its really long and you need a ruler.
• LewRockwell.com has posted Hayek’s 1960 essay “Why I am not a Conservative”. Hayek (winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics), I believe, is one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th Century and is almost totally ignored in universities. (One of the others is Eric Hoffer who will never appear on a unversity syllabus) To understand the relevance of Hayek essay today, read this quote from Matthew Yglesias:
  

  …the era of big government being over is over. It would be a serious mistake to confuse Bush’s brand of big conservatism with liberalism, or with any kind of real concession to liberalism, but it suggests that the underlying political dynamics have shifted a great deal. If you did have a progressive president, there’s no longer a particularly large amount of popular resistance to expanding the activist state. Even most Republicans don’t especially care about small government.

  He’s right. Its dark times for those who just want to be left the hell alone.

• Removed Weatherbug from my life and replaced it with WeatherPulse. I get the temperature in my toolbar and none of the bullshit that comes along with Weatherbug.
• I’ve been goofing around with greasemonkey on Flock. Greasemonkey lets you run scripts to modify webpages on the client side. If a site has a bad interface, you can change what can be seen. There is a pretty big collection of scripts you can download.
• Is it me, or has Microsoft become irrevelant? The only non-Windows MS app I use anymore is Media Player, and that has been replaced by iTunes for most stuff. Vista is completely a non-event for me as there is nothing I really need in a new OS. I use OpenOffice/Abiword almost exclusively. The only thing I can think of where they might be doing something that interests me is Xbox360. All they can do is play catch-up Google and try to do half-assed copies of whatever they do, but they’ll never be able to beat them because they have a corporate culture that requires them to try to milk a dime out of everything they do and push every other MS product down your throat.
• I went through my Sony Vaio laptop today and cleaned out a load of programs and cleaned up the registry. Its running way faster. I install more crap on here than I do on my desktop computer.
• 43 Things is a really interesting site. I’ll post my list when I finish it.