Category: Uncategorized

SportsColumn.com just re-launched in its 2.0 version. Much stronger because the site now lets you (the reader) filter what the various authors contribute. The quality was uneven in the past, since it was dependent on the author. When Vin Diec, the owner of the site, has something to say, it’s usually worth a read. Now there is a mechanism for sifting the wheat from the chaff. I never want to read chaff… I read too much as it is. I’m impressed that Vin got SportsColumn mentioned in this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article: Going blog wild: Anyone with a computer and an opinion can launch a media startup. It was back in February, but at least they spelled both his name and the site’s name correctly.

Seriously, try it out.

I look at log file summaries for clock every few weeks, just scanning to give myself a snapshot. This morning, I decided to take a look at the actual log files, as I do more often at work. As always, a few interesting lines in there, and this was just from the first 7 hours of Sunday, May 23.

Lots of requests from Cyveillance (63.148.99.233), as Gulker mentioned a year ago. Makes even a lazy man want to do something to block them, just because.

A few reasonable requests from “Pompos/1.3 http://dir.com/pompos.html”. Never heard of the Dir.com search engine. Looks French.

Returning to the summary, I learn that just over one-third of my pageviews are requests for my RSS file. Hardly a surprise… could be higher, since I do full-text in the feed. More than 60% of my entries and exits are on the RSS file, so some bots or some people are turning a few pages per session. Glad to see that 30% of the requests received a 304 (not modified) HTTP code, saving me a tiny bit of bandwidth. Storage, more than bandwidth, is my issue, but I don’t want to delete/export these logs unless absolutely necessary.

101 Google searchers made their way to clock so far this month, outpacing MSN and Yahoo 10x. Top search? Twelve people found this site in May by typing “pulo prabang” into Google and then visiting the first result, where I wondered where that island is (from the Aubrey-Maturin series, to which I’m about to return).

I have better things to do, but it is interesting… you start to see some of the appeal of FeedBurner when you try to get a handle on what people (not just machines) are actually reading. It’s not simple.

Bernie DeKoven’s Funlog reminds me of roofball, including a link to Roofball.com. Wow… brings me back to high school, which is where I played. We never used a tennis ball, which the Roofball.com site illustrates. Instead, we followed the DeKoven quote:

“The best roofball ball is one of those cheap, light-weight jobs, about 10 inches in diameter, with all the swirly colors. You find them at the drugstore, dollar store, toy store, and even the supermarket when they’re “in season”.

Also, you could not let the ball hit the ground at all. I wasn’t a master, but I held my own.

Childless couple told to try sex reads the headline I saw on Wednesday. Another one that makes you wonder whether it’s ripped straight from The Onion, but… we’ll hope it’s accurate, even though Google News only finds two references to the story, of which this Ananova reference is one.

Update: It’s a hoax. Glad I was skeptical… but I still posted it, spreading the meme.

Jon Stewart’s commencement address at William & Mary, which he attended as an undergraduate and returned to to receive a honorary doctorate. Seems real, posted on the actual college website. I’ll go with it being real… and it’s funny even if it’s a hoax, a la the fake “Kurt Vonnegut” commencement address. One clip from Stewart:

Let’s talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and IáI wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.

Spent the evening at the Technorati Developer Salon, among the alpha-geeks and A-listers. A bunch of people who in the blogosphere can go by their first name, although there are a few contenders for some of the names. Still, Dave, Doc, Jeremy, Marc, and several others, like Tantek. Sometimes it’s strange to put a face to the voice I’ve come to recognize in a blog, but I enjoyed spending time listening to people who are smarter than I am about this stuff (the bleeding edge of the web). I understand enough to be dangerous… I’ll have to hope that that’s enough. Thanks, Rich.

Had a series of quick calls with Verio this morning about the hosting of this domain, and I ended up agreeing to them moving the site from the original Best Internet servers to Verio servers. I thought this had been done years ago, since NTT/Verio bought Best some time ago, but apparently not. The company’s policy is to send emails confirming the changes to the account… which is fine.

All five emails I received today from NTT/Verio were flagged as spam, one by SpamAssassin at the server (yes, their server), and the other four by Mail.app. My own hosting company can’t send me e-mail anymore, even when they configure SpamAssassin. And yet the spammers get up to 1,000 messages/day through SpamAssassin, most of which are caught by Mail.app… but not enough, honestly. It’s getting worse, not better.

Just like the last time I read Dick Francis, I flew through Wild Horses this weekend. I needed a quick, fun read, and that’s what I got.

Francis didn’t leave horses out of the picture in any of his mysteries, and Wild Horses is no exception. He employs a racing film set in the heart of Newmarket as the backdrop for an unplanned investigation of a decades-old murder which stirs the pot, with the film’s director as the protoganist. I appreciate Francis’s routine of diving into a vocation for a book and teaching his readers (as he probably taught himself) quite a bit about how that part of the world works, at least superficially. Francis doesn’t make it tangential to the tale, either. I’m not out to make any films myself, but at least I feel I have a dim understanding of how the endeavor comes together. In this case, the sausage-making appears as interesting as the sausage… but I know Francis can gloss over a boring afternoon of re-takes in a sentence or a paragraph. And he does, thankfully.

I think I need one more fiction book before I dive into a non-fiction volume once more.

I pushed the boy in the jogging stroller through this morning’s Bay to Breakers. Twenty-five minutes to cross the starting line, and not much fast about the rest of the “race,” either. But that’s eight years straight running Bay to Breakers, and a T-shirt for the boy (after an exceedingly long line in the Polo Grounds for the shirt). Since I’m unlikely to qualify for sub-seeded ever again, I’ll have to get used to this way of enjoying the festivities. I don’t even think I’m at the back of this picture of many of the 60,000-strong “runners”.

Earlier this week, I finished The Confusion, the second volume in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. I read Quicksilver in November 2003; I’m eager for volume three, The System of the World, promised for September of this year.

I love a complex read which still, well, reads well. Powerful ideas, intricate plotting, myriad characters, historical allusions — none of these need interrupt the turning of pages, but often enough they do. Not here. Stephenson includes some “telling” via his characters, but mostly he lets action take hold.

The Confusion takes the characters set in motion in the first volume, and sends them careening around Europe or around the world. The physical laws elaborated by Newton (a strong secondary character here) help explain the seemingly erratic orbits of Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. Shaftoe is a magnet for trouble and action; he’s an inadvertent catalyst, always party to significant events. Only the time spent in Mexico seems to stretch too far even for Stephenson’s nifty historical connections: there’s even a tie-in to the mythical Jewish settlement in New Mexico. A few incidents like this made me think of Leonard Nimoy from the old TV show In Search Of… but I forgive a few few flights of fancy. Overall, the history is fascinating, and I’d like to read more about this period (late 17th-early 18th century). My history and literature studies always started ~50 years later, in the more immediate lead-up to the French Revolution.

Eliza fascinates, in part because she gets to serve as the main actor in the trilogy’s exploration of the beginnings of modern financial mechanisms. Money is pretty interesting stuff, after all — and it doesn’t always make sense, if you move beyond the daily assumptions we all make. The best scene in the entire book is the party in St.-Malo, where in 16 pages (p.350-366 in hardcover) Eliza leads a collection of French nobles through an explanation of how credit works. We readers are not treated like simpletons, as are some of the lesser nobles, but we get the full story and an understanding of why these new concepts surprised so many in that era.

I only worry that any histories I read of this era will pale in comparison to Stephenson’s weaving. I don’t know where he’s departed from fact, but his usual practice leaves me confident that the tapestry of history he’s using is not all of his own creation.

The Confusion is a step up from Quicksilver. At times, it nearly equals the incredible Cryptonomicon, which had the advantage of being self-contained. Again, I’m looking forward to September.

P.S. Here’s Slashdot review of The Confusion, which I’ll read when I’m finished with this post. Probably less disjointed than my own thoughts.