I went with a few friends out to Zilker Park yesterday, for to listen to the Austin Symphony and watch fireworks. I think it’s safe to say it was the most fun I’ve had in several days. Of course, they played the 1812 Overture; they even had someone (I think it was the Texas Guard) firing an actual cannon. Great stuff. Then a selection of Sousa marches, two of which I recognized (Semper Fidelis and Hail to the Spirit of Liberty) and one that I didn’t. I guess I should listen to Paul’s recording, and see if I can figure out what it was.

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It’s always so hard figuring out how to start a post.

So I’m sitting here at work, bored out of my mind because I’ve already read all of the webcomics I like (and a few I’m ambivalent about). I feel like I should post something, but I just don’t have anything to say, really. I’m still riding on my week of vacation (last week), so I haven’t built up a hate for users yet; this precludes another “tech support rant”.

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It’s always weird when I get songs stuck in my head that I know I haven’t heard in weeks. Right now it’s “Human Behavior” by Bjork. I’m guessing it was close enough to “Human Condition” (see the previous post) to pop the song into my subconscious.

Not a bad song, all in all. Just not as good as “Museum of Idiots” by TMBG, which was the one before this.

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Oh, yeah. Major props to Ian Main, who wrote the beautiful stylesheed I just converted to using. The style’s called “Human Condition,” and took 3rd place in the WordPress Style Competition.

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I was starting a new post, and saw that I had an empty draft called “Post #116”, and I figured “heck, that’s a good enough title for me!”

Anyway, the inimitable Alex King has created a plugin for WordPress called “WP Unformatted,” and it’s pretty neat. It basically allows me to turn off the stupid auto-formatting and “happy quotes” on a post-by-post basis. I’ll probably only ever use it if I post code, but it’s nice that it’s there.

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This site, which I found linked from ". . . she’s a flight risk.", is pretty cool. Virtual refrigerator poetry is a neat concept. I haven’t had much time to look at it as of yet, but maybe once I leave work I’ll check it out.

---— “…sleeping is a gateway drug to being awake…” [They Might be Giants, “Wearing a Raincoat”]

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Well, not really. Just an observation, to tell the truth.

Setting up a new dialup connection on a Mac (with OS X) seems to take about 5 minutes when you’re talking to a dumb user. There are two tabs to fill in, and a total of 3 essential blanks on those tabs (4 if your ISP doesn’t supply DNS servers automatically). Maybe 10 mouseclicks total, including selecting fields to type in.

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I suppose I should put something new on the front page, since it’s been far too long.

I upgraded a couple of things recently.

• Tasks has gone to version 2.1b1, and has some nice new benefits (most of which I’ll never use, but still…). I’m kinda glad I gave Alex some dough; it’s probably the best program I’ve ever paid for.

• b. has progressed to 1.4.3 while I wasn’t looking; I updated that. This is probably the best bookmark manager I’ve found; it does pretty much exactly what I want it to do. You should check it out.

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Yeah, there’s a test post below. Apparently flickr.com can make posts to weblogs that have BloggerAPI capabilities. What’s strange, though: the post obviously worked, but the site told me that it failed for some reason. I guess WordPress’ BloggerAPI implementation (via xmlrpc.php) doesn’t return exactly what flickr expects. Oh, well; I can remember that, and work around the limitation accordingly.

Anyway, you should check that site out. It’s pretty cool. I’m not much for chatting, but it seems like a very convenient way to integrate picture-sharing into a chat/IM environment. And boy is it pretty. If only all web sites had a visual design that nice.

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Now this is cool. I found the link originally on boingboing; you can order pizza via a command-line program from your unix-like machine. If only Domino’s founde didn’t donate money to militant anti-abortion groups, I might have a cause to use it. It’s really a shame, too; I’d love to test this thing out. Now, I don’t have a personal stake in the “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice” thing (read anti-abortion vs. pro-abortion). I feel that it’s up to people who are directly affected by the cause to have the largest voice in that cause; single, unattached males (in my oh-so-humble opinion) shouldn’t have as much of a say in these matters as say, a married (or otherwise attached) woman who might become pregnant. My problem with Domino’s founder donating money to these groups is that they’re militant. There are better things to be violent about.

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