July 2003

Spam of the day.

Emphasis mine.

My name is Jason Storm. I recently visited http://www.mintchaos.com and I am certain that our products can increase the value of your website, and increase your business revenue. Our Affiliates & Sales Represenatives earn 40% - 50% sales commission + second tier bonuses on all referred sales.

Our products include: Software, Nutritional Supplements, and Internet Personals. Sign up today and put a banner on your website.

Yes that’s exactly what I need. A combinationf of software, nutritional supplements, and internet personals. Sigh.

Xian 11:37 PM - p-link - talk (4)

Word of the day.

Pesoff.

Xian 03:03 PM - p-link - talk (4)

Godspell.

Ann’s show Godspell is running this weekend. I went friday night and took a bunch of pictures which are up in the gallery. Pictures were taken with the new Canon EOS-10D camera that dad got for Spring Arbor University’s student publications. I’ll try to refrain from geeking about the camera too much right now. This is all about the show after all. But I will say that I am impressed to the point of lust. The pictures turned out quite good considering the low-light conditions. The lens I used for picture numbers 165 - 176 was not as good and the quality change is apparent. But all in all it turned out quite well. And of course the show was awesome. Ann is doing an incredible job and puts so much energy into it I’m sure she’s going to come home tonight and sleep till wednesday. :)

Confidential to Ann: You are beautiful and awesome. I love ya!

Xian 07:24 PM - p-link - talk (4)

Babytalk.

Jen Ambrose is the new newest member of the MintChaos blogwagon. She’s been added to the recent hosted area down on the left.

Jen was hesitant to ask for a blog. She thought I’d say no because she didn’t think her blog would be funny or interesting and “it would probably be full of baby stuff!”. While it is indeed full of baby stuff, I’m sure she is surprised to find that it is funny and interesting and even insightful.

Welcome aboard!

Xian 11:59 PM - p-link - talk (1)

Textiled.

I have upgraded the version of Dean Allen and Brad Choate’s wonderful Textile running on MintChaos’ Movable Type install. Textile is a text formatting utility that allows for a simplified markup for blog entries. For example:

A "link to MintChaos":http://mintchaos.com.

Will create this output: A link to MintChaos. Compare this to the html necessary to do the same:

A <a href="http://mintchaos.com">link to MintChaos&lt</a>

But there is much more to it than simple links. Nearly all HTML can be created in textile. It’s my secret to all those lists I do.

If you use Movable Type you should check it out. And if you have a blog here you should definately give it try. Just Select “Textile” under Text Formatting on the Edit/New entry page. It should already be set as default for most of you.

Learn about it at the local documentation. Or play with it and download it at Brad’s Textile site.

Xian 10:01 PM - p-link - talk (0)

It smells like outside outside.

I just stuck my head out out the window and checked. It smells like outside out there. Which is not to say that it doesn’t normally smell like outside outside, it does. It’s just that right now it has that extra earthly ‘outsideness’ that comes from a combination of buckets of rain, hail, thunderstorms, ninety degree weather and finally getting over a cold.

Xian 08:50 PM - p-link - talk (0)

Link dump.

Sorry for the lack of updates. It’s been a stupid week for me. Anyway, here’s some stuff I’ve been saving. It’s a big chunk, but there’s some cool stuff in there. I put the geekier stuff at the end.

• The Slimp3 is probably the most elegant way to bring your mp3s to the living room I’ve seen yet.
• A conversation between a geek and his wife.
• Stick figure fighting. Some of the coolest flash things I’ve ever seen. An old favorite I dug up because I wanted to see it again. Besure to check out #3 and #4.
• Chris Heilman’s weblog 101-365 Has some great photographs. Including: Chordate, Some impressive infrared work, and he has a thing for Cacti.
• Bounty hunting spammers, a possible grassroots solution.
• I need to play with Penrose Tiles some time. They look to be very interesting.
• ScrappleFace: Failure to Find Saddam Proves He Never Existed. Obviously.
• Bill Drew runs a national database of libraries with wireless networks.
• A transcript of Will Ferrell’s 2003 Commencement Speech at Harvard.
• The bolt gallery makes nifty sci-fi sculptures out of bits of junk.
• A collection of dead dot-com’s farewell pages. Contains 332 entires at time of this writing.
• GeoBlog View. Watch the world blog in real time.
• First Monday: Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks.
• SCons is a Python based replacement for Make. It should make my static website automation process work better.
• Subversion wants to replace CVS. It has a good thing going.

Xian 04:22 AM - p-link - talk (1)

Live journal friends.

Julie Conolly has gone and gotten herself a LiveJournal. I’ll refrain from complaining too much about live journal right now except to say that I wouldn’t hate it so much if it had RSS feeds or if it wasn’t so slow that it makes Blogspot look peppy. But that’s not really the point. Anyway, through her’s I discovered various other college friends’ LiveJournals: Sherry Owens, Kara Mallery, Andy Fetter and Megan Fetter.

Xian 11:05 AM - p-link - talk (2)