I was recently summoned to serve as a juror in the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska, in the Roman L. Hruska U.S. Courthouse here in Omaha. I was originally scheduled to start on April 4th, but earlier this week, they called me and said that the judge wanted to get the case underway and wanted us to come in early (April 1). Rather than the response I should have given (“Sorry, I have already scheduled something for that day, had I known that was the day I would need to start, I could have kept my schedule open”), I agreed to come in. Here is what the experience was like.
If you are a Movable Type blogging customer of FatCow such as myself, you have (or will) likely experienced some annoying problems after their upgrades. In addition to having to change your perl path to FatCow’s new perl path, you will also need to change your “Local Site Path” under Movable Type’s “Weblog Config.” To find out what your new path is, run “mt-check.cgi” in your Movable Type directory, and peep the “Current working directory.” I was getting this error message before I changed this:
mkdir /u: Permission denied at /home/users/web/b194/moo.kadavy/mt-blog/lib/MT/FileMgr Local.pm line 104
Hopefully that helps someone who is having a similar problem
These updates are annoying the hell out of me. I have always liked how simple FatCow is. I sure hope this doesn’t change that. Hopefully they will be upgrading their Perl Modules, because they don’t have many of the ones that are needed to run alot of the good Movable Type Plug-ins. The most amusing glitch is how fucked my stats are. I find it hard to believe that 226 people in the world know who Saul Bass is, much less that there have been that many people who have searched for Saul Bass this month, and much less that they have all come to my site. Also, judging by the number of comments I get, I’m thinking I don’t quite get 5,000 visits a day…especially not after having (allegedly) no visitors the first two weeks of February.
I can’t take it anymore. Yet another ingenius post by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com. I hate to be a blogger that just points out stuff that other bloggers say, but Hugh consistently amazes me. Read gapingvoid every day…especially if you are in traditional Advertising or Marketing. Then you will understand why you are about to be squashed like a bug.
The article explains how to set up a weblog like this: “Anybody can do it. If you’re technically savvy, you can create a Web page for your blog that’s based in your own machine. It’s not easy – there aren’t any places to click or windows to open, just long strings of computer commands.” Huh? In all fairness, they do go on to mention blogger.com.
Then there is the blogs that they link to in the article. I get the feeling they didn’t spend very much time scouring the internet for the best in Omaha blogs. Kenneth Ross’s blog is a pretty decent representation of what a blog is, but Cathie English’s blog hasn’t been updated in over nine months! Jitterblogs.org opens to an excessively prominent disclaimer, which links to another page, which links to five blogs, two of which have zero posts, one that has one post (from five months ago), and another that also hasn’t been updated in five months. Certainly, simply by clicking on “Omaha” in someone’s blogger profile, they would have stumbled upon the hub of Omaha-based blogging.
A fellow employee of RDG has joined the blogosphere. Our IT guy, Joe Schmidt, of joeschmidt.com, after starting a few internal company blogs, has written joeschmidt.com’s first post. I’m really looking forward to seeing what his intelligent, yet sick, twisted, and sometimes disgruntled, mind will create.
I know that he will likely be concealing his identity for some time, but since he is such a handsome fellow, I feel I must show you what he looks like.
I recently got a new laptop, and I have to admit, I have been spending a disturbing portion of my time on the couch. I’m not a big TV watcher, so prior to acquiring my laptop, I spent the majority of my time at my desk, which I guess should be even more disturbing.
Having a laptop is great, though. I got Airport Express, so now I am wireless, and can even play music through my speakers via AirTunes. I can even take it to bed with me, do some blog reading before bed, put it on my nightstand, and then check my e-mail before I even get out of bed (“oh, a computer in bed…the porn jokes I could comment with”…don’t bother). Maybe I’ll slowly devolve from never leaving my desk, to never leaving my couch, to never leaving my bed.
I’m sure I will spend some time on my deck once, if, the weather is ever nice again. It just snowed 14 inches here in Omaha, and every time this happens it makes me wonder why people aren’t nomadic anymore. Oh, that’s right, because we have so much stuff.
Now that kadavy.net is included in the sites drawer for NetNewsWire 2.0b10 (a great RSS Reader for the Mac), I figured it was time to gain a little edge with my own favorites icon (that little icon that is showing up next to the web address on your address bar on most browsers).
To make one for your site, design a 16×16 pixel gif and upload it to your root directory with the name “favicon.ico”. It’s best if you can stay within the standard 256-color216-color web palette.
Tip: When working at the pixel-level in Photoshop, it’s a good idea to have one window zoomed way in (like 1600%) so you can see each pixel clearly, but also have a second window open for the same document (Window < Arrange < New Window for document name) at 100%, so you can simultaneously see what it will look like at actual size.
I recently got a new laptop. It’s a 15-inch Powerbook G4 1.33Ghz, and its quite nice. I got it in my endless pursuit of comfort, and I haven’t used my new desk since I got my new laptop. Instead, I use it on the couch, in coffee shops, Panera Bread, and on the road. You’d think with all of that laptop using, I would be blogging more, but sorry. Maybe it’s because my new Powerbook came loaded with GarageBand, and now I can finally record music with my guitar. My tower didn’t even have an audio input! Maybe I’ll let you guys know if I post any music on iCompositions. Probably not.
I have been spending time on my blog, though. I’m working on a big re-design, and posting my portfolio, using Movable Type as a content management system a la Stopdesign’s Portfolio. Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign was kind enough to post how he used Movable Type to manage his portfolio, and I’ve been able to figure out alot of it, but he seems to have left some crucial information out. I can’t figure out how he managed to get going to a category to go directly to the first post of that category, rather than to an “index” page. Oh well, it will take some tinkering, but not that I haven’t already done enough with no results.
You may have noticed that I now have Google Adsense ads on my site, and, of course, I have an Amazon Associates account. Of course, the objective of this blog is not to make money. There are certainly more efficient ways to do so. I want to organize my thoughts, share them with others, exchange thoughts with others, contribute to adding semantic value to the web, and hopefully have my thoughts read again many years from now.
That said, I worry myself sometimes when I make decisions that may not provide the best and most honest content possible, in order to have the opportunity to chip a couple cents out of my hosting costs. The main place this may happen, is that when I am talking about a movie that isn’t available on DVD yet, I link to IMDB, which I consider to be the best resource on movies, however, if the movie is out on DVD, I link to that item on Amazon, through my associates account.
I promise, this is as greedy as I will get. Now if I overnight happen to become an expert on real estate (“real estate” probably being a pretty high-paying AdWord string), then you know I’ve lost it.
I hope you find my remarks on books, music, technology and whatever other artifacts that may be linked to on Amazon as relevant and interesting as my comments on anything else. As a critic of Affluenza, I couldn’t, in good conscience, push products I didn’t feel were useful. I also hope that the contents of the Google ads are relevant and unintrusive.
