Guesstimating the size of an RSS feed audience is always a huge shot in the dark, but sometimes I get curious about how many people subscribe to this silly blog. If I was willing to surrender my feeds to Feedburner, I could get some pretty detailed stats. But, I don't want to hand over that.

So, I thought about digging into the accesslog that's stored in Drupal's database. I've set my copy to store access logs for the past 2 weeks, and it dutifully records which pages are viewed, as well as the IP address the request came from. It's just a subset of a typical webserver log, so there isn't any privacy issue here (if you're really worried about being tracked online, you're already using an anonymizing proxy...)

I got tagged, so here goes...

1. Music that changed my life
   • Beatles' Red and Blue albums. The first vinyl I owned. Still have them somewhere.
   • The Police: Synchronicity. First cassette I ever owned. Who is Miss Gradenko, anyway?
2. Music I can listen to on repeat - this comes from my iTunes most-played playlist
   • The Police: Synchronicity (still!)
   • The Tragically Hip - Day For Night
   • Black Eyed Peas - Elephunk
   • Smashing Pumpkins - Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
   • Moby - Play
   • Bob Marley & The Wailers - Legend
   • Nirvana - In Utero
   • Weezer - Green Album
   • Battlestar Galactica soundtrack (seriously - it's really good)
   • Billy Talent
3. An album I'd take to a deserted island - album? really? I'd have to take my iPod, fully loaded with CBC Radio 3 .
4. Music that makes me smile
1. Bedouin Soundclash
2. Bob Marley & The Wailers
3. Mel Blanc - D.O.G. Spells Dog
4. Pointer Sisters - Pinball Number Count (Songs from the Street). 123 FOUR FIVE 678 NINE TEN. ELEVEN TWELVE.
5. Music that makes me cry
1. cry? really? music doesn't make me cry. next track.
6. Music that I wish had been made
1. not sure. what an obscure question. what kind of tree would I be?
7. Music that I wish hadn't been made
1. Hanson. Mmmmblech.
2. NKOTB. Baby Jebus cried.
8. Music I'm currently into
1. New Pornographers
2. Broken Social Scene
3. Bedouin Soundclash
4. The White Stripes
5. Weezer
6. Wynton Marsalis
7. Miles Davis
9. Music I've been meaning to explore
1. More Canadian indy bands (getting more of this, thanks to CBC Radio 3)
2. More non-touristy Caribbean music
10. Tag
1. Joshua Archer
2. Paul Pival
3. Stephen Downes
4. Sami Khan
5. Brian Lamb

I wasn't going to tag anyone, but screw banality - it's summer.

I've been using an OmniOutliner document to track tasks and hopefully prevent things from slipping through the cracks. It works quite well, especially when combined with kGTD to help prioritize and filter tasks as they start to pile up, but it's limited to a file on one computer. So, I can't easily add stuff from my Powerbook at home. And I can't access it when I'm not sitting in front of my G5. Sure, I can sync the file, and export it to the web, and print it, and sync it to my iPod, and to iCal, etc... but that's a pain, and not bulletproof.

King's in SF for WWDC2006, and just posted a quick note about the shirt/bag combo. Looks like a really sweet black T-Shirt with "veni. vidi. codi" on the front. Very cool.

King also linked to someone's sneakypic of the banner on the second floor of Moscone West - someone must have neglected to cover it up with black fabric.

If I'm reading it properly (through a window girder), it says "Introducing Vista 2.0" with a closeup of the MacOSX 10.5 install DVD. That sounds like one hell of a warning shot. Wonder what's going to be announced tomorrow...

I tried to take some time yesterday to distill the patent into plain english. Michael Feldstein did a much better job than I did, which should make it really easy to find relevant and defensible bits of prior art. Of course, the fun part will be finding prior art that hasn't been purchased by Blackboard...

I've been biting my tongue on this whole Blackboard-patents-the-LMS brouhaha that's going around. I did add my 2 cents to the Wikipedia VLE Prior Art page, with a link to one of the two LMSes I've been involved in building before Blackboard applied for this patent.

What follows is a largely stream-of-consciousness rant about some of the issues involved.

I find it completely unfathomable that such a basic and well established classification of software could be summarily handed to a single company. I'm planning on taking some time to actually read the patent, to see if it's as general as everyone says, or is it really (hopefully) a vaguely worded description of their particular implementation. A cursory glance at it suggests that they've managed to throw in utilities ranging from online storage of user data, to storing files on a server...

BlogBridge, my most favoritest RSS aggregator app, was bumped to version 3.0 this week. Lots and lots of small improvements, but most of the big changes are under the hood. Performance rocks (it totally doesn't feel like a Java app - it feels like any other native application), and things like syncing feeds and preferences with the BlogBridge service (for accessing from other machines, or publishing guides as OPML, or just as backup) is nearly instantaneous.

I've been thinking about the moronically shortsighted DOPA doowackie that got passed South of the Border. Basically, if I understand correctly, it attempts to protect children from online predators (which is a Good Thing To Doâ„¢). But, it wants to do this by banning minors from websites that let them contribute. They won't be able to use MySpace. Or Blogger.com. Or Wordpress.com. Or Flickr.com. Or any other social "Web 2.0" stuff. Kids will be protected by locking them out.

It's a total non-issue for me, but Dreamhost (the cool company that's hosting my blog) is going through some rough times in their data centre at the moment. Apparently the heat wave in California is wreaking havoc on their power situation, causing a power outtage. The generators kicked in, but there was a short. And a fire. Hell broke loose. (the mention of the fire has disappeared from their Dreamhoststatus.com blog, so maybe it wasn't that bad...) So, my blog was down for awhile. Really no big deal. If you can read this, it's back up. I'm guessing there may be periodic outtages while it's sorted out.

Dabble was just pushed into full public mode, after being in a beta (does anything ever really leave beta?).

Looks like a pretty cool site - the main goal appears to be a social network growing around videos published around the internets.

It is a pretty thorough implementation, completely done in Drupal. It looks like it's pretty heavily depending on a few modules in addition to the core (namely, video, playlist, tagadelic, buddylist(?), and likely a few others). The theme looks like a complete custom job, and the only thing that tipped me off was the use of "node" in some urls. Digging deeper, I found the telltale drupal.css file on the server (but not used in the theme...)

The upside of this heat, combined with the smoke and haze from all of the wildfires, are some pretty amazing sunsets. I drove up the highway to Cochrane last night to catch the sunset, and wound up shooting 207 photos in under an hour. I made myself delete all but 5 of them, which was much harder than I thought it would be.

I shot most photos in fine large jpeg mode, but shot many in RAW. The RAW shots are much nicer, with all of the rich shades of orange and red being captured more faithfully. Here's one I took just after the sun sank below the horizon:

Woah. What a heat wave we've had the last couple of days. No doubt about global warming any more. This was taken outside my house in NW Calgary about 10 minutes ago (just before 3:30pm):

That's 47.2?C or 117?F. Odds are, the temperature will rise a bit more in the late afternoon heat.

47.2?C. In Calgary. Canada. My igloo is melting. It's 29?C inside, with all fans running at full blast. No AC, because it's not worth the cost for the 1 week per year it's needed.