Every year, it's the same crap. Websites trying to be clever by inventing "funny" fake items for April 1. Every year, my RSS reader gets filled with silly, inane little stunts. And it takes a few seconds for my crapfilter to kick in.

Maybe I'm just turning into a cranky old kurmudgeon (maybe? definitely?), but I don't find 99% of these pranks even remotely funny. The Google Juice one was entertaining. And James Farmer's "job offer" from WebCT. That's about it this year. And all of the posts with interesting, but otherwise unusual content having to have "This is not an April Fool's Joke" disclaimers is just frigging annoying.

They weren't kidding when they said they were increasing the mailbox size of every GMail account! Their login page jokes about planning to roll out "infinity +1" gigabytes of emaily goodness. That was the April Fool's part of the announcement. The rest of it goes basically "we plan to keep slapping hard drives into The Beast, so you'll keep getting more room in your inbox, until the global marketplace has been drained of hard drives." Or something like that.

I've been watching Ruby on Rails for a while now. It seems to be gaining some momentum.

Ruby seems like a nice language, and the Rails framework appears to add some WebObjects-like functionality. It looks like it's got some stuff that approaches Direct-to-web. It still doesn't look quite as elegant as WebObjects, but it is definitely interesting, and tries to be pretty cleanly MVC, which is nice. It's also just sitting there at /usr/bin/ruby begging to be dusted off and called into action...

If it was my ear, it might not be so bad. But Evan's been inflicted by a nasty pair of ear infections. Poor little guy didn't sleep more than an hour last night (therefore, mom and dad didn't sleep at all - no sir, no way in hell are we having another one - we had some serious colic flashbacks last night :-) )

We've pumped him full of Tylenol to control the fever, and now he's on yummy banana-flavoured antibiotics to wipe out the little critters filling his eustachian tubes.

As we're creating more content on and for the internet (and computers in general), we're placing more of our culture into what is really an ephemeral medium. There is no 1000-year archive plan for the internet. The closest thing we have to that is The Internet Archive - but even that is subject to politics, business, and personal goodwill (of Brewster Kahle).

Backups of content are created, sure, but on formats like CD-ROM or DVD - which may have a lifespan ranging from 5-100 years depending on the specific media and storage conditions. They are also stored in (dozens? hundreds? thousands?) of unique storage formats (.Mac backup, proprietary backup tools, custom hacked tools, etc...) which may be difficult/interesting to interpret after the originators have shed their mortal coils.

Thanks to Stephen, I got hooked up with a Yahoo 360 invite. I wanted to kick the tires to see what they've come up with in their big fancy social networking system.

The coolest thing I see so far is the concept of friend-of-a-friend. I imagine it's completely compatible with FOAF, but they expose preferences settings to let you restrict access to stuff (your blog, commenting on your blog, photos, etc...) to a list of options:

I'm taking this week to spend with the family. Janice is out of town for much of the week, so it's just Evan and myself baching it. It's been absolutely great being able to hang out with the boy - we spent the morning at the zoo, and it was fun watching him get all worked up about the efants and muhkees. He's almost able to carry a conversation, and it's so cool to be watching him progress. He keeps surprising me about what he understands, remembers, or figures out.

OK. A rant taken from Robert Scoble's playlist.

John Carmack - the guy that wrote Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena, Doom 3, and is trying to get into orbit with his own personal venture - has a blog.

But no RSS. WTF? Is he hand-rolling the pages in EMACS? Using some POS app that doesn't do RSS? Have enough rock-star-zillionaire-programmer-groupies that he can't imagine people not camping on his page waiting for updates?

I'd been using the Kubrick theme since well before WordPress 1.5, when it became the default theme. At first, it was a nice, clean theme that stood out from the rest of the other blogs out there. Now, it's a nice, clean theme that everyone else is using. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but I'm getting tired of seeing Kubrick everywhere.

I just changed the theme to Wuhan (which I ever so slightly modified), which is based on Kubrick, but also takes some design cues from Macromedia.

I've been a hard core BBEdit user since BBEdit 6 (way back before MacOSX). It's a great text editor, and has many awesome features. I've actually stuck at BBEdit 7, since the Big New Features in BBEdit 8 weren't that big to me, and I couldn't justify allocating budget for the upgrade license.

I've also dabbled with SubEthaEdit, but only seriously as a collaboration tool, never for serious text editing on my own.

If you're trying to access any services on campus at the University of Calgary - it looks like our network connection took the Easter weekend off... All servers are up and running fine, but the pipe is plugged, so it's slow going if you are trying to connect to anything on campus.

Which means I'll have to put my tweaks to weblogs.ucalgary.ca on hold for a bit. Perhaps it's a sign?

I might be missing something obvious, but it seems to be more difficult than necessary to organize subscriptions in NetNewsWire. I've got 377 feeds, and sometimes I need to go into my subscriptions list to find stuff, rather than just living in the "New Items" folder (where I do spend about 98% of my time in NNW).

One problem I'm having is that there doesn't seem to be a "list all subscriptions" view. I can use Smart Lists to list blog posts, but I can't seem to list all subscriptions anywhere.