Blog Posts

I've figured out the Apple Special Event announcement...

They’re going to announce that the Google Toolbar will be bundled with Safari! That’s groundbreaking news that will change the world! (interesting - meant to link to Jonathan Schwartz’s “the world is about to change” post, but it appears to have oddly vanished…)

Seriously, though, I really hope it’s a video iPod, with a writeable screen ala Newton… I’d cut off my left earbud for one of those…

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Ultimate Tag Warrior

I decided to give the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress a shot. It’s going to be supported natively in the K2 theme that I’m using, and UTW comes highly rated. I was a bit nervous about migrating from the Cat2Tag plugin I’m using now, because I wasn’t sure how it would handle ~900 posts that were already categorized. I didn’t want to have to re-tag all of those posts. I picked Cat2Tag because it used the Categories themselves to store tags - so if I decided to switch back to Categories, it was just a matter of turning off a plugin, and doing some housekeeping on the now-messy set of categories. I’ll assume there will be a magical “convert tags back to categories” function sometime in the future…

Wiki to document organizational procedures

Julian and I were just IMing about how to set up a new Subversion repository - and we both commented about how this process should be documented. King set one up last week, and we said the same thing then.

So, I bit the bullet, and wrote up a first draft of the documentation for the process of creating a new Subversion repository for a Learning Commons project.

I left a page to list all documentation for the Learning Commons, in case the idea takes off and others start doing it…

Partially Decompressed

The Norman family took the weekend off, and threw Evan a party for his 3rd birthday. Had a bunch of family over to our house for a birthday party - Evan had fun playing with his cousins, and got his Thomas the Tank Engine obsession taken care of for awhile.

Then, we headed north to Edmonton, to hang out at West Edmonton Mall - staying in the Fantasyland hotel right in the mall. Sounds lame, but it’s the largest indoor shopping mall on the planet (for now), and staying in the mall hotel meant we could hit the amusement park and water park without commuting. Evan had a blast - the wavepool was a bigger hit than the waterslides. There were manmade waves that must have been 2-3’ high, with surf and everything. He didn’t want to get out of the water.

Business Week sidebar on iPod Batteries

That “Big Magazine” I mentioned recently was Business Week, and they published a small snippet from the phone interview I gave. Pick up the next Business Week, and check out the “Gearworld” section, for an article/sidebar written by Elizabeth Woyke and Peter Burrows. I don’t come off sounding like either a raving lunatic, nor a drooling fanboy, so it’s not too bad. It’s a much shorter article than I was thinking it was, based on the information Elizabeth was asking (and suggesting that she had already interviewed several others).

Breathe...

Note to self: take a hint…

I got home today to find this postcard in my mailbox, sent by a local church for a series of chill-out workshops coming up this fall…

So, along those lines, I’ll try to finish up what I can tonight after The Boy goes to bed, then I’m going to be mostly off the grid for the weekend. Breathe… :-)

Building evacuated by HazMat team

From the “well, that’s one way to take an afternoon and evening off” department…

There was apparently some kind of chemical (or biological? nobody seems to know anything) spill in the Bio Sciences building shortly before noon today. Since the Learning Commons is on the 5th floor of BioSci, that means we all got to make the journey down the concrete stairways to get the hell out of the building.

so... fried...

Last night, it totally hit me just how fried I am. I’ve been fighting off burnout for awhile now, but I think I may have finally succumbed to it. I realized this when, at almost midnight, my family was upstairs fast asleep, and and I continued to work on my PowerBook to try to catch up on the backlog of bugs to fix - not feeling like I was making any progress anyway. I’m having to keep working this late so I don’t have to essentially abandon my family, which I refuse to do.

Battlestar Galactica Podcasts

Dear Ronald D. Moore…

I am a total Battlestar Galactica junkie. Fell in love with the previews of the miniseries, and have been watching every episode since. Absolutely great stuff - some of the best scifi on tv. I love that it avoids the formulas as much as possible, and doesn’t treat the audience like lobotomized droolbots that need constant spoonfeeding. It seems like, by and large, each episode is better than the last - and that’s hard to do for 1 season, let alone 2.

iPod battery article in a Big Magazine

I won’t say the name of the mag, in case it doesn’t get published - no need to add pressure to the writer - but I was just interviewed out of the blue by a writer for a Big Magazine (you know the one). She is researching an article on the iPod battery life issue, and found my blog entry on it. In the interest of not being used out of context, what I basically said was:

Trying NetNewsWire again...

So, after switching to Safari RSS for a couple of months, and really liking the simple (i.e., nonexistent) interface and unified display, I finally got fed up with the quirks in the Safari implementation. Sometimes it would take 15 minutes for a large feed set to display, pegging the CPU at 100% for the whole time (this was most obvious when viewing my Flickr feeds, which could have 500 images, each of which are downloaded apparently simultaneously).