I was just invited to enter an entirely reputable “blog awards” contest, for the low, low entry fee of only $195 - but ACT NOW! The entry fee goes up to $275 in January!
I can’t wait to be invited to attend the Nigerian Dead Relatives Blog Directory Awards…
Read MoreCruz is a new webkit-based browser that supports Greasemonkey scripts, plugins, and stuff like integrated tinyurl creation and a full screen mode. It can generate thumbnails for search results on Google, and has a CoverFlow view of search results. Very cool stuff. I think I’ll be switching…
Hey! You got Firefox in my Safari! You got Safari in my Firefox! 2 great tastes…
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Google Earth. On my iPod Touch. Seriously. This app is fracking amazing. Pinch to zoom or rotate. Tilt the iPod to tilt the view. The controls are so smooth and intuitive that I was actually disappointed when the view didn’t rotate as I spun my chair around. Maybe on a fancy schmancy iPhone 3G? Still - VERY cool app. Well done, Google Earth team!
D’Arcy’s bike commuter tip #32: Always, no matter how early it is on a Monday, and no matter how tired you are, always check your tire pressure before starting a ride.
D’Arcy’s bike commuter tip #33: It is actually possible to ride for 10km on a nearly flat front tire, after discovering that it was nearly flat after riding on it for 4km, by putting all of your weight on the rear tire and unlocking the front suspension fork. Surprisingly, once you get the hang of it, you can actually go nearly full speed on an almost flat front tire if you’re careful about braking and bumps.
Read MoreI just had to uninstall the TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter from UCalgaryBlogs.ca - it’s a simple plugin that uses a dictionary lookup to try to detect what it thinks are REALLY obvious spam comment attempts. But it was a bit overzealous. Instead of just modifying the dictionary to remove some valid words (which words are valid? who gets to decide that? in which contexts?), I decided to just delete the plugin outright so that comments can be posted without censorship.
Read MoreI just deleted my twitter account. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not looking for reactions. I’m not dropping out. I’m still online, still available, and still easily contacted via better channels. If you need to contact me, try the contact form on my blog, or IM (dnorman@mac.com), or Skype (dlnorman), email (contact at darcynorman.net), etc… I’ll likely write more about why I deleted my twitter account, but for now it’s just gone.
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I was a hardcore Star Trek geek as a kid. Who wasn’t, really? Captain Kirk going all maverick on the galaxy, finding cool new planets, and nailing hot alien babes. Space is cool! I think I watched every episode at least a couple dozen times - yay syndicated reruns - but for some reason it’s the first motion picture version of the franchise (released in 1979) that really affected me.
After thinking about Quest for Fire, I realize that another of the most formative movies for me was 1984’s The Iceman. The body of a prehistoric man was found frozen in ice, but still alive. He’s placed in a zoo-like containment room at an arctic research facility (filmed in Churchill Manitoba, no less) where he can be studied. Another fascinating movie, not because of special effects or high budget, but because of story. Any movie involving a prehistoric man singing along to Neil Young has to be OK…
Inspired by Jim’s description of one of his 10 formative movies, I realized that one of the movies that’s had the most impact on me is Quest for Fire. The 1981 Canadian anthropological movie about 4 separate tribes of homo erectus, neanderthal and homo sapiens, and their interactions.
I remember being absolutely fascinated by the movie, watching it dozens of times (it was one of the early movies offered on our fancy new SuperChannel Cable Movie Channel when I was a kid). I haven’t thought explicitly about the movie in years, but have realized that it’s really affected me by helping to viscerally see and empathize with the various cultures depicted.
Read MoreI’ve been feeling in a photographic rut lately. It seems like all of my photos look the same. They’re of the same thing. They’re all of things I’ve photographed before. Same. Similar. Again. Repeat. Done it. been there. Oh, that again. Gottit…
I just popped onto the Photography tab of my blog, and it hit me - although things feel strongly similar, there is variation and diversity. And sometimes repetition of similar photographs and subjects tells a story in and of itself.
Read MoreI’ve disabled WP-Super-Cache on UCalgaryBlogs.ca because it was doing quirky things like showing the anonymous front page after someone logged in, etc… And, with our low load and mostly logged in users, it really wasn’t necessary.
Except for the RSS feeds used to generate the Recent Posts and Recent Comments sections on the front page of the site. Without WP-Super-Cache enabled, the front page (and ONLY the front page) took glacial epochs to load, as the RSS feeds were generated, parsed, and embedded. I wanted to be able to cache the feeds, without having to throw the switch on caching the entire site.
Read MoreI’ve got a prof using a WordPress site to manage some really active discussions in his course. He’d really like to be able to list all comments posted by each user, as part of the assessment rubric for the course.
I’ve found LOTS of “recent comments” and “popular posts” plugins, and some requests for similar “list all comments for a given user” functionality, but haven’t been able to find anything that fits the bill.
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