Ultranormal

Category: development

  • Bookmark Now!

    I don’t pretend that I’m a writer, and that’s probably a good thing. Apparently, being a writer is both hard work, and the easiest thing in the world. I just finished Kevin Smokler’s new book, Bookmark Now. A collection of essays about reading and writing in the internet age, it’s a fascinating look into the minds of writers, an interesting examination of modern publishing, and a big sloppy wet kiss to the internet from young(ish) writers from all over.\
    There are some brilliant essays here, and the entire book presents an overriding theme of hope for writing, reading, and all the stuff in the middle. My personal favorites were the pieces by Dan Kennedy, Adam Johnson and Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith (they wrote the crown jewel of that section). They were all from the same section of the book: The Writing Life. Each of them gave a little glimpse into the process of a writer, not only how they see the world, but how they attack writing, how they deal with setbacks and criticism.\
    As someone who’s always toying with the idea of writing a book, this book was a good chunk of inspiration to put towards that goal. If you’re at all interested in reading or writing, you’ll get a kick out of Bookmark Now.

  • Ranchero Software: NetNewsWire

    NetNewsWire 2.0 is golden! Go get it right now. It’s the best feed reader on any platform (although it’s only for OS X), and I’ve been using 2.0 since the earliest betas, and it’s awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome.

  • Who’s Number One?

    Me! Well, I’m number one for everything dumb. What about me is number one for that? It’s this super dumbness. Dumb, huh?

  • AIM Blogs

    John Panzer announces AIM Blogs. So, go get yourself a blog. All you need is an AIM screenname (and who doesn’t have one of them?).

  • The Horrors of Beta Software

    I love Instiki, as I’ve said before. I’ve been running 0.9.2 on my Powerbook for a while (ran 0.9.1 before that), and love it. I was running it on my linux box. Notice the was in the previous sentence.\
    What happened? That box was running RedHat 8. I decided it was time to upgrade to Fedora Core 3, and did so. Then, I went to fire up 0.9.2 again, and it didn’t work. It keeps complaining about something in Madeleine (the database). Not being familiar enough with Ruby or its various parts to figure out (something with YAML), I figured it might be because I’d upgraded from Ruby 1.8.1 to 1.8.2. So, hey, let’s try the new version of Instiki! It started up fine, and then barfed on the homepages of my three wiki webs. It was something with formatting, so I went right to the edit_web url, and switched it back to Textile. That worked for two of the three webs.\
    On the third web, there’s a gigantic unordered list. Something in that list is causing Instiki to churn like mad. It locks up the machine, and I have to desperately try to kill it before the machine runs out of memory and thrashes itself to death. It’s funny that text can do that, but apparently, it can.\
    I’m not sure what’s up, but for now, I’ve had to move everything over to my G5 and run it there (where everything still works, thanks OS X!).\
    A few lessons I’ve taken from this:

    • use beta software at your own risk
    • don’t use beta software for “critical” data
    • backup everything regularly
    • beware systems that don’t allow easy import/export of data (Instiki has good export, non-existent import).
    • don’t use a development environment as a shared resource for important data.

  • A Texas-Sized Welcome

    I’m pleased as punch to announce that Katie Sunstrom has joined Bill and me over at I Buy Local! She’s even posted her first restaurant review and her author profile!\
    Welcome, Katie! And, if you’re interested in sharing your local ideas and reviews, e-mail kevin at this here domain (you know, lawver.net).

  • The Phone Buying Blues

    My poor Sidekick Color died last week. My wife wants a cell phone. I want something out of Star Trek that just doesn’t seem to exist yet (go figure). Deciphering cell plans, and deciding on a phone that will do all the things I want it to. Right now, I need a phone for Jen that doesn’t have to do a whole lot. A camera would be nice, but not required, and it just needs a good address book and battery life.\
    My requirements are a little tougher. It has to be on this list, has to have a camera, e-mail, support internet-over-Bluetooth, and a calendar. Yeah, I know. I’m tempted by the Treo 650, but the only carriers who have it charge an insane amount of money for their unlimited internet plan (I did over eleven megs a month on my Sidekick). T-Mobile has a much more reasonable unlimited internet plan, but they don’t have the 650.\
    The cell companies’ websites don’t help either. They don’t have reviews on the site, are sparse with the details, and navigation is a pain in the butt.\
    If you’ve got any recommendations, I’d love to hear ’em.

  • What I’ve Been Up To

    I’ve totally redone the categories, so they’re more tag-like. I’m also slowly going through all the posts I did while I was on Blogger, over 600 of them, and moving them to their appropriate categories. It’s been fun going back and looking at some of the stuff I wrote a few years ago. It’s a lot of fun.\
    Tonight, I got to my posts around September 11th, now in a new category called terrorism that’s slowly growing. I expect the memories to come flooding back when I get to the sniper attacks here in DC. For us, they were almost worse than September 11th. It went on longer, and had the whole area wracked with fear for so long – all at the same time the anthrax scare happened. All of it local, all of it random, all of it could strike anyone at anytime.\
    Keep an eye on the categories. They’ll keep moving around, and I’ll be redesigning the archives page in the near future.

  • The Women Bloggers Are Right Here

    Molly asked the question and I’m here to provide an answer. It may seem strange that a white male is providing the answer, but I step in and help where I can. Even though we pale males are over-represented in the blog-o-whirl, we still serve a purpose sometimes.\
    I’m not sure why this is a question, but since it is, I’ll provide an answer. I don’t know why there aren’t more women at the “top” of the blogging heap. But, I think that question is the wrong one to ask. Blogging isn’t, and shouldn’t be a popularity contest, and it’s certainly not a heap. It’s a community, and each person’s blog is their front porch. How many people you have who come to your front porch isn’t as important as the people you want to come to your front porch. If you write for your family, and they’re the ones who come visit, you’re a success as a blogger. If you’ve made progress on whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish by having a blog, then you’re a successful blogger. Stratifying everyone is an old-world paradigm, that I think is damaging to the medium. I could care less how popular a blog is. If the writing grabs me, and the blogger expresses themselves in a unique and personal way, I’d consider their blog successful.\
    The first blogs I found were written by women, and they’re well-represented on this list. Here’s my list, in no particular order other than the order they happened to show up in NetNewsWire:

    • Heather Armstrong
    • Heather Lawver (I got her started blogging… yay me)
    • Jodi
    • Suzie
    • Lifehacker
    • Rashunda
    • Jessa
    • Betsy Devine
    • Bazima
    • Melly
    • Meg
    • Andrea
    • Molly
    • Chelsea
    • Sarah
    • Gail\
      I got into blogging because of Megnut and Heather Champ. So, my view of what makes a blog a blog was formed by reading their words, which may be why I consider all these women successful bloggers. I never look at their “stats” or see how many other people are reading them. They’re just good people, good writers, and all have interesting things to say. Isn’t that enough to consider someone a “success”? The people who make the most noise are probably always going to be at the “top” in terms of stats, and they’ll probably all be men. We know how to make noise and cause trouble. You can look at the state of the world, and it becomes painfully apparent. But, is that success? There are probably just as many women blogging now as men, maybe more. Isn’t that some measure of success?

  • Redesign In Progress

    Got tired of waiting… I’m not done, but you get the idea. More colors! Some re-arranging of stuff! A little more art, and hopefully some good stuff. I just passed 1500 posts on this blog. This will be 1505. 1500 was, appropriately enough, this one.\
    I started blogging almost five years ago (there’s still a huge mass of entries under the Blogger Entries category that I’m slowly whittling down into their appropriate category). I’ve had this orange color scheme for a couple of those years, and while I still love orange, it’s time to branch out (thanks to the super cool Color Scheme Generator).\
    Over the last five years, I’ve posted over 1700 pictures, and several dozen posts on other blogs around both internal and external blogs.\
    Look for me to finish up the redesign in the next week or so.