Category: development

It’s confession time. I love Swatches. I’m not sure why I do, but I do. I own six or seven of them. Most of them have dead batteries and a couple have badly mangled bands. I found my first swatch the other day in a drawer. Other than a dead battery and some scratches, it looks fine.

There was a place in Tucson that sold used Swatches for \$20. They had the older, more collectible ones for more, but I only wanted the \$20 ones. I bought three or four there. Then, last week, I saw on our little employee site that we could get a selection of Swatches for \$15 a piece – all brand new. Of course, I went nuts, buying two before I remembered that my birthday is next Thursday and I should probably wait. Me, wait? Oh no. I got this one and this one (it’s not pink in person, all orange). They arrived yesterday and I couldn’t be happier.

And then, I went into a meeting today and someone said, “Hey, nice watch. Lose a bet?” No, no I didn’t lose a bet. You’re just old and don’t get it, man. Swatches are my youth reclaimed. They’re cheap, durable and keep good time. They’re interesting to look at and are more fun than your chrome hunk of metal that probably loses minutes every week. My watch is cool. My watch is orange as hell and has a picture of mountains on it. Oh, and it only cost \$15, which means I could go buy another one next week without even thinking about it.

Did I take too personally? Yeah, probably. But, as much as I tend towards conformity, there are times I just don’t do things like other people do. Ok, that’s complete BS. I’m a nonconformist. But, in saying it, I know you’re thinking of those goth babies with white faces or long-haired greasy guys in record stores railing against the system and the man. I’m not that kind of nonconformist. I’m a geek. I just don’t care what everyone else is doing. If I like something, I’ll do it. If I think something is stupid, I won’t do it.

I’m not sure how this turned from my new watches to a post on conformity, but hey, here I am. Let’s go all the way. Nerds and geeks are the only real noncomformists left. Most of the other noncornformists I’ve met or still know may not follow society’s norms, but they definitely conform to their own little group’s ideas. Take the goth babies for instance. They wear black, they wear makeup and pierce themselves. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen most of them. They listen to the same music, worship at the altar of the same authors, etc. Nerds and Geeks? If you’ve met one, you’ve met a truly unique individual. Their geekiness and nerdism surfaces in weird and wonderful mutations that change with the frequency of batcrap in Carlsbad. Embrace the Rainbow of Geekhood. We’re out there, weird as hell, and really don’t care what you think about it.

Not sure how this happened, but I’m up at the top of the results on Google for “how does google make money”. My post about Google’s Acquisition of Blogger is number one, above TechTV, ABC News and Motley Fool. Ummm, I don’t know whether to be afraid that Google got this so wrong, or proud that Google thinks I’m more relevant than the big boys.

Everyone has an opinion on what Google’s acquisition of Blogger means. I’ve read a lot of them. So far, there have been some interesting theories about what Google wants out of Blogger. Wired’s theory of the links is a good one, but why would Google buy Blogger when it already does links? Its whole search algorithm is based on links and volume. Having direct access to the posts would make indexing a little faster, but it means they’ll have to build something brand new to interface with Blogger’s backend, or migrate Blogger’s backend to a new system.

I think everyone’s missing the point. Google already has access to all the links it will ever need. It indexes millions of pages a day and does a pretty good job of it. Adding slightly faster indexing of a couple hundred thousand blogs won’t make them any money (to recoup whatever they paid Evan). So, what do I think they’re going to do? How does Google make money now? They sell services. I think the bulk of their cash comes from selling their search services to companies like AOL (and others). They then give AOL (and others) money to display their sponsored links on their search products, which people pay Google for. They’re in the service business now. What does that mean for Blogger? It means Google probably already has a good idea for how to package Blogger’s product up into XML feeds and XML-RPC calls to sell to other companies. Of course, this is just a theory – I swear. If I actually had any insider knowledge about Google’s plans, I wouldn’t be sharing them here.

Good theory, no?

Ultranormal is coming!! I started on this today while waiting around for stuff to do (shhh, don’t tell), and am unbelievably happy with it. It still needs some work, and then I need to templify it, but overall, I really like it. I especially like the javascript includes to get the posts from Geekout and Photos on the page. Look ma, no server side scripting! It’s a simple Movable Type template to create the script and then one line to put it on the page. Sweet, huh?

There are a couple problem spots. I don’t like the font color on the menu headings. It looks disabled. I just can’t decide what color to replace it with. Also, the missing borders on the left side of the menu and photos list will go away once this is live – my posts are almost always long enough to cover up the menu, and the menu will have more links in it when it’s done.

Oh, and the font I used for the logo is called AIFragment (because I forgot which one I used halfway through it and had to frantically go back and hunt it down). And, I don’t know what it is about me and orange, but I like it.

I loved the old Geekery. It was butt ugly. Last night and (just a little) today, I put the done-enough-to-show-it touches on the new place for my wild Geek Ramblings: Geekout!

Let me know what you think. I’m gonna try to find the tutorial and tip things I posted here and copy them over. It’s all Movable Type-errific, so it should be much easier to update (ok, it means I’ll probably update it – static HTML is pretty easy too).

Oh yes, you had to know it was coming. Want to run JSP’s or other cool Apache add-ons on your swanky OS X machine? Oh, you say it’s a pain in the butt? Yes, it was. Now you can go get the Complete Apache2 from serverlogistics.com and throw those worries out the window. They have packages for PHP, mod_perl and JSP. Now, I’m not terribly familiar with Apache, but I’ve loved having it on my Powerbook as a platform for playing with Movable Type. Being able to run a servlet engine on it makes OS X just about perfect, don’t you think?

I used to have a copy of KPT 3.0 that had this wonderful thing called Seamless Tile Creator in it. The thing no longer works in PhotoShop, and I haven’t made a seamless tile in ages. Well, today, I made my first two seamless tiles in almost four years today thanks to this great howto. Worked like a charm.