Another Word for Nerd

Stavros The WonderChicken has the best “take” on the whole weblogging “scene” so far.

A couple weeks ago, i sent this email in to OLP:

I bought a MM1 (”trans purple”) at Guitar Center in November, and have noticed a difference between what I own and what is shown on your web site. The head of my guitar resembles the one in this picture: http://www.olpguitars.com/guitars/mm1_solids_lg.jpg. However, in this picture, there appears to be a metal “string guide” between the end of the neck and the tuning pegs (look right below the tuning peg for the low E string): http://www.olpguitars.com/guitars/mm1_trans_lg.jpg. Was there a design change? If so, do I have a current or an older model?

Today, I got this response:

Hi Bill,
Man, you have a good eye for detail! Believe it or not, we never noticed the web site pic had a string guide on it. The photographer must have picked up on of the 1st production samples (which he shouldn’t have) and took pics of it. OLP’s do not have string guides. Thanks for the heads-up on the web pic. We’ll be changing that soon. Send me your address and I’ll send you some OLP and BC Rich stuff for helping us out.
Tim Keyes
Customer Service/Warranty Claims
B.C.Rich Guitars / OLP Guitars

I love free stuff!

I spent this evening playing with GarageBand. I like it. A lot. Here is the result (MP3, 441K); not bad for “five minutes after starting the program”.

I think I’ll actually go out and buy iLife ‘04 later this week. For what you get, it’s a great value for $49.95.

You can get a straight HTML feed and directly include it into a PHP-generated page.

I’ve got stuff in weblog-links,weblog-reading, and weblog-blogroll tags on my del.icio.us page.

I’ve got a shell script (again using GNU wget) that passes the correct parameters to pull those down into straight HTML files:

#!/bin/bash
wget "http://del.icio.us/html/mrbill/weblog-reading/?tags=no&rssbutton=no&divclass=&aclass=&tagclass=&bullet=" \
-O ./weblog-reading.html
wget "http://del.icio.us/html/mrbill/weblog-blogroll/?tags=no&rssbutton=no&divclass=&aclass=&tagclass=&bullet=" \
-O ./weblog-blogroll.html
wget "http://del.icio.us/html/mrbill/weblog-links/?tags=no&rssbutton=no&divclass=&aclass=&tagclass=&bullet=" -O \
./weblog-links.html

I then use those HTML files in my main index page with PHP like so:

<? include("data/weblog-blogroll.html"); ?>
<? include("data/weblog-reading.html"); ?>
<? include("data/weblog-links.html"); ?>

etc. That’s all there is to it!

I’ve moved the old RSS feed instructions to a separate page.

Courtesy of Justin at Atomic Tatto & Piercing.

Yes, I’m turning 30 this year. Might as well do something impulsive. Thanks to Amy for going along with me.

Got to work today.

good: no network problems resulting from our weekend work.

bad: EVERY ONE of 75 Cisco IP phones is mis-labeled, so we’ll have to take all of them out of the boxes, let them boot and show their extension, and then put them back in the right boxes. Also, the office wing move has been postponed once again, this time until the end of the month so AC work can get done.

Got a “good job!” from the VP of R&D, though, for our MDF work.

The major hospital in Amy’s home town uses Movable Type for their web site. Interesting. (and its only became of Amy that I recognized “Erlanger”)

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Four of us replaced two large Cisco switches, upgraded all network ports to be power-over-ethernet capable, re-cabled about 350 ports, reworked the logical network configuration, and prepped for a move to VoIP / IP Telephony next Wednesday evening. 9am-8:30pm Saturday, 9am-7:30pm Sunday.

I’ve got full-size pictures here.

Well, apparently Poppy Z. Brite (one of my favorite authors when I was in high school) has a LiveJournal.

I love this quote:

“Yes, and I suppose you’re So Very Different and Misunderstood, dear. Reminded me how glad I am to be shaking off the kiddies who think one’s degree of normalcy is determined by hair color, number of piercings, and whether or not one thinks vampires are, like, so kewl. “

For the past month or so, I’ve been using del.icio.us, a “social bookmarks manager” by the people who brought you MemePool.

It allows you (via bookmarkets or a web form) to keep a list of bookmarks on their site. However, other people can see your bookmark lists, and copy entries to their own lists. Popular sites (in the lists of two or more people) are marked with varying shades of grey backgrounds.

In addition to keeping your list of bookmarks, you can add categories and descriptions. For example, here’s my guns and webdesign categories.

I really like it, and have started not using “local” bookmarks in Safari at all.