Internet

Google is undertaking a project that will allow people to search the text of books and special collections in top libraries from around the world. The state of the world isn’t so bad, after all.

Message from DreamHost, my web server hosting company:

At approximately 4:30 PM PST, a database server had a catastrophic
hardware failure. We are working to stabilize this server. Databases on
this machine (nobnin) will be down at least until 5:30 PM PST.

Thank you for your patience.

That doesn’t sound good. It brought down my Mix CD Exchange. I hope it wasn’t do to my “interesting” programming techniques. I really don’t like the sound of “catastrophic hardware failure.” At least I got a new pair of black shoes.

My friend and yours, David Byrne (from the Talking Heads long ago) maintains a blog. I should have known that. In fact, after perusing his writing for a few minutes, I like it very much.

I cook dinner for Malu and her boyfriend. I am dressed as a Mexican Wrestler. I hope I scared him when he came over and I answered the door- I was in a red jump suit and a silver wrestling mask.

Mmmhm, political gossip bloggers on The West Wing, of course.

UPDATE: Someone who has time to think about things like this more in depth has written and thought about the scene. I just don’t have the time to care that much about it.

Get Firefox. The software, for browsing the internet (like Microsoft Internet Explorer, only better) has now had an official release. There are many, many reasons why this browser is better. For all intents and purposes, significant programming updates on Internet Explorer ended years ago, although they say there might be some updates for the new version of Windows. Who knows when that will be, and why wait until then when there is something better available? Read some of the reviews and then try it for yourself.

The first mix has been posted to the CD Mix Exchange, and it wasn’t by me. I’m still working on building the site, so there are some pages and functions that are still unfinished.

It looks like I’ve finally done something MetaFilter–worthy. The English-to-English Dictionary has been getting some attention today, thanks mostly to Adam and Andy (thanks!).

I should be using this fifteen minutes of fame to my advantage, but… eh…

To activate your XML site feed in Blogger (something you want to do), go into your blog’s settings and select Site Feed. Change “Publish Site Feed” to “Yes,” choose “Full Descriptions,” click “Save Settings” and republish.

If you use Movable Type, the default settings have included a site feed for years, so unless you’ve deleted it, you already have one. If you have an old version of Movable Type, you may want to obtain the Atom template and create a new index template.

UPDATE: This should be my last RSS-related update. You can now subscribe to my photo gallery by adding this link to your news reader.

I just spent some time removing my real name from old posts and comments imported from the old site. I also removed references to identifiable locations. You never know when someone, say a parent of a friend, will discover a website you thought was failry anonymous. Let’s hope Google‘s cache is quick.

UPDATE. I just checked, and Google cached my site minutes after the updates were made. Weird.

Somehow, in the six years after switching from using ICQ to Instant Messenger (and in the past two years Trillian which functions on the AIM network), I had amassed over 200 contacts. (Although, a bunch of them were added to my computer surreptitiously while I was in California—but that’s besides the point.) I decided to go through and get rid of people I haven’t seen online in years and people I haven’t even talked to in more than a year or so.

Apparently there’s some issue when you have more than 200 contacts in Trillian where you don’t see when people are actually online. Now that everything’s cleared up, it seems to be working much better.