Blogaffon

I would have signed up for this year’s Blogathon if it weren’t for the fact I happen to be moving that day, and in general I (like to think I) have better things to do than to sit in front of a computer for twenty-four straight hours. I guess it’s for a good cause…?

Project For When Time Is Extra

Search the web (over the wide world) for pages containing the phrase “… fills a much-needed hole” (and “… fills a much-needed void” and determine the percentage of occurance where the author, instead of realizing that the phrase is negative and sarcastic, employs the words as a compliment.

This realization came to me in a music history class, where the professor of said class, a friend of logic paradoxes like myself, used the above phrase to describe a composer’s body of work. I don’t remember the specifics, but he said something akin to, “Composer Jean-Rousseau Torino Friedrich Smith’s Metamorphin’ Power Fantasy in G-flat fills a much-needed hole in the Saturday morning Romantic-era cartoon orchestra genre,” except with a more legitimate composer and a worse piece of music.

This professor was someone I admired a bit. I was in his office one day, and on his bookshelf was one of my favorites, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I mentioned that I enjoyed the text and dramatizations within the book, and he confessed to not understanding most of it. Heh. The book is great, dealing with correlations between mathematics, art, music, computer programming, artificial intelligence, Zen, and genetics, with a touch of Lewis Carroll.

Get it? It’s the hole that is much-needed, not the work.

First Anti-Spam Day

Yahoo launches first antispam day

So, apparently Yahoo is against the concept of spam now. Funny, last I noticed Yahoo encouraged it. In any case, “Dump the Junk Day” (Jump the Dunk?) is now “official,” for what it’s worth. I don’t think the world needs a raised awareness of spam. We just need people and companies to be fined for sending it. Even Bill Gates is speaking out against junk e-mail, which is eroding the value of electronic mail as a communication tool.

Summer Geek Games

Hey! It’s almost time for the Webkeek 0lympics! Sign up and spread the word. There are different types of activities for all sorts of creative people. Plus, I’m a judge, or rather my alter ego, my “reality identity” is. I will be fair and just, but expect no mercy.

This is Big News

Google is buying Pyra Labs (Blogger). It will be interesting to see what they do with it… The Google people are geniuses.

Also just in: I need to go to sleep. I spent just about all of the day backing up the important files from my computer, wiping the hard drive, and reinstalling Windows XP Pro. Once everything was reinstalled, I upgraded the BIOS on all the network equipment in the apartment (Linksys cable modem, Linksys broadband router, Linksys wireless access point) and that caused some problems for a while.

But everything’s running smoothly now, as smooth as an aging Hollywood producer trying to pick up a young, looking-for-work actress in a bar in SoHo.

Dreamhost Ultimatum

Alright, Dreamhost. I’ve had enough. Here is my ultimatum. You have until March 1 to get things right. Every time I cannot access email via the webmail interface (once within a thirty minute window) and it’s clearly your fault, you get 5 ass-points. Any site outages for more than five minutes, you get 3 ass-points per minute. Every time my MySQL server is needlessly unavailable you get 5 ass-points (only once every half hour, like webmail). Every time you change default site settings without warning users ahead of time (such as changing home directories), you get 10 ass-points. If you rack up 200 ass-points by March 1, I will take my $(hundreds)/year business elsewhere.

Warm fuzzies to anyone who caught the WWIV reference.

CURRENT ASS-POINTS COUNT: 30

Dreamhost Woes

If you’ve tried sending email to me the past twelve hours or so, it is likely the message either bounced or disappeared into thin air. Dreamhost screwed up many people’s email systems. This looks like their biggest mess to date. I’ve done all my web hosting with them since December 1999. Unfortunately, there’s still nobody better out there. If you’ve sent me an email since last night, you might want to try calling instead.