List Unmanagement

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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.

Upgraded

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I’ve upgraded Aaafter Effect to Movable Type 3.11, and by doing so, Synaesthesia, Barb’s Burblings, Serendipity, and Consumerism Commentary have also been upgraded. (Boredom Zone uses a separate Movable Type installation and I haven’t upgraded that, but I can if Michelle wants.)

The security code check for comments has been disabled in favor of the MT-Blacklist plugin. Any comment thought to be spam, or any comment posted on an entry more than two weeks old, will need to be moderated by the weblog owner before it is posted.

I’ve also added a link log back to the site here. You can hide it if you like by clicking “Hide Links” in the navigation bar. I’m not quite sure whether I want to keep it or not.

Words, Words, Words – and Definitions, Etymologies and Examples

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This may not be “legal,” but it is too cool not to mention. Someone has found a backdoor into the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. Thanks for the tip, MetaFilter.

Unrelatedly, I taught a private guitar lesson today. Sure, it was for a coworker, but it meant I had to make my apartment look presentable. That required me to stop being lazy and to finish rearranging my furniture and cleaning the apartment. I have now finished moving my desktop computer out of the bedroom, but the bedroom is still not quite organized.

The good news is the lesson went very well. It seems like he’s going to remain interested and will probably continue taking lessons from me. Not such a bad deal.

Crazy Webcam

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You may have noticed that I added a webcam to this website.

I’ve been rearranging my apartment to help me sleep more effectively. I removed by desktop computer from my bedroom and rearranged the furniture in my living room to fit everything. It’s a little tight but it’ll be fine for the remainder of my stay here.

While cleaning, I found my old webcam, so I decided to put it to some use. So there you go. It’s refreshed every few minutes. You can find it at the top of my sidebar.

Giving Up

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I’m sick and tired of certain people, and I’m just about ready to give up. Who have these people been talking to? I think you know what I’m talking about. My beef is with the “rule” about prepositions that someone made up. Apparently over the last few decades, people have decided that it’s ungrammatical to write a sentence with a preposition at the end, despite the fact it has been done that way in literature for literally centuries. We’ve all learned this “rule” in schools and as good students, we never batted an eyelid.

For the last time people, it’s a fake. It has no basis. If you try to rearrange the sentence, “This is a rule I will not put up with,” you get something quite nasty. One try would be, “This is a rule up with which I will not put.” That sentence is a ridiculous construction.

Anyway, I’m outtie. Where my homies at?

Shakespeare on Display

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This is just awesome. The British Library has published online 21 plays by Shakespeare. The versions they published were printed in quarto before the theaters where they were originally performed were closed. Not only are the texts very different from what is considered the modern standard, but there are versions with wide differences separated by only a few years. The library set up a nice interface where you can compare two texts of the same play side-by-side. I could spend hours perusing this, I just find it so interesting reading old texts. It’s great that technology allows so many more people to see and study these books without damaging the originals.

Increased Hurricanes in the Future

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This article describes some of the scientific reasons behind the increase in powerful tropical storms and hurricanes. It seems we are amidst a period of enhanced hurricane activity that will last for decades. This is unrelated to Global Warming, which will also have a large effect on tropical storms, but not for some time…

The five-day projection for Hurricane Ivan’s track looks very scary, indeed.