When I got home tonight, Randy announced that he was moving out effective the end of the week.

If Leonard is still going to move out—which is not 100% certain for reasons that I won’t get into, because that’s his business and not mine—that means that I’ll have this place to myself by, oh, mid-month.

Beware the ides of March indeed!

Hem is a new obsession of mine, probably best described as “countrypolitan” [country + metropolitan]. I think of it as “orchestral Americana”. Anyhow, it’s cool stuff. There’s a good fan resource for Hem as well, one I’d like to help out in terms of becoming higher profile.

Anatomy of a WordPress theme on Ryan Boren’s Weblog. IJSM.org is the install I run that needs this the worst …

As promised, I present … WP 1.5.

Now, to really build a theme with the present layout …

While it’s not exactly what I suggested in June, the new user levels in WP 1.5 are pretty sweet.

I’ll be doing my 1.5 upgrade on IJSM.org today, and then things are going to get funkadelic around here …

I’m pretty sure of what I’m about to tell you. The old behavior is hard to explain, but the new behavior is easy.

WP’s RSS2 comment feed used to give you the last comment on the last N posts at the aggregation time T. For whatever reason, if I kept aggregating the comments feed and had only one entry actively getting comments … no aggregation.

But on my aggregation of one of my 1.5 feeds … I just saw … every reply to that post so far. The new behavior is what you’d expect: the last N comments, regardless of what post they were on. Also improved: the link provided in the feed isn’t to that entry’s comment area, but directly to that comment.

I think I just wet myself.

For the record, IJSM goes to WP 1.5 this weekend. I still have that pesky design tweaks to do, and having helped Scott with his themes today, I saw the full power of 1.5 theming. Behold the power of theeeeeeeeeeeeeemes.

Man, these 4PM Friday telecons are really cutting into my Miller Time.

It’s beginning to get old.

I so need to go get Gran Turismo 4, start learning the game, and then see if I can wax Sean’s ass.

Okay, moment of delusional thinking over.

But I still should go get the game.

My stopgap doesn’t work.

Well, there went 90 minutes of my life …

Have you ever looked at your home network and said, “Man, this is one hell of a screwed-up setup?”

Well, I have. I got things re-wired just now, and it’s pretty sad and pathetic. So sad, I won’t even detail it. What I have will work for the max two weeks that Leonard still lives here, at which point I’ll get to finally reclaim the back bedroom as mine and start this networking gig all over again. Of course, there, I’ll have the router and the cable modem together in one place, and the bulk of the networked devices will be in close proximity, and I … won’t have two switches daisy-chained together. [There, I said it.]

Until I can figure out if I personally want to keep supporting TrackBack, I’m renaming the wp-trackback.php file in WordPress and changing the .htaccess reference to it. This will stop all the bots that are programmed to just spam wp-trackback.php?p=###.

Every bot request I’ve seen comes in through wp-trackback.php; they never use WP’s prettified URLs.

As long as I don’t screw it up, it should kill the bots … until they figure out what you’re doing and start scraping URLs. But it’d be a couple months before they’d do that, likely. [Once they start scraping URLs, well, you're hosed.]

Now that my Knology cable modem is installed, I have to re-route my network at home. [The cable modem is about 15 feet from where the DSL modem was; I now have to figure out how to re-route the cables without it looking like spaghetti ... or maybe I just don't care.]

Feh. I’m ready to cancel my home phone line!

Like I said to Jason in an email:

If there were one Weblogger I’d pay to support, it would be you. I’m curious to see where it goes, as I’m sure that you are. Best of luck to you, and if the money gets tight, remember that Middle America will take you in a heartbeat. [I mean, monthly rent on apartments in Huntsville is measured in the hundreds ... perish the thought! ;)]

I’m supporting him because I believe in the future of personal publishing.

Man, I’ve heard more hail hitting my living room window today than at any time in the 18 months I’ve lived here. We’re in this weird pattern where storm cells are running on a line west-to-east through the Tennessee River Valley, which includes Huntsville. This is just crazy. Right now, it’s raining so hard that I can’t see any of the buildings in my complex, which is really quite nuts.

Jeffrey Veen has it nailed in “Getting Over Archiving”:

Thus, I gave up on any sort of structured archiving … Before I had dozens of folders for people/projects/themes, etc. etc. Blech. Now, I’ve got a folder with thousands of messages that I rotate once a year or so. … The bigger point here, of course, is that people who think for a living are relying more and more on search rather than browse — and eventually personal social networks — to manage the overwhelmingly complex amount of data that they need to transform daily into information, and ultimately understanding.

I miss a nice hierarchy. I still maintain hierarchies at work because it does save time on things that I have to reference, but I don’t go past the project level down to the task level. [Some of my projects can be so small that some people see them as tasks, but because they have multiple steps, they're not tasks.] But in thinking on it, I’m finding little-to-no utility in hierarchies for personal mail, which is an absolutely crazy shift in how I think about email, because I’m buying into search rather than browse.

[And yes, Stephen, I use Lookout here at work, thanks to your urging. It works with my hierarchies because, well, I have lots of projects that have no clean edges, so there's bleed. But I can sometimes beat search with browsing. Sick but true.]

Now it’s time for me to find a mail app I like again … and to come up with a clean near-term archiving strategy manageable with IMAP, plus a better, long-term solution. Maybe I can ply Matt with vodka for his MySQL-managed mail database scripts.

Oi. I want to grieve here a little. I miss my hierarchies.

After almost a month of dumping data at Audioscrobbler, I have found my closest musical neighbor: Jeff Holland. Next closest? Katey.

It’s a little weird to me that I know these two people; I expected to not have a clue whose ears were most like mine. It’s not weird, however, that Jeff is my #1, because we really do tend to like a lot of the same stuff. Like, I’m wanting to run to his house right now and put some Hem in his hand and see what he thinks of it.

This doesn’t mean, however, that I’m going to start listening to Yes. Adriene might shoot me for that.

The first of my … yeesh, almost 70 … WordPress installs on the box is now running 1.5. Boy, a lot of things changed …

Yo Smiley, happy birthday, tool.

So, this is your opportunity to tell me why the chihuahua upstairs deserves to live.

I don’t understand why a yapper dog that, to this point, has been a very, very quiet dog has chosen this week to start yapping uncontrollably, but I’m ready to box him up and send him to Korea or something. [Yeah, so it's early and I'm pandering to stereotype. I'm sorry.]

I guess I’m just grumpy that I’ll be back at work about 12 hours from when I last left. Considering that yesterday sucked and today promises to be chock full of telecons that don’t matter to what I’m doing but require my presence … grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

The Social Issues Research Centre has a guide to flirting.

Maybe we need this for coders who decide to spend their Valentine’s Day releasing code rather than going out on a date.

[Who loves ya, Matt?]

PVRBlog’s Matt Haughey reports that eBay has released a client for the new Home Media Engine that comes with OS 7.1. As Matt says, the screencaps look amazing.

Like the first commentor says, if Amazon develops an HME client, we’re all screwed.

I’m hopeful that HME will save TiVo. I’m thinking it might be too little, too late, though.

No, I didn’t forget. I was just thinking about waiting until I called to post this, and then I realized that I’d be over at Stephen and Misty’s after that, and … yeah.

So, happy birthday, Mom. I won’t tell people how old you are this year.

I have made my first purchase on the iTunes Music Store, thanks to April: Derek Webb has a three-song EP for sale. The songs are acoustic versions of “I Want a Broken Heart”, “Medication”, and “Nothing Is Ever Enough” from I See Things Upside Down, which is a rockin’ album.

If you’ve heard me babble about Derek before, and you have $3 to blow on it, give it a whirl.

According to Michael—strangely, there’s nothing on the WordPress development Weblog—WordPress 1.5 has been released.

She said yes.