I just deleted a ton of WordPress XML-RPC scripts because I’m headed out of town and don’t have time to do another upgrade. I’ll work with everyone here on the box to do upgrades when I get back home and all that good stuff.

TiVos like to connect to the Internet regularly. Deprive them of this ability, and they get testy. Every time I’ve gone into the ToDo List the last few days, they’ve said, “HEY! WE WANTS THE INTERNET, PRECIOUS!” [Hey, I never saw that movie ... why am I paraphrasing it?] Anyhow, the nice Knology installer just got everything hooked up here, and so as soon as I got the network back up and running, I forced an update for the living room box. Poor thing was so starved for data, this update’s going to run well over 30 minutes, instead of the usual 5-6 minute run.

Thankfully, though, I have a working connection set again here at home … and soon I get to tear it all apart and put it somewhere close to a final set of positions for it all. [Blast there not being a cable drop in the loft.]

Back in my Feed on Feeds days, I’d topped out at a little over 300 feeds aggregated regularly. [Okay, 323.] Now, using FeedLounge, I’m at 351 and growing.

FoF wasn’t scaling for me, both in its aggregation [it often caused CPU spikes and would hang mercilessly] and in its ability to let me sift through the aggregated results quickly and easily. The thing with power aggregating in 2005 is this: you’re going to pull in a lot of stuff that you really don’t care about. That’s because feeds are generally released by content producers, and content producers are never going to publish stuff that you’re 100% interested in. [The exception to that rule might be personal sites of close friends, but even then, my friends sometimes write about things that just don't interest me.]

But an aggregator that allows you to view new items in multiple ways will allow you to cross-section the information you’re aggregating in as many ways, and the end result is that you’re left with a better experience.

My experience is far more than just 9% better [in terms of feeds aggregated]. It’s probably … 50% better, at a minimum. So good that, in fact, I just dumped Feed on Feeds from my box. Bye bye, my lovely 10MB feed items datastore…

Some time back, Michaela pointed me at Global Issues, which does a good job of trying to get down to nuts and bolts about, well, global issues [things like debt relief, Third World hunger, etc.]. Today, I picked up their introduction to the concept that food “aid” may not be so aid-worthy:

Even certain types of food “aid”, (when not for emergency relief) can be destructive. The dumping of the surplus production for free (or nearly free) to poorer nations means that the farmers from such countries cannot compete and are driven out of jobs, further slanting the “market share” of the larger producers such as the US and Europe.

We should truly seek to help impoverished nations; it’s a right thing to do as a nation-state seeking to be a world leader, and it’s a moral thing to do by most any religious standard. However, if you’re dumping excess production at a cost that destroys the local agri-economy, are you really helping in the long run? Famines come when the demand for food exceeds the local supply; one can, theoretically dump more supply than the deficit between the local supply and the demand holds, and when you do that … you’re not really helping too much.

If you’re going to give a hand out, you’ve got to give a hand up, too … unless, of course, you’re just seeking to keep the handed-out down. Sometimes, it seems clear that this is the sad and regrettable case. It might be a mistake to assume malice in situations where the problem is really overgenerous charity, but … :sigh:

I love developing presentations, especially at the last minute. I’m a percolative thinker—I’ll think about a problem for a long time, trying on different ideas for size, and when the deadline draws near, I execute a plan. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.

The presentation I’ve put together could be seen as callous and brutish, but I think that it tells the truth. [I mean, when you're discussing motivations of students in student government, I think you have to bring up the fact that some people are there in small or large part to pad their resume.]

It’s also fun for me to do a presentation because I have a tendency to spend 90 seconds per slide where others spend 60. I counteract this by putting more data on a slide, which tends to make me quicken my pace a little.

Okay, time to finish my quick break and get back to the second half of this presentation …

Seems that Martey Doodoo has a problem with the unintended consequences of unforseen, untested cases … and thinking on it, I wonder if WP’s pretty TrackBack urls would fail is you had a post slug of “trackback”. :chuckle:

In all seriousness, this is definitely a job for a completionist, preferably a completionist free electron. Not that I’m acquainted with any. :cough:

[I am so dead. And it's all Alex's fault for sending me this link via IM.]

While we’re sitting here in the summer of our Gilmore Girls withdrawal …

“Will you just stand still?”

[Haters, step off.]

On a lark, I found that Scott Buchanan’s TrackBack Spam Blocker has been updated to version 1.1.0. I’ve been using it for some time, and it’s been beneficial.

I’ve finally found something that would make me buy an iPod … I’ll be podcasting with Derek Webb.

I’ve been asked to publicize it, so I guess I can talk about it in public now. I am so unbelievably geeked! We do the first day-long sitdown in two weeks. Woohoo!

Paul Bausch gave me a great idea, and since I collect domains for humor value from time to time …

Suggestions taken.

Lara passed me a link to LookingCloser’s interview with Linford Detweiler about Over The Rhine’s Drunkard’s Prayer. It’s a really spiffy interview, and it reminds me just how much I love DP and OTR.

I just got off the phone with the subscription department at The Huntsville Times. If I’m really going to be a part of this community for the forseeable future, I need to stay up-to-date. [And no, I don't get any satisfaction in reading The Times online, because AL.com's technology implementation sucks. I can say that, because I know a lot of people that work there, or did at one time. :)]

0.9 of X. Oh yeah, I’m totally feeling that, though I’m no pastor.

Ever since I’ve lived in Huntsville, I have always lived to the north or the east of my employer. Now that I live in Madison, I live to the west of my employer.

The old truism about always living east of your workplace so that the sun’s always at your back? Yeah, I’m hating that truism right about now.

It’s also really messing with my head to be giving an address of “Madison” and a ZIP that doesn’t start “358″. I’m sure that I’ll adjust fairly soon, but … eeep.

Another day, another GIDEP alert. This crap is really, really getting old. Answering the mail on these things always seems like opening Pandora’s box, but the thing is, this involves hardware that’s … shall we say … mission-critical.

Well, I need to do some minor repairs on my bed before I put it back together. [No, the movers didn't break it. It was something I'd been needing to do before the move. The undercarriage isn't in the best of shape, and I need to fix it. Note to self: hardware store on the way home.] So, last night was spent with the boxspring and mattress on the floor. That was Step One on my way to a sleepless night.

I’m really weird about my sleeping environment. For one, my head has to be slightly elevated. Unfortunately for me, I have broad shoulders, and this generally means that the best way to get elevation is to have a pillow up against the headboard. With my mattress down on the floor, this wasn’t going to happen [at least, not at first].

For another bit, I have to have a radio on in the room, with the audio down really low. Call me paranoid, but if the room’s silent, I hear every little thing creaking in the house—the refrigerator going on and off, the roof cooling and contracting, etc. This has been helpful on more than one occasion—mainly because I wake up nearly instantly when the power goes out in the middle of the night. [Last time that happened, I woke up before the ceiling fan had begun to slow very much at all.]

Anyhow, my overnight listening of choice is AM radio, specifically the local ESPN Radio affilliate, ESPN 1450. Well, we had strong thunderstorms in Huntsville last night, and I think they lost power at their transmitter. As with many radio stations these days, they’re not manned 24/7; with a high degree of automation comes a vastly increased response time when you’re off-air. So, I had to go channel surfing. I tried the local news-talk station, but they futzed out after a while, too. I then went to the other sports-talk station, but I’d forgotten how much I hate Fox Sports Radio. I mean, let’s put it this way—after waking up for the fourth time due to the late-night bozo hanging up on a caller and raising his voice by 75%, my inclination was to load my .45 and put a gaping hole in the radio.

Finally, come 2330—a full two hours after first going to bed, on a day when I’d been up since 0400 or so—I switched things up a bit. First, I moved the mattress right by the footboard, which is leaning against the headboard, which is leaning against the wall. That solved my head elevation problem; previously, I was also waking up because I was knocking my pillow clean off the mattress and onto the floor. Then, I started tuning my AM radio and found that the atmospherics were kind to me—I could pick up 700 WLW out of Cincinnati. Exactly what I needed—even-toned announcers blathering about nothing that held any interest for me, allowing me to drift off to sleep quickly.

Man, 0615 came way too fast this morning.

Well, I talked with the folks at my homeowners association today, and apparently, I should be able to plug in my equipment from Knology and keep on truckin’. That’s good. Now, I just need the energy to go to my apartment, grab the stuff I need from there, go home, unpack the TV’s and TiVos, and do all I need to do.

Actually, I’d add “get one of the computers to the house,” but the thought of trying to string up my network tonight leaves me a bit weary. I’ll be doing well to get the TiVos unboxed and outfitted.

Since I’m not going to be paying for Knology’s extended basic cable—that’s part of our HOA fee—I’m contemplating adding a second digital cable box rental, which would be <$5/mo., far less than the $35/mo. I’ll not be paying them anymore. It’d be pretty near awesome if I could drive downtown, get my box, and take it home without having to have a truck roll. I consider that probability to be highly unlikely, though.

I was amused earlier when a co-worker was shocked that I was at work. “Why aren’t you taking the rest of the day off?! Shouldn’t you be at home, unpacking boxes and drinking beer?!” Mmmmm … beer. With that thought …

Somewhere around 0400, I woke up and started packing stuff up again, taking this apart, etc. I had a lovely sinus headache on Saturday—hopefully, I’ve moved away from whatever’s blooming :)—and that killed anything I was going to get done Saturday. Yesterday, I played catch-up, but I couldn’t get out of low gear. :sigh: This means, of course, that I still have a non-insignificant amount of stuff at the apartment, but most of that is in the category of [keep|pitch] decision-making. I’ll make a pass at it tonight, but right now, I’m pretty tired.

I must say, though … having that nice full-size tub waiting on me for a nice soak at the end of the move was … wonderful.

I feel like the evening’s been pretty good so far … watched a quirky movie with Heather Graham in it [Committed], read through some feeds, dove into The Huntsville Times. And strangely enough, it’s not even official sundown yet.

I’m plowing through some [rmfo-blogs] WordPress/plugin updates—having finally built myself a new tarball over the past couple of days—and I think I’ll do a few more of those before going to bed. See, the Reds are on TV, but they suck so much right now that I’m just not that sure I want to watch it, even though I’m TiVoing it at present. It’s … just painful for me.

Spaceref has published a memo from Wayne Hale, deputy program manager of the Space Shuttle Program (SSP), on the SSP waiver system and how waivers should be processed. I would love it if everyone in the NASA Manned Spaceflight arena complied with what Wayne lays out here—it’s solid engineering and management practice, and it should be the modus operandi.

I would, of course, get stuck with mover unavailability until next week [Monday morning], right when my boss will take a week off [starting tomorrow] while we’re putting out proposals and such.

Someone got a life preserver? I feel a little in-over-my-head here …

HA! This post must have been like a Jedi mind trick, because the one proposal I thought I’d have to go pitch to upper management just slid more than a week. I love it when a [lack of a] plan comes together!

The below is an open letter to Matt Mullenweg.

You wrote:

Bug reports (feed type A does B wrong) are far more useful than calls for a feed revolution.

Okay, you addressesed specific bugs in the comments, Matt. But let’s also face facts here: bug logging was on Trac for a while, and then Mosquito, and then maybe back to Trac. I think? I’m not sure. I’m completely lost as to where the hell I’m supposed to be filing my bugs. Maybe the information’s out there, and maybe I missed it somewhere along the way, but … I’m not a complete clueless WordPress newbie, and when I last had a bug, I had no damn idea where to file it. [I did finally find that WP was back to using Trac, and filed the bug, which has resolved, but ... for no real reason that I can determine.]

If you want bugs filed, we need an equivalent of a neon sign pointing us to it, and we need a system that’s got a fair amount of openness. Trac annoys me that I have to log in to even view the doggone bug [I know this because I had to log in to view the two bugs you fixed].

And as to fomenting a revolution: how is this entry, making a suggestion in the framework of the way I like to do it [not just bitching about a problem, but trying to suggest a solution, even if it's not the right one], fomenting a revolution?

How is it any different than my calls to have a user registration system? You never seemed to feel that I was fomenting a revolution then. I can’t find your comments, but you seemed happy about it then.

I mean, do you want me to start a revolution? If you do, please let me know. I’m really good at invective and rhetoric.

Lifehacker passes along a warning not to live in our iPods:

By routinely switching on our iPods and dialing up our favorite tunes, we’re cocooning ourselves in the old and familiar. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re erecting a defensive barrier against the new and alien, and retreating into our own personal worlds.

Now, I’m no iPod owner—which surprises some of my friends, since they know I’m a gadget geek and a music consumer—but I call B.S. on that. My iTunes habit gets me to know my music collection even better, and I have Audioscrobbler and my peeps to help me find new music. I get new and new-to-me music at a pretty good clip, so … whatever, man. It’s insular only if you let it be.

[I think that, sometimes, the only reason I write these suggestions for WordPress is that it makes me feel better. But I also know that Matt reads my feed, so ... it's less intrusive than me sending him a nasty gram or something. Besides, I like Matt.]

Anyhow, I want to echo Scott’s suggestion that he made as an aside this morning as he discussed FeedLounge’s valiadation protocols:

As a side note, a large portion of the invalid feeds so far are from some version of WordPress. There are a lot of users out there that haven’t felt that upgrading is important. Please upgrade!!! The security fixes alone are worth it. I hope in a future release that the WordPress team might use one common codebase for feed creation, rather than separate code for each feed format. Disclaimer: dotnot.org uses WordPress 1.5.1.2, and will not change to something else anytime soon. I like WordPress, just offering constructive criticism, and I just want to give the WP team a friendly nudge from time to time

[Emphasis mine.]

I bring this up because, as it stands, Scott’s comment feed is invalid. And for whatever reasons, comment feeds are only available in one feed format: RSS 2.0. [Somewhere, Mark Pilgrim is spinning on his head.]

So yes: the suggestions are as follows:

1. Please use a common codebase for generating feed information, and then use some kind of templating to output the feed in the desired format. I think WordPress has been edging towards this, but another nudge can’t hurt.
2. Please provide comment feeds in other formats. It doesn’t make sense for WP to publish entry data in RSS 0.9x, RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 0.3 and then only comments in RSS 2.0.

Thanks as always for your time and consideration.

I didn’t check my feeds at all yesterday, so when I walked into Ye Olde FeedLounge this morning, I figured it’d take me a couple hours to dig through it all. Nope. I had 249 unread items, and I was through them in under 90 minutes—half of what that normally would’ve taken me to do in FoF—and that doesn’t count the time I took to post on the Rumor Forum, or going to the breakroom to refill my water, or …

I think the point is made—despite being an alpha Ajax application and all the bits that means [occasionally slow loads, some unoptimized Javascript that makes Gecko gack a bit]—that FeedLounge makes me more efficient in reading all the feeds I subscribe to, and besides that, the experience is far, far more enjoyable.

It’s all I can do right now not to make myself delete FoF…