Kennyblog Redux

Meant to write about this the other day. It's important I get this down on paper (or whatever this is. Magnets?) Ally and I were doing our evening dental hygiene routine (nothing unusual - floss, mouthwash, brush. Ally does it in a different order, which I think is crazy, but that's something between me and her [well, it was something between me and her until I just made it Google'able information, but whatever]).

Anyway, I was toward the end of my brushing stage, mouth completely full of foam, when Allison very lovingly brushed her hand on my cheek. She showed me her finger, which had the eyelash she had just picked off my face, and presented it to be blown off (during which act I would, presumably, make a wish). Remember that at this point in process, I have a mouth full of toothpaste foam, which is not pointed not only at Allison's finger, but also directly in line with her face.

Honestly, I surprised everyone by not blowing a fine mist of toothpaste foam at her. I was shocked, once Allison realized what she was setting herself up for she was shocked. Even our cat, who is generally imperturbable unless we move her water dish, was shocked (I think she was shocked. For a moment her face changed from a look of querulousness to a look of incredulty which is as close as we're like to get). It took a supreme act of will, one (and here is the important bit) I'm fairly sure I'm never going to be able to make again.

I need to have it documented in case an opportunity like this arises once more. You guys need to back me up - it's not my fault. No man should have to keep from doing that more than once in a lifetime. Ally won't think it's funny, but she'll be wrong. Can I get an Amen?

Ally and I went to a spa this weekend, to do some much needed relaxing from the relatively stressful wedding preparations (Great Jones Spa, which was recommended to us by our friends Jer and Emily). It was my first real 'spa' experience, and it was definitely a great one. Very good times. We splurged on the VIP room, which is a private room for the two of us use use during and after massages. It had a steam room for two, and a nice jacuzzi.

I really liked the jacuzzi, but it was a weird size. It was a little too big for just two people, but it would have been crowded with four people. It was the perfect size for three people. Which I thought kind of strange. The whole jacuzzi thing is a really nice experience, and I was thinking that in the next place that Ally and I move into, we should totally have one put into the bathroom (presumably the next place we move into will have room enough for a three person jacuzzi). And I was thinking that if we're going to have something like that, we want our friends to feel like they can come over and use it, since it's pretty neat to have a nice soak every once in a while.

But if you have a two person jacuzzi, is it weird to invite a friendly couple over and say 'Hey - go have a nice soak. We'll be downstairs watching Heroes'? I'm not sure. I think it might be, but if someone said that to me I'd be all "Hells yeah. Yell up every time Hiro says "Mr. Isaac!" so I know to take a drink." I mean, I know it's not weird to invite people over to have a communal soak, if your jacuzzi is big enough for everyone, but what if it's not? Does that mean you aren't supposed to share?

Update: No update, really. I'm just testing something with my blogging software

Actually, since I've got you here, I'll tell you about a mistake I made recently. I found a backdoor to some system the other week, that allowed me to make the terrible mistake of sending a test news headline out to all customers of my companies product.

This is a bad thing. On the upside, for some reason when I did it I used the phrase "Test Headline - Please Ignore" instead of my usual test text "HUGEHUGEHUGEHUGEHUGEHUGEHUGE."

So, this is annoying. If you follow this blog via RSS, you've probably noted that the formatting is a travesty, what with there not being any line breaks being inserted. Makes reading it somewhat difficult. I'm trying to get this working properly, but am having a tougher time than I expect.

I have found, however, that the Atom feed works properly. Oddly enough, it only works when it's called atom.xml. I can't just have the atom feed generated with the name index.xml and have that work. Of course not, because that wouldn't be a pain in the ass.

So, again, if you are following this via RSS, I suggest you use the following link:
http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/kennyb/kennyblogii/atom.xml

This will not suck, I assure you. I'm going to continue generating the old feed, of course, so you won't break. But I strongly suggest switching. Oh, and if you know Moveable Type real well and want to give a brother a hand, please do leave a comment for me.

Oh, and just so this post isn't completely worthless:

LOLCTHULHU (I has a non-euclidean geometry: Le me show you)

Update: Actually, the index.xml appears to be working now. I don't know why. I know it's annoying, though!

I got a GTalk chat request from someone random yesterday (actually random, in that I have no idea who they were). I answered it:

1:42 PM adumasarts: hola preciosa
1:43 PM me: not sure I'm who you think I am
1:44 PM adumasarts: when are you
me: now
adumasarts: yes
me: OK.
adumasarts: hello!

Made me laugh.

I totally got married yesterday. That was the best thing ever.

Due to a (very) minor snafu at my wedding on Sunday, I find myself in a position requiring me to mail out a hundred CDs to my wedding guests (one per family, or thereabouts). In my online search for the cost of a padded envelope, I came across the Postal Service "District Sleeps Alone Tonight" single for sale via the USPS online store.

Thought that was weird, until I realized that it was brilliant.

The Wikipedia entry for the track list of Girl Talk's album Night Ripper pretty well encapsulates just about everything I love about the internet.

I have a bunch of new albums in my listen queue (evidentally there's a new Radiohead out there, some albums that a friend of mine from work lent me who's names I can't recall right now, a Peanut Butter Wolf album that I've been looking forward to picking up when it was first released in 2005). But today I'm setting aside to appreciate the past. There's a whole lot of albums out there that, when I first started listening to them, I played them to death. Just killed the hell out of them. For a couple, I was aware that I was doing it at the time, but I didn't care.

After a week or two of overplaying that album, I would be sick of it, and put it down never to be listened to again. Today I'm taking the opportunity to go back and listen to a bunch of them. Just once.

Like so many of the best laid plans of etc etc, my days musical adventure has gone astray, dramatically derailed by Goldfrapp's Supernature. On one hand, that's kind of disappointing. On the other hand: Ooh-La-La!

One one hand, this is another in a long list of incredibly uncomfortable stories about the ham-handedness of Homeland Security, and how they are probably a tad more heavy-handed with their powers than they perhaps should be (though I note that the story suggests that it was the Canadian version of DHS, not the US DHS. It's not exactly clear).

On the other hand, any security protocol that includes provision for reducing the number of Death Cab albums in the world can't be all wrong. So I'm going to call it a wash.

In general, I've been really happy with the Mac experience. I switched about. . . two years ago (wow, has it been two years since Ally fragged my PC laptop with a cup of tea? Huh, that's crazy), and in general am a much happier person because of it. Having a command line is just a vital part of the computer experience for a fellow like me (at this moment, I'm jumping between my blogger software and iTerm, setting up some backups of my mp3s and pictures using rsync), a lot of the applications are just wonderful to use (using Quicksilver, for instance, helps in my life's goal of never having to remove my keys from the keyboard, iTunes is super nice from a user-standpoint), and it's very very pretty.

But there are a couple of gaping holes in the applications that drive me batty. Like, a web browser that doesn't suck. There isn't one. Safari (packaged with the Mac OS) out of the box is terrible (anything that doesn't let me re-arrange my tabs is just not OK, and the fact that inline find isn't an option is just terrible. I'm led to understand that this will be available in the Leopard release, but should I have to wait that long? No). Firefox 2 is a memory beast, and since I made the terrible mistake of only getting a gig of ram in this puppy, memory is at a premium. Firefox just completely drags down my system. Lots of nice features, though. I've been using Camino for a while because for some reason it's really fast when used with GMail. But that's no good either (no tab re-arranging, no inline find, my bank site doesn't work with it).

Since I liked Firefox so much, I wanted to give Flock a try (which I haven't installed for over a year. As I understand it, Flock is a branch from the Firefox code base). They are just announcing their 1.0 Beta released, so I installed that tonight. It has a bunch of interesting features (native tight integration with a bunch of social apps: flickr, Facebook, blogging tools, etc). Which is kind of neat. I was hoping that it would get me involved with Facebook, since all the kids are using it and I hear it's the next big thing. And it was actually kind of nice. Until it crashed 10 minutes into my using it.

Alright, not a big deal. Until the next crash 5 minutes later. Tabbed browsing is really wonderful, but if you are going to have a single window interface to your application, you have to find a way to keep critical errors from knocking out ALL of the windows you have open, since that makes for an intolerable user experience.

So, I'm going to go ahead and put away Flock until the official 1.0 release, since I really don't want it crashing while I'm in the middle of writing a long post, or transferring money, or doing anything else.

And don't get me started on FTP clients. Yuch.

A couple of links for you that are really more of Sean's territory. An interview with Clive Barker (about video games, not horror. But still, interesting). And Nad Shot, a blog with panels from comic books where people (and gorillas) are taking blows to the groin.

Respective hat tips to Kotaku and, errrr... the National Review, for some reason.

There's this Canadian fellow that works for Ben's company, who writes a really wonderful weblog (well. . . it's wonderful if you're interested in things like "Structured Programming" or want to read about how learning FORTH will change your life. Which I am, but you maybe not so much).

In any case, he recently had a poll up about whether or not he should keep putting his daily link summaries into his blog, saying that he doesn't intend to start generating multiple feeds, one for links and one for his own writing. Doing that sort of stuff can probably be very annoying, if you're not writing your own blogging software (come to think of it, it's just as annoying if you do write your own blogging software. . .).

I've wanted to try Yahoo Pipes for a while, and this seemed like a good candidate. So I generated two really simple pipes for his blog, one just the links, and one just his posts.

Ragenwald - Links Only

Ragenwald - No Links

This was really simple to do with Pipes. Makes me want to generate some Pipes that do something more complex. Psyched it supports regular expressions.

During the preparations for my wedding, there were a lot of things that came to me as a surprise. Things like the many flower options available to todays consumer (do you have any idea how many different types there are? And the fact that you can get any flower in just about any color is a miracle of science, if you ask me. Although it puts a real cramp in the "roses are red, violets are blue" thing. Seriously game changing in the field of doggerel), or the fact that I have approximately 34x the number of relatives that Allison does.

Here's a transcription of one conversation Ally and I had during the planning process. It contains one of these surprises. can you spot it?

Ally: So - I think I know what I want to get you for your wedding present! You're really going to like it. Do you know what you're getting me yet?

Ken: . . .

In case it was too subtle for you to spot, I was totally unaware that wedding presents were traditional (or aren't they? Did I get suckered?). On the upside, I love getting gifts. And on the other upside, Ally chose something that I am totally psyched about - the Sony eReader. I don't know why I'm so psyched about it, but I am. There are a number of reasons for me to not be psyched about it:

I blame myself - the thing that I was tracking was the optional AC adapter (I didn't read the shipping manifest closely enough). The problem is - why haven't they shipped me the thing itself? Estimated shipping date on the online form still reads the 29th (that would be yesterday), and I'm on hold with Sony just to ask 'what the f#$k?'

I wouldn't mention it, except that the hold 'music' is crappy smooth jazz, interspersed with someone telling me about how exciting the Sony eReader is, and that I should ask the operator that answers (which presumably, despite the evidence of the last 10 minutes, they will) more details about it.

The thing about being on hold is that you aren't really listening to the music, so when a song stops you get SO excited that someone actually picked up. But they didn't.

I feel like I should be writing about this whole eReader experience. Although I like technology, I'm very seldomly an early adopter of 1st-gen technology. But I'm making the plunge with this one, and I should really be sharing.

BTW, I cancelled my online order for the eReader, and ended up walking 6 blocks from work to the Sony Style store to get it there. I would say that's really annoying, but it turns out the reason they kept pushing back the ship date was something about California going up in flames. So they say, anyway. The device is really nice looking, and the text looks great on it.

The first issue I had was the fact that there's no software for the Mac. The Sony eReader comes with a software package kind of like iTunes (except written with a Swing interface, which makes me want to be a little sick), and there's only a Windows build (which is funny, since it's VERY clearly a Java app, so why not put in the extra couple of man-weeks to get it to work on Mac? But whatever). And Parallels wasn't recognizing anything plugged into my USB drive except my mouse. This isn't the fault of the eReader, clearly, but it was something I had to get dealt with before I got involved in the whole eReader thing.

Turns out, there's an extension which is loaded when you plug in the device that tells Parallels that OS X is currently using it, even when it's not. So Parallels won't use the device in use. I found a little hack here which taught me to use kextunload to uninstall the driver for com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass, and then Windows immediately recognized the Reader. Sweet. That is definitely news you can use. For
some definition of 'news', anyway.

Crap. During the authorization process for the eReader, the virtual Windows just bluescreened and crashed. This might take a while. I'll get back to you.