A Moment for My Ego

People often say “I’m speechless” and then go on to write for a few paragraphs about whatever supposedly took away their ability to speak. So I’ll just say “thank you.” In the past week, Unnofficial TypePad Resources and Everything TypePad! have both mentioned my MT→TypePad Permalinks article, Snowman has flatteringly redesigned, and I’m in the “Featured TypePad Sites” box on the main page.

Working as a “Conflicts Research Assistant” doesn’t quite stimulate me from nine to five every day. Getting recognition on my creative endeavors really means a lot to me.

A Sign on My Phone

As of today, it looks like the National Do Not Call Registry is on. Matt Thomas and I had a discussion about it last night. I had been wondering for some time whether I really did think that the registry was a legimate thing for the government to impose. I now think it is.

The Direct Marketing Association argued last week that the registry would restrict their constitutional right to free speech. It does not. The DMA is free to speak however they want. In the exact same way, protesters are allowed to picket on the street outside your house, exercising their First Amendment right. They are not, however, allowed to walk up to your front door and yell at you.

If you don’t want someone to enter your property, you just have to put a “no trespassing” and/or “no soliciters” sign up. If someone fails to heed this sign, you can call the police and have them arrested. Even without the sign, if someone comes to your door you can tell them to leave your property or you’ll consider it trespassing. Delivery men are allowed only if you’ve ordered from them, and you have to sign a form to let FedEX or UPS leave something at your door. Clearly people are not allowed on your property if you don’t want them, and this doesn’t inhibit their right to speech.

Is making a phone call in a way entering their property? I think it would have to be, but I think this point is where the Do Not Call Registry question hinges. Putting a sign on your law forbids door-to-door salesman from conducting their business, and this is an established and valid practice. The problem is that you can’t put up a “no soliciters” sign on your phone. The Registry is just legislation that draws this analogy. By this merit, I think it is an acceptable law.

Matrix Revolutions Trailer

The trailer for The Matrix Revolutions is up at What Is The Matrix.com. It’s more of the same images that we’ve seen since promotions for The Matrix Reloaded were released. We get lots of fast cuts with Neo flying all over the place, swarming sentinels, and dozens of Agent Smiths being menacing. It doesn’t bother with much story teasing, because mainly we know that it’s continuing right from the last movie and that there’s a big fight ahead in a short amount of time. Just over a month to go now.

They're Still Alive

The Apple Music Store has eighty Pearl Jam albums. Most of them are of course live albums, but it shows how great internet distribution can be. If you went to one of those concerts, you can buy it now in a high-quality recording for $9.99. The indie labels’ contracts should start coming in soon, and rumors indicate the Windows version might be out within a month. Bravo!

Underwere

Katherine just sent me a link to this Yahoo! News article stating that Underworld director Len Wiseman has been asked to write and direct two sequels to his horror/action directorial debut.

I saw Underworld and I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it was a terribly good movie. Or if it was, it wasn’t the movie I wanted to see. I won’t give it much criticism for not being original, because in a vampire action movie I’d be disappointed if I didn’t see rainy, bluish tinted gothic sets and Matrix-esque action. Here’s the first half of the above new story’s summary of the film: “Underworld follows a beautiful vampire vixen (Beckinsale) caught in an epic battle between the immortal races of vampires and werewolves.” Except that the movie isn’t about the epic battle, but about its end. There have been lots of good stories (especially Lord of the Rings) whose story is but a minor part of its greater mythology, but I think that every single person who went to see Underworld didn’t want that. We wanted vampires fighting werewolves. We got very little of that.

What we did get was a fun but flawed movie. Every time that Victor (Bill Nighy) was on screen I heard people in the audience laughing, and I’m certain that his scenes weren’t meant to be funny. The story seemed cramped. I liked it, but I think that by telling the story of the end of the war, plus having to tell the backstory of the war itself, there wasn’t much time left for character development or, failing that, a few better full-on fight scenes.

But I’ll have to give them credit on having some of the best werewolves I’ve seen on film. They’re tough creatures to do well. Canines don’t have broad shoulders like people do, so they don’t look right standing upright. Wolf heads are so much longer than primates’ that they look unbalanced if just stuck onto a human necks, but at the same time a person’s face with fur on it doesn’t look different enough, either. Underworld did it pretty well, and they did well in conveying how painful the transformation must be when Michael goes through it in the police car.

What gives me hope for this upcoming franchise is the possiblity noted toward the end of the Yahoo! article that “one of the films may be a prequel.” Maybe they’ll make the movie I wanted this one to be.

Long Hair and Smooth Aluminum

For the technologically repressed Apple geeks in the house, I found this pictorial of a girl unpacking a PowerMac G5 (SFW). …and then she installs RAM!

Compatibility of Weblogs and ISSN

Zeldman is asking everyone to link to “Compatibility of Weblogs and ISSN” by Joe Clark. He very clearly lays out why weblogs should continue to be eligible for ISSNs and why some registrars may be denying or sitting on them. I applied for an ISSN months ago and have not yet gotten mine. Read the article. Many weblogs may be trivial, but they are a free source of information coming directly from individuals and not corporations. Having an ISSN gives an appropriate level of legitimacy.

Social Luck

I just got a Friendster message from a girl from high school who was in the saxophone section with me. At first I didn’t remember her. She’s cute in her Friendster pictures, so I told my coworkers about it, saying that you’d think I’d remember a cute girl I went to high school with. One of them said, “well maybe she was a nerd in high school and she’s cool now.” Possible. I replied, “I was a nerd in high school.”

A few minutes later, she said, “I can’t believe you were a nerd in high school.”

“I’m still a nerd.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Sure I am, I like computers and the internet and Star Wars and comic books and stuff and junk.”

“But all of that stuff is trendy now.”

“Well that’s just my good luck! Just because Spider-Man made $900 million doesn’t make me not still a nerd.”

I’d like to think that the rise in nerdy things into the mainstream comes from the movies we were reared on. Go back and watch most movies from the 80’s. Almost all the heroes are nerds. John Cusack and Michael J. Fox were the dork standard bearers for our generation. They got beat up at the beginnings of movies and won in the finales for us, the nerds who grew up.

Zombie Free Press

Today’s link spree is about one thing: zombies. Prompted by Chris White and Jon Novak, who recently reminded my why SomethingAwful is so damn great, here are a few zombie reading choices:

• Stop vampire and zombie oppression.
• Zombie Alert, “a full line of zombie protection products.” Among other things, Zombie Philosophy. (Seriously.)

Redirecting Your MovableType Permalinks to TypePad

I use TypePad for my weblog. I used to use MovableType for my weblog. I’ve since imported all my old entries into the new page and, thanks to good engineering by the Six Apart team, everything got from one place to another perfectly with all the data intact.

One of the big problems that one can have when moving to a new site is that all of the link locations change. If anyone’s bookmarked an old entry, they might never find its twin on the new site. And until search engines find the new version, new people might stumble across the old one without knowing any better.

Here are two tricks I’ve used to make the transition better.

First, add/change to a “noindex, follow” meta in your head. This will tell search engines to ignore the old page and direct them to the new one. Now, set up a redirect from the old page to the TypePad permalink. You’ll want to give the user a few seconds so that they don’t get confused, and provide a bit of text telling them to note the new location and to change their bookmarks. Here’s a basic template (click to enlarge):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W#C/DTD XML 1.0 Transitional//EN "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/ DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">  <html xlmns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>redirecting to TypePad</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=" text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content=" 2; url="http://YourTypePadSite.typepad .com/YourTypePadSite/<$MTEntryDate format= "%Y/%m"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to= "15"$>.html" /> </head> <body> <p>Slight address change. New address is: <a href ="http://YourTypePadSite.typepad.com/Your TypePadSite/<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/ <$MTEntryTitle dirift="1" trim_to="15"$>here</a></p> <p>Redirecting...</p> </body> </html> 

You’ll have to change “YourTypePadSite” to the name of your site of course, and change typepad.com to blogs.com if that’s what you use.

The key to the redirect is in the formatting of the links. MovableType by default builds permalinks using an entry ID, while TypePad uses the year and month of an entry plus the first 15 letters of the the title. So for a September 2003 post called “My First Post,” the permalink will be: http://example.typepad.com/example/ 2003/09/myfirstpost.html The template uses MT tags to reformat that data into the proper URI.

Now, if people go to the old link on your page they’ll see a screen telling them that the entry has a new location followed two seconds later by a redirect to the new page on your TypePad site. I hope this helps!

Update 9/29/03: A clarification (via Everything TypePad!), this is for your Individual Archive Template.

Antidiluvian

I awoke a bit before five last night to what sounded exactly like a faucet running into a pool of water. My bedroom having a faucet, that seemed wrong. The rainstorm had dropped enough water fast enough that the ground hadn’t soaked anything up, so our basement window wells had filled all the way up — each probably holding well over a dozen gallons of water. Turns out that our windows aren’t water-tight, so leaks around the edges were pouring water onto the floor. I woke Matt up, then went into the main room and discovered inches of water by the window and an already soaked carpet.

This apartment is cheap and convenient to the Metro, but this is now the third flood we’ve had. Annoyed, I decided to take the day off, do some mopping, and get back my lost sleep. Except that our squeegee is very old, so it won’t actually clean the floors. I have everything mostly dry but very dirty. The poor dehumidifier needs a vacation.

(Also the built-in Apple dictionary knows the word “squeegee.”)

Figment

Dear Peter,

You were right, Uncle Bobby doesn’t exist. Matt and Katherine agree: psychological coping projection.

1. Old Mike says at the beginning and the end that truth is in the teller and history is how you tell it.
2. The stepfather going to jail and Bobby leaving happens at the same time, because Mike didn’t need him anymore.
3. At the end, old Mike says “that’s how I remember it.”

It isn’t like The Sixth Sense, they don’t give you context clues, but after watching it I’m pretty sure that Bobby is meant to be fictitious.

And Back Into Debt I Plunge

No finance fees if you pay within six months? I couldn’t resist.

Why did I choose the iMac instead of a swanky 15″ PowerBook? Price was the major factor. I got a better-equipped iMac with a bigger screen for a good deal cheaper. Second, after looking at them in the store, Katherine and I agreed that the 12” really is the best one. Its ultra-portability and youngest child charm are just sooooo the way to be. And since she’s so far been kind enough to let me play with hers when she’s not using it, I’ve got my laptop base covered. And thirdly, I just loaded Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos with all the settings cranked up to eleven and wow did it soar.

After a few moments of thought, I opted not to get a Bluetooth Keyboard even though they seem cool. Most people I know who’ve gone down the wireless input device road love it, but it just seemed like $69 I didn’t want to spend just then. If only they had offered a multi-button Bluetooth mouse…

I haven’t come up with a name for my new adoption yet. For one, I can’t quite decide: is a 17” iMac male or female?

Update: When the new iMac was released, Apple had Pixar come up with a pair of adorable shorts. Apple has since taken them off their servers, but I managed to find copies. The second contains evokes an almost naughty feeling as the iMac realizes we’ve caught it checking itself out. Watch iMac Dance and iMac Superdrive.

Isabel Allows Redesign

Since Hurricane Isabel gave me the day off, I happily wasted it watching television and redesigning my site. I’ve decided to switch to TypePad for my hosting and weblogging needs. I’m just in love with the service and how easy it makes it to do stuff. At the moment my page on davextreme.com is still up, but the link to my page on the main davextreme page points here to davextreme.typepad.com, but I’ll set up domain mapping a some point. The image of the tree comes from freefoto.com, and I’ve done the color scheme from the photo’s pallete. (I later discovered this article suggesting doing that. Yay me for being clever!)

Feedback on the new look is of course appreciated.

File Sharing in Canada

As the RIAA wages war on its own customers in the US, it seems that Canadians have little to worry about. Tech Central Station reports that the Canadian Copyright Act specifically allows “private copying” of music. Their solution to the problem of music theft was to institute a federally mandated tax on blank media. In the five years since the act went into effect, the music industry has collected 70 million Canadian Dollars ($51 million US) through the 77 cent CAD (56 USD) tax on blank CDs and 29 cents CAD (21 USD) per blank tape. According to the article:

While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution.

In fact, you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process. “Private copying” is a term of art in the Act. In Canada, if I own a CD and you borrow it and make a copy of it that is legal private copying; however, if I make you a copy of that same CD and give it to you that would be infringement. Odd, but ideal for protecting file sharers.

Every song on my hard drive comes from a CD in my collection or from a CD in someone else’s collection which I have found on a P2P network. In either case I will have made the copy and will claim safe harbor under the “private copying” provision. If you find that song in my shared folder and make a copy this will also be “private copying.” I have not made you a copy, rather you have downloaded the song yourself.

Update 12/12/03: A decision today underlines that Peer-to-Peer downloading is legal in Canada, but may levy a music player tax. C|Net has the story.

On Joining Friendster

I usually try to be on the cusp of trends. I joined eBay in 1998 and Napster in Fall 1999. For some reason, it seemed for a time like too much work to set up Friendster, but last night I got around to doing it. (I was quite overstimulated by a great idea by Kenji and finishing The Goblet of Fire, so my energy level was high.) I’m glad I did, as I do feel occasional pangs of guilt for turning my back from my high school friends. I’m sure that Friendster will help me get back into some level of contact with them. Not that I’m actively looking to rekindle long past friendships, but I’d love to at least know who’s in the area.

This Connected Selves post examines a biological charge that human beings are mentally unable to mainain more than a certain amount of close friendships. I’ve been known to point to size discrepancy for why fraternities and sororities are so different (gender differences being obviously big, too). Frats (at W&M at least) tend to be smaller, allowing for greater social interaction between all the members. Everyone has their closest group of friends, but most are entirely comfortable with any other member in the group. I think because of this you’ll also find frat guys to have fewer friends with non-members that sorority girls. Sororities go for a bigger pool, and you can see that they’re not able to maintain close friendships with all of them. It just isn’t possible to be close friends with more than a handul of people, and lesser friends with more than a few dozen.

This post on Plastic Bag discusses the first one, bringing up that Friendster and the web may be able to begin to overcome that. Online communities allow a level of casual intimacy that people wouldn’t otherwise maintain. How often would I email Whitehead if he didn’t have a webpage? But since he does, I can check in on it every few weeks, read what he’s posted, and remember the guy. Likewise, by leaving comments on your friends’ pages, you can keep up a dialogue, however mundane, that keeps a friendship burning just enough.

Update: Here’s another post on the issue, and here’s the paper by Robin Dunbar, “Co-Evolution of Neocoretx Size, Group Size and Language in Humans”.

Optical Illusions

The Hivelogic Narrative is a well-respected weblog. Very bizarrely, it is written in the second person. Today, it links to this set of optical illusions. They play off how odd it is that our brain is able to construct a three dimensional world out of the two dimensional images it gets.

There are a bunch of rules that filmakers have to follow when they’re making a movie for the audience to be able to understand what they’re seeing. If done wrong, viewers will get confused when, for example, an actor walks to a door that they thought was on the other side of the room. Citizen Kane is famous because it played with these tricks. In one scene, Kane appears to be standing in front of normal windows which are actually absurdly large and start at head-height. This works because your brain is fooling itself into believing that the images on the screen represent the real world.

Anthropologists curious about this once set up a movie screen in front of a tribe that had never seen movies or photos before. The people had no idea what they were looking at, seeing just a large, bright screen. They watched curiously for minutes, unable at all to see the movie, until a chicken appeared. Once they had seen the chicken (which they recognized from daily life), their brains were able to identify the images and could then understand to turn the flat signals into an interpretable concept.

Update: Tripod doesn’t want me linking to their images directly. To see the Citizen Kane pictures, go 3/4 down this page.

200th Post: MxPx and Dashboard Confessional Show

Sunday Katherine and I saw MxPx and Dashboard Confessional. MxPx, tagging along with Dashboard Confessional until their own tour for their upcoming album, was very good. They didn’t play a few songs I would have liked to hear, but in their short set they got in a lot of their good ones and managed to sneak in two good new tunes. Dashboard Confessional played very well, much to the delight of hundreds of teenage girls, but didn’t offer very much to me that the CD can’t provide. Mostly they just stood there any played their songs, pausing occasionally to let the crowd chime in. And they sounded good, but there just wasn’t much showmanship there. Though the cover of “Teenage Dirtbag” was a pleasant surprise. (And to make me proud, Katherine recognized it before I did.)

Bloglines

A lot of website have syndicated feeds built into them in RSS or XML formats. Mine does. Every LiveJournal page does. Most major newspapers’ sites do. But most people don’t know about them and don’t use them. I’ve known about them for a long time, but most news aggregators I’ve found are more complex than I was willing to deal with.

Yesterday I ran accross Bloglines. It’s free and is very easy to set up. Just sign up, then go to the bottom of their page and click on “Easy Subscribe.” It’ll give you a link that you can drag onto your web browser’s bookmarks bar. Then, whenever you come across a page you want to subscribe to, just click the little subscribe favelet and it’ll be added to your “My Bloglines” page. The site works very well and is very simple, which is precisely what I wanted.

Why? The friends page on LiveJournal is a very handy place to check for updates on your friends’ pages, but is of course restricted to LJ users. A news aggregator like Bloglines works with any page with a feed and checks it once an hour. When there’s an update that page’s name will appear in bold, and you can can click on it to read an excerpt or go to the actual web page. Right now I have all the non-LJ blogs I read plus Wired News and the NY Times set up. Whenever I come across a new page I want to subscribe to, I just click the favelet and I’m all set.

How does one know if a page has an RSS or XML feed? Most have a little orange button on them somewhere. (Mine looks like this.) If in doubt, click the subscribe favelet and see what happens. If Bloglines opens but doesn’t display any entries, the page probably doesn’t have a syndication format set up. Some sites provide entires posts in their feeds, others just use excepts, others offer feeds for both. Personally I prefer exceprts, because it’s easier to skip over entries I don’t think I’m interested in, and because I like to read the post in the context of the actual page.

Oh, one more thing: when you first subscribe to a page in Bloglines, the entries may appear out of date. They’ll refresh within the hour, it just means that Bloglines hadn’t been checking that site regularly.

Women, Purses, Inconsideration

Women: putting your handbag in the middle of an aisle or walkway, even if it’s right by your chair, is not okay. If it won’t fit under your chair or in front of the bench on the Metro, it goes in your lap. That’s just the way it is.

Quo Vadimus

I love the fall. I love the changing leaves and the coming of cold (as opposed to winter’s lingering cold). I even love the rain. But the impending arrival of autumn has left another season marker in my head, providing an easy check against where I was a year ago and a year before that. I’m not unhappy about where I am right now, but I know it’s not where I want to be for very long. The problem is, after all this time, I still don’t know where I’m going. Web design looks more and more appealing as an option, but with the forthcoming 1.0 release of the frat page I become less and less happy with my design (and more and more annoyed at IE/Win). Last night my dreams revolved around modifying tags and rebuilding the site. If that sounds boring, it is, and it left me in a very peculiar mood that hasn’t receeded with the morning fog.