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.