Still going after all these years.
A friend just shared this little jewel of a wedding dress auction, and I had to pass it along. I have to say, the man has guts. I don’t think I’d have quite the shape to pull that off. At least the updates to the page show he’s having fun—and maybe he’ll get a decent proposal out of it…
(Incidentally, a $600 bid for a used wedding dress? I think that may be a prime example of what economists call the “winner’s curse” in effect.)
It’s a good day when an old friend releases a new album, and today is definitely a good day. Justin Rosolino, with whom I sang for a year in the Virginia Glee Club before his muse led him elsewhere, has just released his second album, Wonderlust.
The record, which features contributions from members of Sixpence None the Richer and Jars of Clay (as well as legendary studio musician Matt Rollings), is Justin’s first since 1999, but he’s kept busy, apparently finding time to play for clowns in Brazil and in the US (kidding about the second one…I think). The album features full band reworkings of “St. Francis” (released on the late lamented MP3.com) and two songs from his first album, “Legacy” and “Come Sweet Day.” The second album is available from CDFreedom and will be available soon from PasteMusic.com; the first album is available used from Amazon.
A few times in the last month, I’ve had conversations with people that went something like, “Oh, I wonder how Google’s editorial staff keeps up to construct relevant search results for all those terms.” Apologies to the speakers, but that’s a little like wondering how those elves make the cookies taste so good.
My former coworker Craig Pfeifer points to the original journal papers that underlie the theory of how Google ranks content on the web, including PageRank, some data mining algorithms, and Google itself. If looking at these papers tells the reader anything about Google, it’s that the relevance isn’t built editorially. The rules of the underlying algorithms might be tweaked a little bit from time to time, but the heavy editorializing of results isn’t really necessary.
Interesting point: a lot of the exploits that have been done on Google in the last few years, such as propping up a page by using lots of pointers from the home page of low-ranked sites and Google-bombing through the use of link text, are either implicitly or explicitly called out in these papers. In the case of the former, Brin and Page admit that it might be possible to outsmart the relevance algorithms with a lot of low-ranked sites, and say “At worst, you can have manipulation in the form of buying advertisements (links) on important sites. But, this seems well under control since it costs money.” Apparently they didn’t predict link farms or blog memes too well, but that isn’t to say that their work is a miserable failure…
Lisa and I spent Saturday and Sunday on our front porch. Alas, not in rockers. More like off our rockers.
Saturday began with the ceremonial Removal of the Cruddy Outdoor Carpet, that green plastic thing that used to cover our porch. No more! Now the two-inch gap in the flooring in front of the old front door and the six inch wide strip of dry rot along the far end of the porch are out in the open! Oy.
We chose to go ahead and paint the walls and old front door first, rather than continue to look at primer spots. We began by painting the porch walls and door, and amazingly, the paint that Lisa and her mom got from Lowe’s actually matched the old paint on the walls. When we were done, I couldn’t tell the patched and repainted parts from the untouched parts around them.
We also cleaned a ton of trim and upper wall that had been allowed, in the shade of the overgrown front trees, to mildew. And I nailed in a patch to replace the missing wood in front of the doorjamb. We also bought a replacement carpet (much as I would love to just paint the exposed flooring, I don’t think sheet plywood is anyone’s idea of House Beautiful), though we didn’t get to install it.
In fact, besides some lawnwork and weeding, we didn’t get to do anything else at all. As we collapsed exhausted on our sofas late Sunday afternoon, accompanied by dogs who were ecstatic that we were finally paying them some attention, I think I muttered something about taking a two day vacation to make up for the lost weekend. But I can’t be sure, as I was already asleep.
It’s been a few days since my in-laws returned to New Jersey. While they were here, they kick-started a ton of projects around the house, including replanting the beds in front of the house (formerly hidden by our trees), getting the junk out of the pathways around the garden beds, and the front porch repainting and baseboard preparation I mentioned on Sunday.
On Tuesday night I took the new nailgun and started installing the baseboards. The only problem I ran into was lack of accessible studs on some walls—meaning that two of the molding strips have one end that is attached to nothing, at least until I find a way to glue or otherwise affix them more permanently to the wall. I was also disappointed to note that the electric nailgun was not quite sturdy enough to drive a 1″ brad all the way into the stud; I ended up having to hammer every one down for the last quarter inch. But the work went much faster and was much more precise than if I had to drive the nails by hand. Next steps: fix those two loose ends, caulk the gaps between the boards and the walls where the walls aren’t quite square, and touch up the paint.
Incidentally, a long belated shoutout to the folks at HouseInProgress.net, who blogrolled the Houseblog department a while back and whose energy and dedication to their remodel has frequently shamed me into taking action on our projects, which are much less onerous than theirs.
This week in Doonesbury, original cast member B.D. loses his helmet (without which he has not been seen, though over the years it morphed from a football helmet to a police helmet to a GI’s helmet, in over 30 years)… and his left leg, from the knee down. In response, local papers in Colorado and other places are pulling the strip because of profanity.
Huh? That’s a little like refusing to show photos of returning injured or dead soldiers because it might upset people. Oh wait… that’s already happening. In fact, the person who took that photo has been fired.
Why is it that it’s only the comic strip artists who have the guts to talk about the real human costs of this war? (via Metafilter)
(Note: I am not saying that it’s good, blanket statement, to show pictures of dead Americans. But I think we dishonor the dead by pretending that their sacrifice never happened.)
The new Search experience on Microsoft.com (not to be confused with MSN Search, which searches the whole Internet; this search “merely” searches the 4 to 6 million pages of content on Microsoft.com) is available.
Before today, if you searched for a term you would get categorized buckets of results: the top three downloads, product information pages, support articles, etc. that matched your terms. Today the results are returned in a flat list, with additional search scoping options available in the right navigation.
Reduced functionality? Not really. As Amazon has found, if you return results in fixed scopes and categories, you run the risk of a highly relevant result in a category that’s far down the page and consequently never seen. Getting the categories out of the way but keeping the option to select them for filtering handy is a kind of “best of both worlds” situation: the categories don’t interfere with relevance but are there if you need them.
It will be interesting to see what people like Korby Parnell (and his commenters in this post) think of the difference.
Aside: while I didn’t work on the actual release, I was part of a team of researchers that analyzed customer data around the last version of search to make recommendations for this version. Kind of nice to see the vision come true; hopefully it will be an improvement for our users.
Ben and Jerry’s will be doing an iTunes song giveaway on free cone day. I read the headline and groaned, remembering the Pepsi giveaway and imagining premiums hidden in cones and under pint lids—in short, everything we feared when the company was bought out.
But the mechanics are quite a bit different. In Ben and Jerry’s giveaway, the giveaway isn’t tied to merchandise, but to activism. If you sign a pledge to vote in November’s presidential election on their website, you get a free song. Needless to say, the offer is US only. (No mention of the promotion yet on their site, though.)
The long awaited day arrived yesterday, while I was at work. I came home to a rectangular package from Fantagraphics. The first volume of the Complete Peanuts had arrived at last. More thoughts on this joy later, but let me just say that having a hardback Peanuts collection is, well, like a warm puppy. And it has an index!!!!
A quick tour round the block:
We spent a lot of time this weekend in the oft-neglected older half of our house. For those just coming in, our abode is a bit of a Frankenhouse, with a big 1999 addition with master bedroom, great room, and garage added onto a Craftsman cottage that started out around 1916 and grew over the years into a five-room house. Unfortunately, we hadn’t spent a lot of time on the original portion of the house since renovating the bathroom, and there was a lot of work still left undone.
This weekend we started to reverse the process. Yesterday Lisa’s dad and I measured and cut the baseboards that we never got around to adding to the newly remodeled bathroom. Today, Lisa and her dad primed the cut ends of the boards while her mom and I started scraping and applying caulk and spackle to various nail holes, cracked boards on banisters, and so on in preparation for painting on the old porch. I also ran to the Home Depot and found that the most economical nailgun for applying molding was an electric model that I bought for about $10 less than I could have rented a pneumatic model and air compressor.
So tomorrow night is cut out for me: popping moldings into place with a nailgun, a little touch-up paint, some caulk, and the bathroom is almost all done. Just some trim to go over the doorjamb and we’re set. Heaven only knows when the paint on the porch will be done.
I was reading Tim Bednar of e-church’s paper on blogging and religion, “We Know More Than Our Pastors,” (highly recommended, btw), when I ran into this quotation. I call it out since I think it resonates with what I fumblingly tried to say yesterday. If you are looking at the PDF draft of the paper, the quote is on page 10 (emphasis and hyperlinks added):
Steve Collins explains that his blog is “not spiritual, except that everything human is.” Andrew Careaga reinforces this idea; “I try to consider most of the conscious activities as spiritual activities, even if not exactly religious.”
This passion to live incarnationally unites these bloggers. Jordon Cooper writes about his blog and describes what I mean:
Many of the sites 20,000 monthly visitors can’t seem to get their head around how a site that has so much about postmodern thought and the church can also have links to the Calgary Flames and the Saskatchewan Roughriders […] I started to get e-mail back saying, “wait a minute, it is knowing about you that gives the site some character and credibility.” […] People went on to say that without the personal stuff, the site just became a collection of links posted by someone they don’t know. My stories about my life gave it some context and something to judge it by for good or bad.
This holistic engagement between author and audience is what makes blogging unique and compelling. In this respect, these “Christian bloggers” are no different than all the other opinionated bloggers except that they intentionally bring their faith in Christ to bare [sic] on everything that interests them: hockey, Microsoft, George W. Bush, Jennifer Lopez or Strongbad.
Without the personal stuff, this site is a collection of links posted by someone they don’t know. I don’t know if anyone has articulated it this way before, but I think it points to something important that I’ve discussed before: personal voice. Specifically, personal voice isn’t just a defining characteristic of blogging, it’s the whole value proposition.
This weekend is the second BloggerCon. Unfortunately, no such fortunate confluence of events as last time will allow me to attend. It’s a shame; between no paid panelists, lots of interesting discussion groups including one on religion and blogs, and a really good group of attendees, it sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Congrats to Dave and the gang on putting on another show; I look forward to following the proceedings from here. I hope someone will archive the IRC backchannel; last time that was one of the most interesting parts of the proceedings.
Oh, and if I’m the only one to reference my favorite movie sequel title, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, in conjunction with BloggerCon II, I will be sorely disappointed. Or relieved. Or something. (Of course, that film DID feature both Ice-T and Martika, so it couldn’t have been ALL bad, right?)
Tired of hearing the GOP leadership rail against MoveOn for violating soft money bans (as though independent groups couldn’t voice an opinion about the president)? Wondering whether there will ever be another Internet savvy candidate again after Dean’s disappearance? Wondering which candidate you should support for a seat in the US House of Representatives with good old fashioned hard money?
Well, wonder no more, bunky. Following up my coverage of the campaign two weeks ago, I wanted to point to the latest Cathy Woolard development. Greg Greene, blogger extraordinaire, press secretary and research director for Cathy Woolard’s campaign, and my former college roommate, has mounted an appeal for funds on his blog. Benefits: help elect Georgia’s first gay congressperson, ensure that an experienced, fiscally moderate, socially progressive voice gets its place in the House, deny the GOP a seat in the House, and help send Greg with his boss to DC. Contribute on Cathy’s official site, and give an amount ending in $.07 so that the campaign will know it came from Greg’s blog. I’ve given; won’t you?
Now, about that beer, Greg…
Well, the Script-dotting (q.v.) of my reaction to Bush’s press conference seems to be slowing down. Thanks to all the readers who participated in what must be the most spirited discussion ever on this blog yesterday. Special thanks to Gary Robinson, who kept the tone of the discussion high and brought forward some interesting points.
At some points during the discussion yesterday, I had one of those “oh no” moments. I normally don’t worry about things I write on this blog, but at one point I began to sweat a little. I now know co-workers, old friends from high school, and others who read my blog, in addition to my RSS subscribers and all the Google visitors. Am I making a mistake by putting my political views out there? Maybe.
But I’ve had my political views out on this site almost since it began, certainly since 9/11. It’s not possible to put the genie back in the bottle.
I think this is one of those deep-breath moments that must come to every blogger. To really blog, unless you blog exclusively for work (or everything you write on your blog is untrue), you have to put it out there. Otherwise it’s just lists of links or news about gardening. But even with lists of links, you’re subject to having people guess your politics. In these echo chambers, one’s choice to link to Oliver Willis or Joshua Micah Marshall (or Greg Greene) instead of Instapundit or LittleGreenFootballs says a lot about who you read and who you think is worth talking about. But if one is to add any value to a blog it has to have your voice in it.
I talked about this with Esta some time ago. She’s now blogged her concern about her blog’s effect on her employability as a minister. So I’ll present my side of the conversation. One: your blog shows, if nothing else, that you can think and write. Really well. Two: your blog shows that you are a real person with real experience. I think that knowing about an individual’s struggles with the Black Dog, or about their difficult life decisions, makes one’s appreciation of their work that much richer. Particularly if the job they are going into is one where empathy is a very large part of the job.
So that’s good for Esta. I would argue that being as open as possible about things that matter is good for all of us. If nothing else, it can get you into conversations with a CEO you might never otherwise meet.