Once around the block

From the keiretsu:

  • Esta writes about the Episcopalian decision to ordain a gay bishop, and some subsequent fallout in that community: “The greater public sees a large proportion of believers being hateful, and the church wonders why its numbers are dwindling?” The interesting part of that process, in my opinion, is the way the allegations of child abuse and pornography sprung up in the eleventh hour, but were quickly defused. Makes you wonder…
  • Got an IM from Greg this morning confirming the arrival of my birthday gift, the first CD I burned using this machine. If anyone else is curious, I posted the play order over at Art of the Mix.
  • Flangy points out the one thing I didn’t in my update marathon last night: it rained here. Shortly after I put the sprinkler on our tomatoes. He also wishes for categorized RSS feeds. Unfortunately Manila doesn’t provide those out of the box, but there’s an RSS plugin available that I use to roll mine.

Novoselic says “Seeya”

Krist Novoselic, nee Chris Novoselic (but Nevermind), has laid down his bass for the last time, according to Rolling Stone and a news post on the Eyes Adrift website. After a disappointing start for his band Eyes Adrift (with Curt Kirkwood from the Meat Puppets), he’s decided to get out of music entirely, citing his unhappiness with the business side of the business.

And he wants to get into politics. Hey, Krist, Gary Locke is stepping down. Wanna start close to home? If Minnesota can have a pro wrestler, the least Washington can do is one-up with a kick-ass bassist.

(Incidentally, Eyes Adrift’s album is available on eMusic. And with that note, I really need to go grocery shopping before I fall over.)

I have a “Did you mean”!

Doc Searls points to some common misspellings of his name through Google. So I tried it out, and was thrilled to note that, like for Doc, Google tries to help out. The most common misspelling of my name, omitting one of the two ending ts, turns up a “Did you mean “tim jarrett“”? So does searching on tim jarett.

Dig it. Now if everyone were hardwired to Google, I would never have to spell my name over and over again.

Better weblogs.com usage data?

I noted that I had let a new high water mark go by last week; the weblogs.com data watch has been updated and you can download the new data set here. The new high water mark is amazing, too: out of nowhere, it jumped from under 3000 to above 4000 weblogs in a three-hour period. Anyone know what was happening on Friday to drive that much traffic???

Anyway, this was the kick in the butt I needed to look at my cron script that I set up to download the Weblogs.com changes file. I had set cron to run a custom AppleScript (source to be shared shortly) to download changes.xml every two hours and gzip it, or so I thought. Looking at it today, the first day I left the machine on overnight since adding the cron setting, I realized I had asked it to download the file once a minute during the 2 am hour instead. Oops. Sorry about the bandwidth, Userland.

So why is this important? As I’ve been saying for a bit, I want to understand the dynamics of a day and a week in terms of blog posting frequency. Which are the high traffic days? What percentage of blog users post more than once a day? More than once every few days? Just how many unique blogs ping Weblogs.com in a two week period?

Starting today, I’ll be working on finding out. My cron script is now working (it’s amazing the difference between * 2 * * and * /2 * *). My machine won’t be sleeping or shut down for the next two weeks. I’ll make my summary data available at the end of the experiment and see if I can draw some conclusions about the meaning of the high water marks we’ve been seeing. Hopefully, if I’m successful with the project, this can be a longer term study. But for that to be true, I’ll have to automate the process of importing the data file and aggregating the statistics, and that may be too much to get done right now.

Is anyone else engaging with the changes data in this way? Are there any questions about the weblog population that two weeks of granular update data would provide?

Cooking on all burners

And for once I don’t mean that literally. After a somewhat frustrating day at the office, I got home and got the following done:

  1. Conducted our first two way video chat with my in laws and Lisa (who airlifted a new iSight camera out to them).
  2. Talked Lisa through using the DVD player on their computer to watch the DVD I made from last year’s Italy trip footage—my first iDVD project, and done in about four hours start to finish, including screening over an hour of footage to pick the least motion inducing clips; building the DVD menu including chapter headings; and burning the disc.
  3. Figured out how to use our MiracleGro dispenser to allow me to feed and water 30 tomato plants in less than ten minutes
  4. Figured out why my cron script to download changes.xml from Weblogs.com wasn’t working—see next post for details.

Plus a variety of things around the house. And I’ve only been home an hour and a half.

I know this won’t last and by Thursday I’ll be moping around again, but it’s nice to be up to speed for a change.

Hating your customer, part N+++: BMW vs. Mini Cooper Online

Another addition to the Hating Your Customer files: BMW is going after a Mini enthusiasts site for using MINI in the domain name and demanding that the owner surrender the domain name to them (thanks to Doc for the pointer).

I’m sympathetic to the club—after all, there have been BMW people on the forums for over a year, as the slogan below points out. And these are the guys that have been keeping the flame alive for the MINI all these years. On the other hand, the potential for trademark dilution is pretty clear, and MCO does sell merchandise and accept advertising.

let's shoot ourselves in the foot. let's litigate.

Sleepless again in Seattle

I just saw Lisa off to the airport for another week of business on the East Coast. If past trips are any indication, this will be another low sleep week for me. Expect insane raving by Thursday.

Just kidding. It is going to be a monster week at the office, though.

Vacation

Or mini vacation, anyway. Lisa and I both took today off from work to get a few things done around the house before she leaves for the east coast for the rest of the week tomorrow, and I took off from the blog this weekend. We drove out to the Olympic Peninsula yesterday; spent some time at Lake Crescent. Good time, really. Not a lot else to say.

Schaub4Heisman.com???

My officemate reminded me that college football season approaches (quote, “I can’t believe the Vols’ first game is the end of this month!”), and I decided to check out VirginiaSports to see the game schedule. What should appear when I load the page, though, but an interstitial ad promoting Virginia’s Great Hope, Matt Schaub, as the nation’s “No. 1 Returning Quarterback” and offering a link to the site for his Heisman bid, Schaub4Heisman.com. Nice photos on the home page. I am glad, at least, that Schaub appears to be a true student athlete, working on his five-year bachelors/masters in economics and education.

Rest in peace, Sam Phillips

BBC: Elvis producer Phillips dies. One of those headlines you really wish you could rewrite. How about, “Sam Phillips, secret father of rock and roll, dies”? Because surely Phillips’ role in encouraging Elvis’ recording sessions away from bad ballads and towards “That’s All Right’ is among the founding moments in the creation of the music, as is his role in starting the careers of Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash.

When I toured Sun Studio back in 1997, on our pre-honeymoon in Memphis, I felt Sam’s presence around every corner of this unremarkable little building in a gravelly parking lot. The old recording equipment, shockingly primitive compared even to the tiny studios I’ve been in, and the unadorned plainness of the space told a different story than the pictures in the entranceway (also reproduced on the home page for Sun), showing Elvis at the piano and Jerry Lee, Johnny, and Carl Perkins (composer of “Blue Suede Shoes”) leaning over and singing along. The picture has the feeling of iconography, but the studio was set up for hard work and inspiration, the piece that Sam brought to the mix.

Sleep well, Sam.