Category: blogging about blogs or blogging

The Loss of a Great Rubyist, A Dream, A Note

Yesterday I learned here that one of the great Rubyists I’ve never heard of, Guy Decoux, aka “ts,” had died.

Last night in my dreams that memory mutated, and I dreamed that _whytheluckystiff, creator of Shoes and many other whimsical Ruby projects, had died! I remember thinking sadly about Shoes left unfinished, never to fulfill _why’s dream of helping children learn to hack.

Today in my feed reader I came across _why’s note on the passing of ts, and was relieved to learn that a dream was only a dream.

Tangent: I’m finding myself very resistant to writing on this blog these days, as opposed to just writing to friends, or posting something to myface or spacebook or whatever, or bleating it to the handful of friends who follow my twitter feed, or just emailing it. I don’t know why. Just don’t feel the need to contribute to the Blog Oh Sphere, at all.

Futzmonkey Targets GoesPing

I’m tired of emitting bits of political outrage stolen from the loathsome and infuriating Reddit.com to a WordPress blog with an irrelevant list of categories I never use and a blogroll two years out of date. I want to change something.

I want to set up some new and different kind of blog, doing something new and different with it.

What, where, how?

I don’t know yet.

Leipzig Is Calling You, Henry

Thomas Dolby’s out touring again with a new CD and all, and he’s got this video podcast called The Sole Inhabitant (a phrase from his song White City, and also the name of his current tour), and I have been subscribed to it for a while and I only just got around to watching/listening to it, and wow. It’s footage of Dolby performing live, with a small commentary intro/outro. You get to see practically every keystroke of his performance, and realize that all that electronica is very, very live. Dolby’s rocking the chrome-dome these days, and he looks like some kind of character from a cyberpunk story when he performs — a head studded with gadgets (but practical ones — e.g, wireless earphones, mic, and what appears to be an iSight strapped to the side of his head, footage from which is edited into the podcast) and in one video he’s wearing this weird oversized trenchcoat.

So geeky. So cool. Dolby is the man. I want to be him. I want to be a tenth as cool at my coolest moment as he is while flossing.

The Comment Spam Takedown: Bad Behavior and Akismet

Between Bad Behavior blocking most spambots from even reaching the site (look at the bottom of the page to see how many it’s blocked as of now) and Akismet screening out the trickle that get through, I seem to have the comment spam issue covered. But what about legitimate comments? Is Akismet going to mistake them for spam, so I have to comb through them to find gems of real humanity? If you’ve got nothing better to do, help me out here with an experiment. Drop a comment from you, a human being (or equivalent sapient entity) reading this, and I’ll see which ones if any get misclassified as spammage. I’ll report what happened in an update on the post.