Category: General

Might have to come back to this old place.

Facebook, which had been sucking me away from blogging, is just too weird anymore*. I’ve thought of changing the Ping to a different format, keeping the old stuff archived (I even made an archive of it all with wget), but I’m not sure what format I’d want to change to. I was really into the idea of a static site generator for a while, or something uber-simplistic like blosxom or one of the blosxom-like things out there. (There was one particular one that I liked but whose name I can’t remember…)

I dunno though. I could just leave it the way it is.

* positive “anymore,” a peculiar construction that has entered my vocabulary.

Reported at Hacker News, which I saw at reddit.

I hope this is temporary.  I hope he’s OK.  I really like his work so much.  And he seems like such a great guy.

Breaking radio silence to say — yay!  New emacs!

Will probably set Aquamacs aside to play with it, though I may find myself going back to the really-quite-wonderful Aquamacs eventually.

“It’d be so cool to have a computer that knew everything…. ‘Computer! Get me the birth-weight of James Earl Jones! And how far I could throw him as a baby! Cross-reference with how much I would have trusted him!'”

–Eugene Mirman, “Driving and Thinking,” from _En Garde, Society!_

Ghostery is a Firefox add-on with a Zen simplicity: it tells you who’s watching you, via ad networks and “web bugs.”  It doesn’t try to stop them from watching you, or do anything about it.  It just lets you know.  Which is somehow even creepier than doing something about it….  “Oh, Google Analytics knows you visited this page.  Quantcast is watching you visit this page.  Tacoda and WebTrends both know you visited this page.”

It’s an unassuming little box in the upper right hand corner of the web page.  It disappears after a few seconds.  No big deal.  Easy to miss it.

On this page, on goesping.org, it tells you google adsense and doubleclick are both watching you.  Since I put the ads on these pages.  I don’t think I’ve ever made so much as a penny from them.  Checking… nope, never a penny.  Maybe it’s time to give up on that experiment.  Turn down the creep factor a notch.