Jefflog

Since I don’t have a chance to use my Linux machine much these days, having to compile everything under Gentoo was getting to be a chore. Often times, it would take hours to update my system to the latest version, only to turn out that I wouldn’t use it for a month. (Mind you, for most of that time, I could walk away while the machine did it’s thing, but it’s still more time than was worthwhile.) So, I formatted the partition and installed a fresh version of Ubuntu Linux.

I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but it seems nice enough, and since it’s Debian-based, it uses the über-cool apt packaging system. It was great to be able to install packages within a matter of seconds rather than minutes (or hours, in the case of Firefox or OpenOffice under Gentoo.)

Hong and I have never watched the Super Bowl. Sports in general do not interest us, so when Super Bowl Sunday comes around, we usually are far away from a TV. Last year, while the Super Bowl was on, we headed to the mall, only to realize that a bunch of other people not interested in sports also decided to go that route. This year, we decided it would be best to head to the bowling alley, since the last time we went it was so crowded that we had to wait an hour for a lane.

For starters, we went to a local burger place to get some steakburgers. The place was packed! We figured it was due to people congregating to get some burgers before settling in to watch the big game. No biggie.

Then we went to the bowling alley. While not as crowded as the previous time, there was still a 45 minute wait for an alley. There were a number of kids birthday parties going on, too. At this point, we started to wonder if the Super Bowl perhaps wasn’t this week after all. We didn’t stick around the bowling alley; we just went to Costco then went home.

Sure enough, on one of the Pepsi cans brought back from Costco, it exclaimed “Super Bowl XVXVXVXV (whatever it is), February 6, 2005″. And here I was, amazed that for the first time in my life, I had been to church on Super Bowl Sunday where the pastor didn’t make some comment about us “all watching the game later on that afternoon”.

Next week, we’re definitely going bowling.

Here is a list of all of the albums I’ve downloaded on file sharing networks that I like and haven’t yet bought a copy, but should get around to do so:

• Among the Living, by Anthrax
• …And Then There Were Three…, by Genesis
• Blackwater Park, by Opeth
• Deliverance, by Opeth
• I’m the Supervisor, by Infected Mushroom
• The Light, by Spock’s Beard
• Signify, by Porcupine Tree

I’ve downloaded other music, but most get deleted soon after listening to them once or twice; these are the only ones solidly worth listening to.

After using Thunderbird’s RSS capabilities to keep abreast of the latest changes to websites in a handy, newsreader-like fashion, I became enamored of RSS. Sure, the set up was a bit clunky, but once set up it was very easy to discover what websites had been updated without me having to go visit each and every one of them. Very handy.

Then, for some reason, it started wigging out on me and thinking that every time it fetched an RSS feed, that all of the articles there were new ones. So I’d have five, six copies of the same article in my browse list, for every single site. I’d clean it up, but the problem would be back within a day or two. This was clearly not working.

So I went a-searching for another RSS news reader and found NewsFire for OS X. Quick, fast, and uses several eye-candy tricks. Makes excellent use of keyboard navigation, although your mouse-based navigation will work just fine too. Highly recommended.

It looks like the kids at Google are doing something to combat comment spam.

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Apparently Yahoo and MSN Search are also sponsors of this initiative, so I’d expect them to follow it as well. While this won’t stop comment spam per se, it would remove the incentive to add comment spam in the first place. Three cheers!

Bill Gates poses for Teen Beat magazine, circa 1983.

I got an announcement in my Inbox today about Ebay raising their seller fees. In the middle of a bunch of tiny increases, I see this one:

eBay Store Inventory format listing insertion fees will remain unchanged. The Final Value Fee for Store Inventory items will change as follows:

Sellers will now have to pay three percent more of the final values of their listing than before. Needless to say, sellers are outraged. But what can they do about it? Amazon and Yahoo still have their auction sites running, but since they hardly have any people visiting them, there’s not enough traffic for buyers to bother with it. Ebay knows that its sellers can easily get at least 3% more revenue from selling off of Ebay, so sellers will stick with it. They raise their rates because they can.

Does this sound like another familiar company?

Actually, this would be a good opportunity for another auction site to make a splash.

1. Offer a number of Ebay Powersellers the ability to list free on your site, and dirt cheap listing rates for the rest of the sellers.
2. Advertise the bejeezus out of your site to attract customers.
3. Profit!

It has been unseasonably warm here today. It’s mid-January, and we’re supposed to be hovering around the freezing mark, but it’s 65 degrees today. Global warning, El Nino, earthquake’s effects on earth’s rotation, I don’t know why, but I’m loving it while it lasts. I stole some time away this morning to go bike riding.

And during that bike ride, what did I spot? A truck from the now-defunct HomeGrocer.com “groceries over the Internet” enterprise! The familiar peach logo on the truck was unmistakable. Wow, I wondered if they had come back from the grave and were back in business? I concluded that it wasn’t the case, as the “HomeGrocer.com” logo had been erased, and the truck was making a delivery to the local movie theater. Maybe now it’s owned by PopcornDelivery.com?

Moreover, HomeGrocer’s website shows it’s still defunct, although it teases that they’re coming back. That is, until you read the alt-tag on the intro graphic which says “The new HomeGrocer website will be coming in early 2004.”, and the page itself hasn’t been updated since December 2003. Yeah, I’m not holding my breath either.

I’ve started to organize the movie clips of Maggie I’ve posted online. Three new video clips added today.

This morning, I had a dream that made me wake up laughing. KFC was trying to get rid of their “irregular” chickens…you know, birds that are a bit misshapen for whatever reason. So they had a deal where if you bought one chicken, you’d get one of these irregular chickens as well.

They were calling the promotion “The Odd Chicken”.

Somehow, it’s more funny at 5 o’clock in the morning than it is now.