When I changed my banner image for the fall, it was more an act of defiance than as some sort of genuine reflection of the reality outside. We’ve now had several dustings of snow, and there was the small issue of my bicycle brakes being encased in ice, fused to the wheel.

Anyhow, I ran into Matthias Wandel at Swing Club this afternoon—he’s a UW grad, and has a number of really neat project writeups on his site. It was just funny that I was half-heartedly studying some circuits in the studio, and when I asked him about an op-amp question, his response was more about what a useless circuit it was, than what exactly the filter behaviour would be.

In other news, I seem to be getting the hang of Tango a bit more. It’s a far simpler dance than Lindy, and certainly less flexible, but fun enough in its high-heeled, strutting sort of way. Like any of the more intimate dances, it’s more about the subtle communication between partners than big showy spins and tricks.

A pretty girl told me recently that she found my writing here to be charmingly pedantic. You know, as opposed to pretentious, preposterous, or perhaps sophomoric. The warm fuzzies faded quickly, however, when she mentioned that the site was rather slow to load—a problem of which I’ve been aware for quite some time.

This problem is now solved. In between book-writing and work, I buckled down and finished up porting things over to Wordpress. So here we are.

Expect words.

In the process of upgrading Typo, I managed to accidentally publish a somewhat inflammatory partly-finished draft here. If it showed up in your RSS reader, you can send me inflammatory email or you can just ignore it until later.

But anyhow, it’s gone now, so here’s a funny picture instead:

I won’t be trying to update this site on a weekly basis until the book is finalized in July. Read on…

Email is my most important means of communication. My favourite is face-to-face; second to that, the telephone, followed by IM. I think I might even prefer the intimacy of a hand-written letter to most cold, unfeeling, poorly-punctuated, hastely-posted email.

But email really is the most important. It’s instant, convenient, concise, and reliable. Well, mostly reliable, as we’ll see.

Friends and family talk about personal matters; random people ask me CSS questions; I get stuff from classmates about whatever; and I’m on mailing lists for things like the WCF Exec.

So I was understandably upset to discover—a few weeks ago—that some unknown percentage of my outgoing mail was simply not getting through. Read on…

Back up. Important topic. Booooooring topic. But I finally have a reliable mechanism in place: Except for the logs, every file that’s here on the server is sitting safe on my hard drive, in a basement in Waterloo.

It’s a comfort.

I’ll demonstrate how I’ve done it, since I think it’s a pretty good procedure for keeping a continuously synchronized duplicate. Read on…

So I’m back online again.

The (otherwise super-terrific) folks at Dreamhost sprung a surprise Rails 1.0rc4 upgrade on us, and I was definitely not prepared for it.

At any rate, I’ve got little else to say, so I’ll just share two little experiments with you: The Google Maps Autolinker and the Ajaxian File Browser.

Neither of them is perfect, but 24 hours offline wasn’t perfect either.

Since I’ve been through a handful of site migration situations, I thought I’d share a few tricks for seamless forwarding. Read on…

This wasn’t supposed to be a full redesign. And really, it isn’t.

But the time had come for me to say goodbye to the home-brew CMS that was running this site. It was instructive to create a basic CRUD system from the ground up. But its been neither educational nor interesting attempting to bolt additional features onto it, when I had little idea what I was doing at the outset.

It’s silly to spend large amounts of time implementing what’s already been done many times over in open-source packages. Read on…

Our new class website has launched. And it’s a portal.

Google succeeded by being just a search and not a portal. The previous version of this site succeeded by being a private forum, not a portal.

So why have I made us a portal? Read on…

It seems that Jonathan Fenocchi has passed me an almost-legitimate Musical Baton. So here’s my contribution to the meme.

Total Volume

4.91 GB in /home/Mike/My Music/

Last CDs Purchased

Beauty From Pain, by Superchic[k]. It was a bit of an impulse buy, but I’ve happened to enjoy most of it, particularly the title track. They’ve changed a lot since their contribution to the Legally Blonde soundtrack, and I think I like the most recent version. Not as rock-ish, but more thoughtful lyrically.

Imaginarium, by Terry S. Taylor. It’s a collection of favourite songs from three of Doug TenNapel’s games: The Neverhood, Skullmonkeys, and Boombots. Bizarre and delightful, all at the same time.

Playing Right Now

Carly Simon — Nobody Does It Better

Five Favourites

• U2 — Mysterious Ways
• Guns ‘N Roses — Sweet Child of Mine
• Dandy Warhols — Bohemian Like You
• Delirious — My Glorious
• Jann Arden — Thing For You

Passing It Along

• Kristy Sammis
• Doug TenNapel
• Rands
• Kevin Menzel
• Patrick Haney

Mike