the IDIOT

through complacency i stayed with bloglines (free service, so can’t bitch overmuch) for years, until this week. diagnosing what seemed to be a huge error in the feeds for this new, wordpress blog version, it ended up being bloglines only. sucks. spent too much time testing wordpress and various plugins, when they were apparently running smoothly.

so i bowed to the empire and signed up for reader (yet another google thing), while balancing that with basically leaving blogger and — however brief our association — feedburner (an unnecessary product if ever one, from my hack perspective). had never used google reader. it’s far better than the dormant bloglines.

google continues to emerge from its embryo form; embryo of baby skynet. voluntarists, watch your asses with these sanctimonious clowns. damned if i sign up for gmail.

so much fun to have databases integrated with this piddly site. moving to a new blog location left thousands of stale pages needing redirects to their new versions. years ago, using blogger, i would’ve used an offline database to create manual redirects, uploading thousands of replacement HTML files. but with wordpress (or any DB-based system controlled by user) those redirects simply became a local table, and i can get rid of the vast blogger folder structure while keeping unbroken whatever links go to the old blog — including when i linked to a post in another post, as in the first one linked below, with three links to old blog posts.

though complicated — because links sometimes deviated from a simple pattern — it was still a batch process except for roughly 200 records requiring manual cut and paste (in excel, data from which was easy as hell to import via phpMyAdmin).

here, test it out: (more…)

as an 80s 20s pisser i found The George Michael Sports Machine dorky, ridiculous, and nearly always enjoyable enough to watch, though i’m not a conventional sports guy. no one better to memorialize this apparently genuinely good dude than DC radio legend don geronimo, who via WJFK introduced people to the cool side of a vibrant, albeit semi-schlocky, power.

I received a sad call this Xmas Eve morning, from a friend informing me of the passing of Radio & TV Icon George Michael. (more…)

funny how easily swayed most people are by packaging. reading an LRC article this morning, it hit me that it sounded pretty much like someone holding forth on IMDb or some other yap yap forum, where the post would likely be responded to casually or just ignored. the usual bleh. put it in official colors and format though, and with most readers it gains that special oomph. (more…)

not that anyone cares, but i’ve removed the IP tracking facility installed as described here. it helped and it’s not needed anymore.

don’t know why i never bought a good still camera. having a blast with this thing. great for looking at stars.

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pro market types often refer to markets as if without state “regulation” they would always function correctly. here’s an online catalog that doesn’t function worth a damn. is that the state’s fault?

regular, non-vandal visitors to the IDIOT: i’ve added an IP tracking facility to this blog — something i’ve had nothing to do with for years (since switching to godaddy.com). sorry about that. (more…)

in the late 80s i had a bass student named josie. she was 15 then, i think. maybe 16. we had fun in lessons — got along great personally — but she wasn’t too serious about playing bass, and was using the lessons to kill time or something. like i did with a few students here and there (the best and the worst), i suggested she stop, because i didn’t feel right taking her parents’ money when she wasn’t playing much except during the lessons. (more…)

just visited a blog trying to find out if the owner — who gave his first name everywhere — was who i thought it was, but finding the last name was a pain in the ass. finding my meatspace name’s not so hard here if you poke around for 5 minutes (it’s on every “serious” article, here and here), but why should somebody need to do that if the name’s the only thing he gives a shit about? in the interest of user-friendliness, my prime directive, i’m adding it to the “about me” profile thing.

please continue to call me salty or whatever. or you can call me dr. paul and send me some protection money, because <SuperHugeTypeface>the hope of the republic is in my hands, children o’ the state!</SuperHugeTypeface>

here’s one from ‘88 — an audio drama! link at bottom, but if you’re going to listen you should probably get the background:

when i was growing up in virginia we’d hang out regularly with a family down the street. i’d babysit their kids, they had weekly volleyball parties, the father taught me to drive a manual transmission, they gave my brother and me our first car (i bought out his half) — a used VW rabbit… blah blah blah. after they moved to the philly suburbs, we’d sometimes vacation with them in vermont and new york. they had a son named jamie… or at least he used to be jamie. he did something like i did midway through childhood (changing my name from kevin to charley — middle to first), and announced one day that he was no longer jamie; he wanted to be called chris. the funny part was that chris wasn’t one of his birth names. anyway, he was about 15 at the time of our last vacation together, and very annoying with his know-it-all tone and general bullish stupidity (simply because of the age; he was otherwise a good guy). (more…)

it’s 2007, and major online retailers still can’t eliminate the thousands of “See larger image” links that open up the same picture, same size/resolution, in a new window? WTF. (more…)

censorship, like discrimination, is a word normally ascribed negative weight improperly. both censorship and discrimination are necessary in regular human interaction. for example, when as a vegan i decide to eat at taco bell instead of mcdonald’s, i’m discriminating. when i delete non-conversational advertising from the comments at this blog, i’m censoring. (more…)

What The Romantics don’t like about ‘Guitar Hero’