2 words that are now synonymous with “Happy Holidays” – I first read about the uproar over SpyGate via Stephen’s NewsTrolls service. Then, I’ve heard it several times since then on American TV networks. On freaking TV.
So, an “elected” president apparently tramples the constitution, giving the nod for government agencies to spy on citizens just in case they might be doing something bad – without the need for judicial review or approval. And, that’s being acknowledged by Bush’s own people as an impeachable offence – with the story broken in the Traditional Media by the New York Times.
Maybe there’s hope, after all… If this story gets large enough, it can’t be ignored (even by Shrub). If it doesn’t make it to full impeachment status, at least it will make the next election a bit more interesting. But, with Bush not able to run again, maybe that’s a moot point…
Happy holidays, indeed!
Update: Now BoingBoing is pointing to a Miami Herald article that describes the Bush wiretap approvals as doing something that Bin Laden could not have done – erode the constitution and spread fear throughout the entire country, in the name of a president-come-king. It’s great when fearmongers are able to leverage synergy to amplify effect… (yeah – I used corporate marketing buzzwords to describe the business relationship between Bush and Bin Laden)
They completely reworked how uploaded files are handled in WordPress 2.0 – they’re now put into folders by date to keep things nice and clean. Very nice touch. And thumbnails are automatically generated and linked if requested as well. Very cool. If it works, here’s a screenshot of the image upload form from WP 2.0…
First, you upload a file:
Then, you select the uploaded file from the Browser, setting options like thumbnail/full or linking etc…
And then, you can use the fancy schmancy new WYSIWIG editor to resize the image by dragging, etc…
Update: The file /wp-admin/inline-uploading.php has hard-coded widths and heights (lines 81-85: max width 128 pixels, or max height 96 pixels) for the thumbnails to generate. It’d be really cool if this was a setting under the Options section, so I could have it create “thumbnails” that are 500px wide (what I typically use an Automator action to do on my computer before uploading).
I could modify the code myself (trivial to just hard-code my value in place of the defaults), but I’m sure others would like something similar, but with different values…
Thanks to Josh, I took what I promise to be my last mindless personality quiz of 2005.
Ouch. I was sure I’d be a geek or dweeb or something like that. I did spend a few minutes to slightly clean up the painfully bad HTML generated by the quiz… (finally resorted to a screenshot of the tweaked output, because even that hurt to paste into my blog)
The Calgary-Vancouver game just ended. Holy. Crap. What a great game. I kept thinking “Man, this is the best game I’ve seen so far this year!” It was fast, back-and-forth all over the ice. Few stupid penalties. Fights, and fast, physical play. Awesome saves on both ends. Kipper was on freaking fire – whatever he’s getting paid, he deserves more.
Chris Simon’s goal was absolutely beautiful. He made an impossible interception of a pass, then kicked the puck forward from his trailing skate, giving him a clean path to the net. First goal in something like 16 games, IIRC, and was he stoked about it.
Oh, yeah. And the Flames won the game 6-5 in a shootout. The entire game was neck-and-neck, with goals being answered sometimes within seconds. And it ended up in a shootout. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
I’m soooo jealous of Brian, who was able to sell a kidney or two to get tickets to the game. It must have been amazing to be in the arena for this one – the fans were on their feet for most of the third period (judging from the CBC camera coverage, anyway).
Again, lots of interesting photos (and in this case, diagrams as well) on Flickr.
Lamest. Game show. Ever.
Not even the pretense of requiring skill or intelligence. Pick a bunch of random numbers, and try not to be a bumbling greedhead. About as much of a “game” as Keno or Bingo. All you have to do is pay attention (a little). And the “banker”? Just some clown sitting in front of a simple odds calculator to give Howie a chance to ham for the cameras.
At least they have 26 hotties in fancy dresses to hold the random numbers. They almost make it worth watching. Now, if Howie Mandel pulls out the rubber gloves and starts inflating them over his head, they might have a show…
And, yes, I’m aware that by watching it I’m only encouraging them 
I’m packing it in until the new year, so officially signing off (yeah, right) for a little while. I hope everyone has a great [INSERT REASON HERE] holiday season!
It’s been a big year for me. Lots of ups and downs, but I think I came out of this one ahead. Trying not to make a self-absorbed self-congratulatory post, but wanted to document some of the highlights. I usually forget the lowlights as part of my coping mechanism…
Big events for me this year (rough chronological order):
- Moved blog to my own domain at darcynorman.net
- Northern Voice 2005 (posts from the conference)
- Fun with podcasting
- Fun with tagging/folksonomies
- “launch” of weblogs.ucalgary.ca
- “launch” of wiki.ucalgary.ca
- Pachyderm development (including the weeklong Summit of Geeks at Sonoma State University)
- Museums and the Web 2005 Conference in Vancouver notes
- WWDC 2005 in San Francisco
- NMC 2005 Summer Conference in Honolulu (and family vacation)
- ADCE and PlanetADCE
- Enjoying some miniscule local celebrity with the TV and press appearances
- Dad’s 70th birthday
- Mom’s 65th birthday
- Workshops on campus on blogging and wiki
- Pachyderm 2.0 release
- Mavericks almost-release
- Starting to see this whole “Web 2.0″ and “Semantic Web” stuff start to come together
- Winning an EduBlogger award for darcynorman.net
- Realizing that I’ve taken the leap to make the blog an integral part of what I do (~20,000 words written per month, professional + personal, etc…)
One thing that struck me as I crawled through this year’s posts, is how fast things are happening. I was remembering things as happening months ago, when they were actually very recent. Things like the Peak Oil posts – it feels like I blogged it a long time ago, when it was only a month ago!
Things I plan/hope to do in the next year (not new year’s resolutions, just a basic guideline):
- Spend more time with the family – without the damned computer mining RSS feeds in the background
- Become a better photographer. Maybe/hopefully pick up a real camera. Maybe take a course or something…
- Restart my Master’s program. Get any last coursework out of the way, and finally pick a damned thesis topic.
- Do more writing. Not just blog posts, but more carefully constructed articles etc…
- Actually spend some time playing with cool new stuff. Ruby on Rails, ferinstance.
- Spend more time working with faculty etc. – workshops, presentations, etc…
- Spend more time in Open Source land, perhaps hacking Drupal or WordPress, or Moodle, or our own LC code, etc…
- Breathe. Don’t let this crap bother me so much
Bear with any barfage over the next few minutes. The upgrade went well on my desktop copy of the blog, so here goes a live update. Whee!
Update: Had a few moments of “oh, crap.” when the WP back end stopped letting me in. Running /wp-admin/upgrade.php again, and nuking the cookies from my browser appear to have fixed that (but there is a “Bad request: Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Request header field is missing colon separator.” error message showing up in this editing form, and no “media” section is showing up… Uh, oh…
Update 2: Looks like it may be a weird cookie issue – admin and editing stuff work fine in Firefox, but Safari isn’t happy, producing borked header error pages instead of anything in /wp-admin/ – I’ll try a clean install rather than a copy-over-existing-files upgrade…
Update 3: Pretty sure there’s something funky in the cookies being sent or stored as part of the WP admin side of things… If I delete all cookies excepty the “wordpresspass_#####” and “wordpressuser_####” cookies, I can get in just fine using Safari (as I can if I nuke all cookies). But it appears as though something in the dbx-postmeta cookie is corrupting something… Until that’s fixed, I can use The Fox to edit. That’s not so bad…
Update 4: Posted to the Wordpress Support forum, in case anyone else is having the same issue. Here are the details about the pesky dbx-postmeta cookie, as gleaned from Firefox’s cookie inspector:
Name
Value }&
Host www.darcynorman.net
Path /
Secure No
Expires Thu, Dec 21, 2006 1:47:34 PM
Name dbx-postmeta
Value grabit=0-,1-,2-,3-,4-,5-,6-&advancedstuff=0-,1-,2-&extend=function (object) {
Host www.darcynorman.net
Path /wp-admin/
Secure No
Expires At End Of Session
Also, the Rich Text Editor that ships with WP 2.0 RC3 is pretty good, but fails miserably when trying to enter
... blocks..
Update 5: If you're using Spam Karma 2, there is an incompatibility with WP 2.0 - nothing serious, just that the comment counts on the main page don't get updated. There's a fix that takes care of the problem until the next Spam Karma release (2.1).
Update 6: WP 2.0 final has been released, and either the cookie bug/issue has been resolved, or it's gone away on it's own... Yay!
Well, iDoom, anyway. Finally got around to installing iDoom on my 3G iPod, and man, it plays nice. Surprisingly, it’s about as snappy as the original game was on the smoking fast 486 DX 66 I played it on back at the Alberta Science Centre…
I was surprised that it doesn’t use the scrollwheel to control movement – seems like it would be perfect for steering the little Doomer…
I just checked out the videos of iDoom on various iPods, and man, I need to upgrade to a colour screen version
