So the syndication plugin I’ve been using to pull content in from the Scout weblog appears to be broken; the errors it’s throwing don’t make any sense and the error messages are little or no help. Which sucks.
I’ve been streaming The Civil War at work over the last couple of days, and finished up with the first episode yesterday. I didn’t see the series when it first aired (I was living in Baltimore with a black and white TV and couldn’t pull the PBS signal in with rabbit ears) but wow, what an impact that had on me. I’m now quite fascinated with the subject. I’ve been thinking about reading material for the beach, and was settled on the middle three of the Harry Potter books; I think I’m going to add The Killer Angels to the list. Some of the trivia from the war is fascinating: For example, consider Wilmer McLean, on whose property was fought the first battle, and in whose parlor at Appomattox, four years later, the surrender documents were signed.
I’m no closer to brewing my next batch of beer, but I may activate the yeast tomorrow morning to see if it rises by the time I get home. I’d like to get this batch fermenting as soon as possible, because the recipe says it’ll be 4-5 weeks. It also calls for double fermentation but I think I’m going to skip that part. Last weekend, Brian helped me remember that the Hefeweizen extract I’d used came from a friend of his, and must have been at least five years old by the time I cooked it. So I don’t feel so bad about that batch being so lousy. I’m just going to buy a six-pack of something good and pour out 3/4 of the hefeweizen so that I can reuse bottles for the new batch.
Reading about OSL’s death this afternoon, I’m reminded of a chapter of Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah, a book about the Iranian hostage crisis. The Desert One Debacle tells the story of the failed rescue attempt in 1980, an event that streamlined U.S. Special Operations and increased the chances of success for risky assaults like yesterday’s.
Not surprising, considering how bad the food sucked. It’s a shame, because ten years ago it was still really good; the new owner rode it into the ground.
I missed this yesterday, but I figure ten years and one day still counts: This weblog has existed in one form or another since March 22, 2001. That’s an average of about 24 posts a month (minus one and a half months). The current archives only go back to April of 2003, but eventually I’ll get the entire thing into WordPress.
USA Shopping Malls, Summer 1990. Pure nostalgia.
I read on Fucked Company that Cidera, a former employer of mine, shut down its service for good yesterday. Godspeed, and god bless. And quiet props go to Doug Humphrey, who was Doug enough to add a goofy farewell haiku in the announcement instead of some bullshit NewEconomySpeak excuse/diatribe.
(Jen just reminded me via email of one of the design ideas she had for a streaming media brochure featuring a test pattern. )
I also read today that Mr. Rogers passed away this morning. Bye, Fred.
Now that I have a wireless network set up at the house, I’m paranoid that it’s insecure. In reading some basic online articles about the 802.11b protocol, I have cause to be concerned. The Wi-Fi Alliance has this basic information to offer, and there’s a good book written on the subject ($20). The ever-timely Airportblog leads me to believe that there’s no really good way to lock a wireless network down other than implementing a bunch of technical third-party fixes, which is discouraging. WEP is a jacket made of holes, which is disturbing, and simply denying MAC addresses is useless as well. Still, something is better than nothing, and it would be nice for Apple to implement something. We can hold out for Leap or some other encryption standard, but the long and short of it is that it’s going to take time to sort this all out.
Found via Wired: Musicbrainz.org, a service that automatically tags and catalogs your existing MP3’s based on metadata and ID tags submitted by you and other folks. It’s a great idea, along the lines of the CDDB, but there’s one drawback: The client is only available for Windows.
When I started this weblog in March of 2001, I did it for a couple of different reasons. The first was to keep some kind of record of what I was doing from day to day. The second was to learn more about HTML and coding. The third was to create something each day, whether it was a page design, a photograph, a drawing, or writing.
As I approach the ten-year mark, I’m looking back through the archives and realizing that updates have been spotty over the last year, due to work, life, sleep, and motivation. I’m not going to blame anyone but myself for a lack of focus. That having been said, I’ve been wrestling with finding new ways to post at least something each day this year and get back into the habit of writing, as well as reawakening a routine of finding at least one thing each day to photograph.
The other thing I’m going to work on, with the anniversary as a target date, is getting the rest of the static content from the old weblog into WordPress once and for all.
In the meantime, electrical work on the side porch is stalled while I wait for our neighbor to get back to me. I was going to schedule drywall delivery and installation for this coming weekend, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen right now.
Mr. Scout stopped over to look at the beer in the basement, and we took a gravity reading to see how things are progressing. While the numbers were close to the target, we figured it would be better to let it sit for another week and finish fermenting.
I was poking around on our backup server last night looking for some pictures and came across some old shots of Chewbacca in and around the blizzard of ’03. This was one of her shining moments and paradoxically the final nail in her coffin; After digging out there wasn’t anyplace we couldn’t go in 4-wheel drive, but I don’t think she was ever right after bathing in road salt that year.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Inside Kowloon’s Walled City. This is total awesome, and scratches my obsessive-compulsive itch completely. As a grade-school student, I used to draw obsessively detailed cross-sections of secret assembly lines in underground factories, so I love the cartographic aspect of these images. Even more incredible is the story behind the Walled City, which was torn down in 1993.
Walter Soplata passed away quietly on November 8, but he was a legend in the warbird community. A carpenter by trade, he bought and traded decomissioned military aircraft of all types and parked them at his rural Ohio farm. Ranging from a rare Twin Mustang to an entire B-36 fuselage, his collection was unique and eclectic. I hope the airframes in his collection go to good homes.