Category: Sumana Harihareswara

Road Trip Day 6

February 18, 2004 /

Picked up one of Leonard’s dozens of backup clone-bodies in Sin City, so the parity of Leonard:Brendan was restored to full efficiency. We attempted to employ a magnet-gun scheme to make millions at the roulette table, but were defeated when they wouldn’t accept our bets in Berendes Bucks.

We thoroughly rocked Bakersfield, as assisted by Leonard’s mom Frances Whitney, Three-Time Champion of the World. Yesterday, we limped at last into San Fran, Destination City, where I had dinner with a conspiracy of interwebbian luminaries whose URLs I don’t have time to look up right now. Fortunately, I managed to pick the hay out of my teeth before my beef ‘n’ rice ‘n’ plantains arrived.

Today, maybe Berkeley, certainly Salon, then dinner and who knows what.

So I’m gonna have to jump!

February 12, 2004 /

Leonard is in my living room right now, resting between rounds of Mario Kart by talking to Sumana. (Leonard is a big fan of Green Koopa Troopa, for the record.) FAME!

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February 12, 2004 /

Leonard just called to tell me he’s leaving Little Rock for Louisville, putting him at my apartment some time late tonight. When he leaves on the next leg of his road trip back to San Francisco, I’ll be riding with him, skipping out of work and school for a week to hit Far Points West and fly home a week from today.

As linked in the link above (metalinked?), Leonard has titled this expedition “As Long As I’m Here,” but for me personally it’s Captain Spacedork’s “Conquer the Rest of America” Adventure (I was going to make it “Actually Goes West of the Mississippi,” but then I’d just be lying). I get to meet several luminaries from the NewsBruiser User Galaxy of Stars, including Sumana the Cogent, Frances the Bold, and even the famous Atticus Matkin. I also get to do some recon work in anticipation of my return trip this summer.

I’m really looking forward to the trip, and I’m glad Leonard extended me the invitation, especially in light of the fact that he’s still going to have to do all the driving. I’m sure we’ll both be updating from the road when we can. And Mom, don’t worry, I’m packing all clean underpants.

January 22, 2004 /

I’m unabashedly stealing a story from Sumana today–I can’t give her credit there, so I might as well do so here. If you’re clever, you might even figure out where it is.

Update 1343 hrs: Also, while checking something for said story, I managed to get Yahoo! Maps to produce a set of directions that concluded with “19: Arrive at the center of OHIO.“

December 11, 2003 /

Sumana sent me pretty cool article.

“Louisville Christians are demonstrating that the Church is indeed one. Predominately black Forest Baptist Church has joined predominately white Highland Baptist Church in commemorating those killed by violence in the Louisville area during the past year. Church members drive white crosses into the ground outside their churches equal to the number killed during the past twelve months….”

Times like this, I like to remember my city’s motto.

Louisville: Hey, we’re not Cincinnati.

November 30, 2003 /

I experienced a surreal and Sumanaesque moment upon the sudden realization, tonight, that I have a LiveJournal! No, wait. I knew that. Stephen gave it to me. What was surreal was planning to set up another account, with the aim of syndicating NFD, and then discovering that a certain kind somebody had already done so!

LiveJournal: A neverending font of generosity. If you’re Brendan.

Condense, condense, condense

November 5, 2003 /

Via Sumana:

“It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a f***ing act of will.”

—Ira Glass

October 21, 2003 /

I’m glad I have a reason to talk about NewsBruiser again, because I’m on the front page! No, actually I want to talk about NewsBruiser because Leonard’s had version 2.0 (“Master Planarian”) out for weeks and I need to install it. Except I don’t want to install it, because a) NewsBruiser installations have traditionally been nightmarish for me (this is due to my hosts and my own incompetence, not NewsBruiser), and b) it has comments. NewsBruiser with comments! It’ll be anarchy!

Sumana and I had a conversation this morning about said comments, and about Leonard’s implementation of Bayesian heuristics in NewsBruiser. We agree that it’s capable of preventing comment spam, but I argued that it can’t entirely prevent tar pit syndrome, because it can’t filter out stupid. Sumana argued that it can. And then we jousted. No, actually we exchanged spam jokes.

(Yes, I know you can just turn off comments, I’m just whining. And yes, I do have a forum and am thus technically already sinking into a tar pit. However, you’ll note that the definition of the tar pit theory clearly states that “as long as no one actually uses the discussion forum, you are safe.” The only people who actually post there came from AZWP anyway, so I’m totally slopy.)

I do need to install 2.0, actually, so I can do trackbacks. I really don’t understand trackbacks, but they sound like they have something to do with RSS feeds or referrer logs, so I must consume them! Speaking of RSS feeds, I’m turning into an RSS evangelist like all the RSS early adopters, and I should be shot. And speaking of referrer logs, Cody Powell responded just as I planned to my goulash bait, and proceeded to write an entry about Cracked vs. MAD, which is a topic I was thinking about just this morning, during my pseudobreakfast. CODY POWELL CAN SEE INTO MY BRAIN.

Warning: I’m gonna talk about a lot of stupid blog stuff now

October 3, 2003 /

My RSS aggregator is now officially aggregating 39 blogs. Granted, a lot of those are dormant, but that’s still not bad for something that started as an experiment while I was bored at work.

Things I want to change about it:

  • This is a third-party aggregator, so I have to wait for it to update itself, which it does only once an hour. For petesakes, that’s a possible 59 minutes of tardiness on late-breaking bruisable news! I should either write my own or find software I can install on my own site, but I’m lazy.
  • Thirty-nine? Come on! Somebody start a new blog, I want to round it off. No, not a blogspot, they don’t let you have a feed unless you pay money.
  • (Or, if your name is Kristofer Straub, you could get on the stick already and install some journal software with feeds and also real permalinks.)

I know thirty-nine isn’t actually a particularly large field for an aggregator, but it works nicely for me. It was pretty boring when I started out, but now there’s a good chance that any hour I hit it will yield at least one new post.