2002-08-04»
st ignucius and co.»
I spent a good hour ploughing through SuperSnail’s images of OSCON last year. And now he’s done the same for the people of OSCON 2002, and they’re just as funny and revealing.
Currently:
Archive for August 4th, 2002
searching oblomovka (and its rss feed)»
Dave Green angrily suggested I get a fucking search feature working on this site, so I’ve done so. It’s to the left. It doesn’t work very well if you search for URLs. It tries to “highlight” the search term, and so mangles any thing inside a tag, but I can’t work out a way of fixing that without parsing HTML.
One nice spin off, though, is that now my RSS feed does searches too. So if you want to keep an updated list of all entries where I mention the word “BBC”, say, you can subscribe to http://www.oblomovka.com/rss.php3?q=BBC and you’ll get just that.
I have a feeling that sooner or later, I’ll wish I optimised that code.
mothering sunday»
I have made an unsolicited promise to my editor that I will never ever mention the looming arrival of my kid in the column. It’s a rule I’ll break eventually, but, well, you’ve got to exercise some discipline. (Except here, of course, where I can bang on about the topic all the time. Ha!)
I’m not sure why I made this commitment. I think it’s because I know at some deep level that my family is not as Universally Fascinating as I am currently being rewired by my own endochrinology to believe. Of course, computers aren’t either – but that’s okay, because those of us who are deluded into loving them are in a minority. So I still feel I’m catering to an underappreciated taste, which is the next best thing to being tasteful.
The other reason is because no matter how much I write, I’ll never be as good at discussing parenthood as my friend Juliet Jones, whose chaotic, mournful, celebratory and hilarious cries for help live on an obscure site in the middle of the Web, instead of the front page of the Women’s bit of the Guardian, or wrapped up in a best-selling book, or plastered in mile-high letters at the North Pole, or something.
One of the reasons why I hate columns about parenthood is you just know that the writers are mincing everything to make a good story – convey that they’re a good parent. Even the “my life is chaos!” pieces you get in the funny papers are junking the truth for a joke. Juliet’s pieces are bone-jarring honest.
Billie is a “lie in bed and yell till someone comes merchant”. Olly on the other hand, arrives like some dishevelled traveller carrying his most important possessions (pillow, toy, book) and sobs by the side of the bed. The Zombies to his Witchdoctor influence we rise, make room for him and one or other of us wanders off to find a new place of rest. One of the most bizarre and Kafkaesque stories I heard of nighttime waking was from a guy who did some plumbing work here. He said that every night his child comes into their bedroom, wakes them up and asks them to take him back to bed. Talk about playing with your mind.
cheapo wifi cards at pc world»
The consume.net mailing list folk have spotted a bargain: British branches of PC World are selling the SMC 2632 PCI WiFi Card for £49.95, which is about half the standard price. And, coincidentally, just two-thirds of the monthly subscription for BT’s new WiFi hotspot service. BT either have no idea about competitive pricing, or no idea about how to roll out a cheap network. Maybe both.