brentashley

Dave chuckles at the hexadecimal nature of 0xDECAFBAD.

This year is the last year for some time that I’ll be able to fall back on hexadecimal as the obfuscator of my antiquity, for today, I turn 0x29.

I can cry far and wide:

But next year I turn 0x2A. Maybe that’s why 42 is the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I won’t be able to use the hex trick again until April 17th, 2009, when I turn 0x30.

There’s gotta be a term for those years of lost hexadecimal innocence between (decimal) 42 and 47. How about The Alpha Years.

Louise Kehoe at the Financial Times is “particularly intrigued” by BlogChat. Quite a few people have had similar I can’t quite put my finger on it but it’s somehow marvellous impressions.

I have to say, if someone came to me and said “Hey, there’s this new CHAT app you gotta try!”, I’d roll my eyes heavenward and say no thanks. Yecch. Age/Sex/Location? Gimme a break. Anonymous chat brings out the worst in people.

But….

BlogChat is a chat connected to YOU, to your own voice, not to some anonymous identity void. People coming to hear what YOU have to say and to engage you in conversation about your common interest, about your blog, your hobby, your business. Close enough to talk to. Not so close that they become your IM buddy.

My blog used to be a static display of my work and musings. Now it’s a tradeshow booth. Sail on through or stop to ask me something or tell me I’m a goof – it’s up to you.

Dan Gillmor, another journalist hep to the blogging world, was in for a visit too, and we’ve had a few fairly prominent bloggers express an interest in the beta.

Come on in, folks. The water’s fine. Give it a try, see if it fits your style.

Sharing a thought from Snowdeal:

“You’re not a designer, you’re not a writer, and you’re not an editor!”

Exactly. Poo-poo Kaka!! My bottom stinks! Wugga wugga! I have no editor, no proofreader, no design committeee constraining my expression.

I’m as much of a thoughtful, insightful sage or ridiculous puffed-up bogus self-aggrandized twat as I wanna be.

Caveat emptor. Beware the blog content, for it may be ridiculously slanted and/or hopelessly amateurish. And that’s a Good Thing (TM).

I’ve become addicted to Jimmy Smith, the king of the Jazz-Funk Hammond B3 organ. I actually found this page of Immortal Hammond Solos, and though there were many, none of the others quite matched Jimmy’s   mastery.

I absolutely love going to the basement, cranking it up, sticking on the headphones and playing along on the drums. Of course, my wife has a different opinion.

Dave Polaschek has another method of displaying refferrers [via PapaScott]. The best part of the article, though, is this quote (my emphasis):

There’s probably a more efficient way I could be doing it than using tail over and over, but the server logs don’t show that heavy of a load from this part of the script, so I’m not worrying about it yet. Avoid Premature Optimizations.

Hans tells me that Web Developer is web ontwikkelaar in Flemish

This afternoon, David Weinberger was in for a chat. He’s one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and has a new book out just this week called Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

It was nice having David visit (as it was having Doc Searls, another Cluetrain author) because some of the things this BlogChat has done is to amplify my own human voice and to increase the two-way nature of the communication I’m able to maintain with my blog’s audience.

[Note – this post was written in 2002. Things have changed since then – check your docs]

What the hell good is a sql call that is limited to a single query? I find that PHP’s mysql_query() won’t take multiple statements. Makes for some unnecessarily wordy code. I found a good snippet in PHP.net’s online manual annotations, though…
Read the rest of this entry »