Monthly Archives: July 2003

Welcome Home, Sasha

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Photo of Sasha

After months of going without a dog. After the landlord kindly gave us his trusting consent. After hours and hours of surfing petfinder.com. After spending a Sunday afternoon browsing kennels and wanting to take them all home. Finally, Monday night at 9:00 PM, we brought home our new friend, Sasha. She’s from the PAWS animal shelter in Montclair, NJ. She’s a three-year-old terrier mix and weighs in at around 35 lbs. She’s energetic, curious, adorable, and loves her new home.

Perhaps one day we’ll take dog photos as good as these. In the meantime, though, here’s the best we could do so far. ;-)

Mozilla Bookmark Hackery

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A recent discussion about managing internet browsing (and information overload in general) got me playing around with Mozilla bookmarks. I discovered that, if you’re running Mozilla Firebird, you can have your bookmarks show up in your browsing window rather than a popup window or a side-panel–a la Safari.

Bookmark Panel (pretty cool):

   chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksPanel.xul

Bookmarks Manager (somewhat less cool):

   chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksManager.xul

By the way, you need to cut and paste these URLs into the browser for (I assume) security reasons.

RSS Distillation

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Chad Dickerson: RSS Killed the Infoglut Star. At last, a way to manage the Internet information overload.

Ha! Give it a few months, Chad, and you’ll be subscribing to as many voices as you were visiting web sites! Has anyone else been facing this problem? I’ve been noticing more and more that I’m having an increasingly difficult time in keeping up with my Internet surfing. The reason, it turns out, is that I’m subscribed to 38 different news feeds from websites. To some, this may be a paltry sum–I don’t know how you live. To me, this is a staggering number. Every day I’m enslaved to reading the from 38 different authors.

“Why not cut back your reading?” I’m considering cutting back my feeds down to maybe ten that I read on a daily basis and maybe setting up some bookmarks in Mozilla that will open up a monthly reading list, or maybe a list of sites to read when I’m really bored. The frustrating thing with this is, when you have accessible to you the personal online journals of bleeding-edge technologists, humorists, and theologians, you want to be able to consume them all. I mean, who could resist reading the thoughts of these people on a daily basis? It’s probably a quandry not too unlike working at a library.

As I was talking with family tonight about how they manage their time in the very mundane aspects of planning dinners and living on a budget and so on, I became increasingly aware of how little free time I have–or, more aptly stated perhaps, how much free time I spend trying to keep up the most current trends on the Internet. I remember, too, when Darin went away to Bible school for a year and his description of how freeing it was to be away from “all that stuff,” referring to the daily rat-race of keeping up on technology and his industry in particular. I don’t think I want to get away from that entirely, but, to take a few steps back away from this full immersion of minds and get back to living a little.

There may be a technology solution to this problem, but probably not for the next couple of years. You know, that whole idea of having a semantic user agent be able to pick up news articles of particular interest (like the coolest new Mozilla enhancements) and dump the ones of no interest to me at all (like the latest squabbling over RSS). In the meantime, I really need to do something to keep from going nuts.

Thoughts?

Mig Hacking, More Mozilla, and That Community Thing

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Blogzilla: Mozilla Firebird, Thunderbird Installers Are Here. One more reason to switch. ;-) I’ve actually just recently changed email clients from Outlook Express to Mozilla Thunderbird. My biggest niggling point is that the UI isn’t quite refined yet, but that will happen with time. Mozilla Thunderbird looked like total crap until v0.5. ∂

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Speaking of Mozilla user interface…Ben Goodger: The Start of Something New. User Interface is an interesting thing. Everyone thinks they can do it, but the sorry truth is they can’t. Poor UI decisions are especially sad in the workplace. They can make an otherwise great product look like a trainwreck. (via Asa) ∂

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Ken Walker: About this Site. Welcome to the personal website of Ken & Sarah Walker of Wharton, NJ. Here you’ll find news about what’s going on in their lives, photos of places they go and stuff they do there, and an occasional rant by Ken about the latest acronym-ridden technology. Okay, maybe excessive rants. Copious, even. This has been a fun page to write. ;-) ∂

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Jordon Cooper does XML. ∂

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Mary Hess: Open source religious education resources.

It used to be that many churches simply looked to their denominational publishers for ‘authoritative’ content, assuming that whatever the publisher put out there must be doctrinally and educationally appropriate. Setting aside for the moment a judgment about whether or not that process ever worked well, we can say at the current moment that it does not work right now. Communities of faith are simply too diverse, and situated in too many different contexts, for print publishers to be able to produce materials in a timely, cost effective, and theologically appropriate way.

The question isn’t whether or not this is going to happen, it’s when. Just like we can hardly remember what it was like before we had the news or our research information or our bank accounts online, there will be a time when churches will wonder what it was like to not have huge, religious-text libraries at their fingertips. The question is, who is going to be the first O’Reilly of religious-text publishing? (via Adam) ∂

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One of the coolest features of My Image Gallery is that you can build templates around your image galleries. Much like Movable Type–though not as flexible yet–Mig gives you tags that you can use amongst your HTML markup. One exceedingly cool thing I discovered about this is that my templates can be imported into my Movable Type configuration. That way, all of the MT markup that I’ve spent hours upon hours developing can be leveraged into our photo gallery, so you, as a visitor, don’t have to feel like you’ve been whisked off to some remote corner of the Internet when you visit the galleries. Check it out. ∂

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Oh, and one final bonus. Izzle! Izzle pfaff!: The Magical Elevator Where Everybody Told The Truth [PG].

AG: When we get to the smoking gulag, I will bother you with awkward banter that will only emphasize the tenuousness of our threadbare friendship.

Skot: I understand. I will feign interest in your awkward banter while manufacturing elaborate fantasies that involve your spectacular death.

This one had me stifling laughter so as not to wake the Schmozer last night—mind the rating, though. ∂

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Well, okay, one more bonus. :) Wired: HomestarRunner Hits a Homer. Not everyone gets it, but enough people flock to Mike and Matt Chapman’s HomestarRunner website that its stars, Strong Bad, Homestar, Marzipan and The Cheat are gaining cult status with pre-teens, the Gen-X crowd and everyone in between. To boot, the Atlanta-based brothers have made a tidy business selling T-shirts featuring their creations. Isn’t that gweat? (via Ryan)