Briefly from Savannah

Down in Savannah for a few days’ visit, so my sis can check out the town and the Savannah College of art and design, and decide whether she really wants to come down here and enroll. Typing this over borrowed wi-fi in some little cafe. Not much to say about the trip yet, except sure is a picturesque little city. Spanish moss is everywhere. More impressions to follow, perhaps after we get back to Chicago on Tuesday.

Complete FD Archives

Okay, I had to fudge some of the dates on certain very early entries by hand, and the times are not remotely accurate on the first several months’ worth of entries, but I managed to get the whole history of this blog back online, all the way back to February of 2003. It’s nice to see just how long I’ve been at this, although I must admit a lot of it just confirms how much I can be embarassed by reading over things I’ve written earlier. Some of it’s kind of fun to look back at, though.

I seem to keep mentioning my Atom/RSS feeds lately, and here I go again. Despite the fact that I’ve yet to put in a set of categories for posts that isn’t frivolous and arbitrary, I still might find myself compelled to go back and assign categories to recently imported old archive posts, which are currently all under the default category of ‘Fuzzy’. As I do this, I think these entries will bubble up to the top of my feeds as having ‘updates’. That’s kind of weird, since I’m not really changing anything but the category, but I don’t think I can stop it. Just think of it as a sort nostalgia show, I guess. The order of posts on the page itself shouldn’t change.

George W. Bush makes obscene gesture on camera

..just like it says on the tin. (1.1 MB quicktime video file, NSFW.)

Yo, FD feedreaders!

I thought I posted about this awhile ago, but it appears some still didn’t get the message. I notice from server logs that blog/index.rss still gets requested a couple hundred times a week. That could be the same one person requesting a refresh every few minutes; I haven’t looked into it that closely. Anyway, heads up syndication kids—feed links changed here a few weeks ago (see sidebar at right). I’ll try to whip up an index.rss file with this info later in the day, if I get a chance, in case somebody’s out there waiting for a feed update and never checking the web page in a browser.

Feed b0rked (now fixed)

Confidential to those getting FD updates via Atom feed: my last post there caused the feed not to validate for awhile there, which I didn’t notice until this morning. I guess the problem was that I had the final, acute-accented ‘e’ in resumé encoded as HTML entity é, which turns out to not be consistent with my utf-8 character set declaration. Validation is hard.

Anyhow, all should be well now.

New resumé online

I expect I’ve made this clear in the old blog here before, but I am a professional data modeler—as of today, I have just updated my resumé. That link goes to a new, styled XHTML version. From there, you can find links to PDF or plain text alternatives.

I’m not really sure what I plan to do with this now. I’m not really out looking for a job, I just figure a current resumé is always a good thing to have. I’m also curious to see whether anyone notices this one, which for the time being I’m not putting on Dice or Monster or anything. While, as I say, I’m not especially looking, I’m never averse to discussing an interesting opportunity.

Shorn

At this point, I’m pretty well committed to the head-shaving process; I seriously doubt that I’ll be growing my hair out any more than few days’ worth any time soon. I just like it shaved off. One weird unexpected side effect, however: every time I walk by a nice looking hair-cutting place, I get this little twinge of something like homesickness. There’s just something really luxurious about sitting in either a fancy stylist’s or a nice barber chair, getting your head worked on. It makes me sad for a moment when I face the reminder that this pleasant experience is no longer for me.

Debate III

Evidently “he’s a Senator from Massachusetts” is this week’s “I’m working really hard”.

Also: much more entertaining if you stop wondering, and just go ahead and assume someone else is feeding answers into Bush’s ear. I think John Kerry should go ahead and make a joke about it out loud.

‘Tis autumn

More autumn color
Originally uploaded by Yager-Madden.

I’ve been walking by this smallish tree every morning on my way to the train, watching it turn all kinds of pretty. Fortunately, this morning I remembered to bring along a camera before the leaves all fell off. This is one of a few pictures of it I just posted up at flickr, along with some other snaps I took around the neighborhood, and from out the window at work.

Baseball question

In honor of that playoff time of year, I have a pretty dumb question about baseball. There are always a few switch hitters around, so how come there never seem to be any switch pitchers? Now, obviously, this doesn’t surprise me too much—serious competitive professional pitching is a totally crazy occupation, that involves the pitcher’s entire body, not just an arm. On the other hand, it seems to me that much the same could be said about swinging a bat. So, I understand that switching pitching would be rare, but it appears to be nonexistent. It’s just not crystal clear to me what would keep someone naturally ambidextrous from training themselves to do this, with regular practice pitching from both sides. Is there something I’m not getting? Or, have there in fact been switch pitchers, and I just haven’t heard of them?

These are things I wonder about while waiting for the train. On the way to the train I was bouncing a rubber band ball left-handed (I’m usually a rightie).

What? What’d I do?

Yikes! This little ol’ blog page o’ mine saw 133 (!) hits just yesterday, which I’m quite sure is some sort of personal record. And, really—only a hundred or so of those were from me. (I swear!) I’d like to think it was posting “Basketball Jones” that made me so popular, but actually no one seems to have downloaded that, so far. Honestly, I have no idea. If you’re just joining us from elsewhere, I’d appreciate hearing in the comments how you found me here. My referrer logs have been no help whatsoever.

Basketball Jones

A week or so ago, I found somebody’s old, wonderfully beat-up basketball in some bushes next to a parking lot in the neighborhood, while I was out walking our dog. I’ve been wanting a basketball—just to mess around and like shoot baskets at the park with—for a long time now, so I was really pleased with my find. It doesn’t bounce quite the way a basketball should; I’m not sure if that’s the wear on the surface (it’s pretty damn gone) or if it just needs a little more air. Either way, as basketballs go it’s not the greatest, but it has a certain junkyard charm—and of course, any basketball is better than no basketball at all.

So, in honor of this momentous occasion, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Tyrone Shoelaces! ! !