So actually putting my blogger onto my personal Yahoo page(which is something they request you do when you register a new RSS source) makes me feel self-conscious about not having something new and witty to say every day. Not that anyone actually reads it but me.

I am trying out the new FireFox Mozilla browser. It seems a bit faster, but not a quantum improvement over Mozilla, and it doesn’t have Mail, News or Chat(which is one of the reasons it is supposed to be much faster).

I’m trying to decide how to vote on various California Propositions. I wonder how economists feel about laws requiring balanced budgets. On the one hand I am personally very financially conservative and am very debt averse. On the other hand, I’m not sure it makes sense to require it by law. Both Proposition 56 and 58 are balanced budget acts. 58 is the one supported by Governor Schwarzenegger. It still sounds funny saying that, Governor Schwarzenegger. Governments have a history of being fiscally short sighted, so I am leaning towards voting for the propositions.

So I spent last night finally getting this blog set up with an RSS feed. What does this mean(here’s an RSS tutorial)? It means that my site can be syndicated and republished pretty easily. You can even do weird things like add it to the front of your Yahoo page. The Yahoo feed is still experimental, but it seems to work for me. I’m going to have to spend some time converting my reading habits from regularly visiting web sites and bookmarks to using an RSS aggregator. I haven’t decided on any specific software yet. I’ll stick with the Yahoo! one for now.

I might even double my readership from 1 to 2 people.

I had kind of a nightmare getting it working though. Here are some of the issues. There’s multple versions of RSS, and blogger has decided to support a new format called Atom. This is somewhat of an annoyance because it’s relatively new, many aggregators(Yahoo in particular) support only older RSS feeds. I wanted to provide support for both, so I have to run a converter between the formats. Unfortunately the local converters I tried didn’t work reliably for me(though I admit it could be because I don’t understand the intricacies of XSLT). So I’m using a web based converter, so that means when you hit the real RSS feed on this page, you’re waiting for another web site to convert the Atom file into RSS and then send it back to you. It’s ugly yes, but it works and I don’t have to make any manual updates whenever I make a new posts.

While doing the furniture rearrangement, Tracy went shopping and bought some bookshelves at IKEA. They seem pretty decent and they were cheap, Tracy sort of thinks that their stuff isn’t as solid and high quality as it should be, but I guess the price is right. Whenever someone talks about IKEA, I am reminded of scene from Fight Club where Ed Norton’s life is so empty he fills it with stuff from IKEA. Well I am happy to say that now that’s me too, now I just need to get someone to start beating the crap out of me.

So we decided to switch our two bedrooms. There’s the one I use as the office and then there’s the one with the extra bed in it. The one with the computers was closer to the master bedroom, and the games I play are sometimes kinda loud and that keeps Tracy up sometimes. Also the office was in serious need of some cleaning. So we are about half way through it and I had quite a nightmare of a networking problem after we we started.

The problem was that the old office had the cable modem outlet in it. And we didn’t have enough long ethernet wires to run from the hub to the new office. I have 802.11g wireless gear that I’ve been meaning to install anyways. The install goes ok, and it doesn’t take too long get the wireless gear up and running, but it looks like someone else nearby is also running a Wi-Fi network. So I decide I need to secure my net with WPA(the successor to the very broken and insecure WEP security protocol). Of course that doesn’t work easily. And in addition I think I’m running into some significant interference from the other network. So I need to reconfigure my network to lessen the problems there.

Then I try to use my XP box as a router so that my linux box can also talk to the net. This is a miserable failure(the link is a kind of internet joke), and screws up my network even more, so I have to back out that change as well and I’m still working on a solution.

Then to top it all off, once I install the SMC router, my cable modem does a DHCP renew and I get a completely new IP address. This wouldn’t be a problem, but comcast blocks incoming port 80 on this IP address, so my web server breaks. So I call up Tango and he provides me a reverse proxy through funkware. So now you’re reading this page through funkware, which forwards to my cable modem and then back. It’s gross and slower(not that you’d really notice, but you might), but at least it works.

I had this dream the other night that I was in a live action version of Starcraft. I was a ghost running around trying to set up a target for a nuke, and I was trying to use my cloaking but it wouldn’t work. Dreams like that are cool. I wish I had more of them.

So for the first time in a few years, I ran a virus scanner on my PC. No surprise that it came up clean, because I’m very paranoid about downloading random files. But if you aren’t sure about your system try the free Trend Micro House Call virus scanner. It seems to work pretty well, but then again I didn’t have to remove any viruses, which is the tricky part.

Oh and I ordered a set of Kem Cards. They are the kind of cards used at casinos for poker. They are kind of expensive at about $10/deck. Unlike Blackjack cards, these are plastic and are washable and last a long long time. Blackjack cards are paper and pretty much disposable once they’ve seen some use, which is why you can usually get a free deck if you ask a casino for them.

I had my regular bike and run tests this weekend. I had a great run. 3 miles in 22:10, or 7:23 mile pace. That’s the best I can remember having done it. My ride was mediocre though. A pretty slow 23:10 for my standard 7.6 mile course. Kojo’s run was 22:08 and his bike was a really good 20:10.

Also I’ve been trying the Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo. The engine is very impressive. It requires a lot of horsepower, it’s the first time in a couple years that I’ve felt like a faster machine could really be helpful. The Onslaught game mode is a lot like Planetside, which I played for a few months and wasn’t bad.

I share a lot of the same concerns that other geeks do. I’m interested in privacy and data security. I’m a bit concerned about data associated with use of frequent shopper cards and RFID chips. However one thing that slashdot and Wired cover a lot of that I have absolutely no interest in is electronic voting systems and how many problems they are having right now. I mean, yea they are going to suck for a while and they probably aren’t very secure, but I’m sure there are lots of other systems which are the same.

The new

features in JDK 1.5 are awesome. I’m kind of an operating system and programming language fan so my enthusiasm for these things might not be shared by everyone, but it is still cool. Generics are the biggest thing of course. These are like C++ templates, and unfortunately they sort of inherit what I consider to be a somewhat unusual syntax. Of course I’ve never designed a language so I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to think up something better. But syntax aside, the flexibility is really nice for programmers. Other features are just conveniences to save programmers a bit of time, nothing architecturally important. Though the metadata feature will help administrators, code generators and other utility programmers ease some of their programming burden.

Had my first long, tough run of the year. It was pretty good for right now. I ran 9 mi in 1:16, or about 8:30 pace. I want to be faster in a race, but it’s not a bad start.

It looks like me, Kojo and Tango will be doing a relay triathlon in August. Tango will swim, Kojo will ride, and I will run. It won’t be faster than Kojo doing it all himself I suspect, but it’ll be fun.

The other day was the super bowl. Congrats to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. I’m not entirely sure yet that I believe he is in the league of Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw or Bart Starr as the only other QB’s to win 2 Superbowl MVPs, but he has done very well so far. Of course I root for him because he’s a Michigan grad, and he actually grew up in nearby San Mateo too.

Oh and I don’t really get what the big deal is with Janet Jackson’s boob. I guess some people just can’t handle it. It’s just a little bit of nudity really.