Layout

So I've mentioned that I wanted to change to a three column layout here. For some reason I thought it was going to be difficult. Before trying to dive in and do it myself, and spending the next several hours cursing css (or, at least, my css abilities), I asked Google one more time. One of the first results was this page, which got me going with no trouble at all. So thanks guys.

Anyway, if you've got strong feelings for or against the current layout, let me know. I don't expect I'll hear from anybody.

World Record Layout

I updated the layout for this blog recently. Not much, really, I just added two new bits along the right side:

1. Download Day. The folks at Firefox are trying to set a world record 'for most software downloads in 24 hours'. They've got it set up so you can pledge to download on the day Firefox 3 comes out (which, interestingly enough, is not yet determined, just "sometime in June"), so I put a link there on the right. If you're reading this in a feed reader, you can just follow the link here.
2. Flickr Slideshow. To play around with new (for me anyway) things (or just avoid doing work), I signed up over at flickr (so now I'm on yahoo too, I guess), and posted a few photos. Those now show up in a slideshow along the right panel. There isn't much up there yet, but hopefully I'll remedy that... sometime.

I'd still like to spend some time trying to make a slightly more substantial change to the layout here. I've been thinking I want the 'blog archive' and 'labels' bits on the left (maybe 'about me' as well), as they are part of this blog, and leave the other bits (other random bits of my online life) on the right. None of the provided blogger templates are 3 panels though, and I haven't found one online. But I need css practice anyway, right?

Haircut

Sometime in April I started wondering about giving myself a haircut. Everybody "knows" it's a bad idea, so I was curious to see just how poorly it would go. I waited until the end of the semester, and then went for it. Since I was expecting disaster, I thought I'd document the process with some photos. It actually went better than expected, so I didn't bother much with the pictures. But last night I was going through some other pictures, ran across these ones, and got a chuckle out of them. So I thought you might as well.

Here's one before getting started:


And then I brushed it up, generally good for a laugh:

I'm vaguely reminded of Eraserhead.

After these two, I stood over the sink with a pair of scissors, grabbing bits of hair and chopping off those that felt long. Here's the result:

Probably a photo from the back would be a bit more like what you'd expect of giving yourself a haircut... but I'm only so flexible. I guess the trick with giving yourself a haircut is: if you cut everything short enough, you can't really go wrong.

Video of my Cat

I took this video a while, of my cat Kramer playing with a new catnip toy. He's generally pretty reserved.

OpenID Revisit

A while ago I wrote a joyful post about OpenID and how I thought it was great. Admittedly, since then I have hardly used my OpenID identity (any of them). I've remained positive about the idea, and keep hoping I'll find/make the time this summer to do enough webpage building sorts of things to get to a point where I would accept OpenID login.

So I've been brought down a bit by the article "The problem(s) with OpenID". It's a little lengthy, and apparently largely a wrap-up of many other posts from many other places. Still, it seems like a fairly important article to read.

Also today I listened to a podcast from April concerning DataPortability with guest Jonathan Vanasco, and found it to be pretty interesting. In particular, it made me think more about the idea of having many different faces online, e.g., something like a MySpace versus LinkedIn account. And, as coincidences go, just yesterday Mr. Vanasco wrote a post: "Data Sportability". All quite interesting, and I'm looking forward to the promised 'upcoming' posts.

I wish I was more thoughtful about security and privacy and things. The web sure is an exciting place. Articles like these tend to make me wonder what I should be doing with my life. There are smarter people than me, that work harder than me, all over the place, getting all sorts of amazing things done. What sort of contribution can I actually make? Where should I direct my energy, so that a contribution actually can be made?

Feed Update

I just decided to try out FeedBurner for this blog (new feed here). I'm not sure how that works for current subscribers - will you even see this message? Anyway, if you get a minute, perhaps update to the new feed.

I decided to do this, because according to the Feedjit widget here, I'm actually getting hits from... well... around (I know, plenty of them are me, seeing how the page looks. But I know I'm not all of them). So I thought I'd get some more information about that, and FeedBurner seemed like a common way to do so.

Please bear with me.

Beach Week Recap

So it turns out (I'm not sure I'm surprised) that I have a little in common with whales on the beach - it's quite clearly not my natural environment.

I made it 3 days without checking my rss reader, and for the remainder of the time I didn't read items, just starred a bunch. So today, catching up, has been pretty taxing. Luckily it was a holiday, so a fairly slow news day. I'm back down to a reasonable 20ish starred items. I don't think I'll try for any more rss-free days any time soon.

Couple of other things from the beach.

• Running on the beach really isn't that exciting. The scenery never changes really (at least, the 5 mile stretch I was on), and it was windy (could have been a fluke, I don't know much about the beach) and sand blowing in your face isn't fun while running.
• It occurred to me at some point during the week that though I expected the expression 'give props' was probably short for something, I had no idea what. I asked my friends (5 of us there), and none of us knew. Our librarian friend looked it up on WordNet (which was cool, I'd just started hearing about WordNet). Turns out its 'proper respect'. Makes sense.
• We played some fun games while we were there (besides Dr. Mario, which did get brought out - what sort of nerd brings a Nintendo to the beach?). Settlers of Catan is a fun game - except I almost always get frustrated while playing. Eric had a game 'Pentago' that was also pretty cool. It's connect 5 on a 6x6 board, but after each turn you get to twist one corner of the board. We also played some Farkle.
  
• I started wondering about perhaps making a blog for the calc 2 class I'm teaching in the fall. Trying to decide what it would include, and if I feel like worrying about privacy concerns and all of that. I guess UVA has some system in place for class collaboration, perhaps I should start there.

So what did my (not so) unconnected week miss?

• I did, actually, get my Twine invite, which I was surprised by. Perhaps because I mentioned it here? I know that when I signed up for the invite, they asked for my webpage... are they monitoring to decide who gets an invite? Or was it just a coincidence? I haven't yet had a chance to play with it, but am looking forward to doing so from here (well, probably tomorrow) on out.
• The XOXO (next version of OLPC laptop) looks like it could be cool (see here and here). I'm going to wait a while before I get too excited about it - see what it actually turns out to be. The $75 price mark was shockingly low, given the current version is at $188. Time will tell I guess. Also they're doing G1G1 again later this year (with current version laptops). I certainly don't need another, and I really, really hope they have their distribution issues worked out. Oh yeah, and I took mine to the beach as an excuse to test it in direct sunlight (like we don't get that in cville), and it worked beautifully (as expected).
  
• I listened to a Semantic Web Gang podcast while I was away, with Barney Pell from Powerset. Got me excited about Powerset, and some of the people had pretty cool accents. So I downloaded a bunch more of the semantic web sorts of podcasts I've been avoiding. I still haven't gotten around to them.
• Read a pretty interesting article from Newsweek - 'The Rise of the Rest'. Worth a look. Made me wonder what I should be doing to better prepare for global interaction. Any suggestions?
• Found (thanks 'Discover' button in Google Reader) a cville blog I actually subscribed to, because it's about local tech. And it turns out I missed another interesting talk here at UVA. Sigh. Hopefully this is the last one I miss because I don't hear about it until after the fact.
  

Probably the highlight of the news I missed was the Roku Netflix set-top box (see here and here). I had basically forgotten about that news from January, but I'm kinda excited about it again. Sounds like its a really easy to use piece of hardware, in a reasonable price range... I'm debating about it. People have complained about the 'small' number of 'Watch Instantly' titles from Netflix, but I'm sure I could find enough to keep me occupied (like I need another distraction). If the Roku box was able to play videos from anywhere online (maybe embed a link in your Netflix queue?), I would have bought one already. Perhaps one of the other boxes that is set to come out later this year?