June 27, 2007
I was glad to see ColdFusion make it on this list of the top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills. It’s a ridiculous “language” that I never bothered to learn and used to tell people was craptastic and worthless when it was brand new and everybody and their mother was looking for people that knew it. I clearly remember being told that I just had to learn ColdFusion or I was going to miss the next web wave. I scoffed, learned ASP and PHP, and think I made the right call.
I was surprised to see C on the list, though. I guess I can understand that there aren’t many people actually programming in the original C, but I’d say that the basic principles of the language — including C++ and all of its children — are still pretty important.
June 26, 2007
2007 - 1973 = 34
How the hell did that happen? I could have sworn like two or three weeks ago I was just turning 30 and it was only a year or two before that I turned 21. If it wasn’t for the fact that I am happier now than I ever have been before — and I have felt that way pretty much every day since I turned 9 or so — this whole 6/26 thing would really bother me.
June 22, 2007
A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”
Google hates underscores?!
First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.
Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.
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June 19, 2007
Yesterday I became the proud new owner of a Dell D630 Latitude. Today I began the tiresome task of transferring my life from my old D610 to it. The old laptop was Anchor. (Previous computers were Budweiser, Guinness, and Corona.) The new laptop is Maui. Here is a list of the software that Dell decided to install on my new machine that I either immediately disabled or deleted:
- Google Desktop
- Google Toolbar
- AOL Setup
- Intellisonic Speech Enhancement
- the “language” taskbar toolbar
- Dell’s Wireless WLAN Card monitor
June 14, 2007
Let’s say you want to create a smart playlist in iTunes that will contain the 25 highest-rated Beatles or Bob Dylan songs that you haven’t heard in a while. That would be pretty cool, right? It’s not that simple, but it can be done. I’ll show you how.
The main roadblock you’re facing is that iTunes only gives you two ways of restricting / selecting songs. You can build a smart playlist based on songs that meet all of your criteria or one based on songs that meet any of your criteria. This any / all option really puts you in a corner. First I’ll explain why, and then I’ll show you how to fix it.
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June 14, 2007
With the demise of the Sopranos, West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and with the interminably long hiatus of Friday Night Lights, the best show on television right now is Rescue Me. It has been months since the last episode aired and I had been anxiously awaiting the season premiere last night. Black billboards featuring only a Pink-Floyd-esque, stretched-neck-and-screaming Denis Leary profile started appearing in LA a few weeks ago, captioned with a very simple “rescue me” and “06-13-07″. All day yesterday I was excited to see what was going to happen. (Last season, of course, ended with a dramatic cliff-hanger.)
Now understand this: I have three televisions, two TiVo boxes, and a DirecTV HD DVR. These three machines have yet to fail me in 3+ years. Any time a show was missed, it was always entirely my fault for not double-checking the priorities. I knew that “Rescue Me” was set to ultra-high priority on the two TiVos and I — incorrectly — thought that I had told the DirecTV DVR to record it as well. But it was not to be. I forgot that the (absolutely horrible) software on the DirecTV DVR wouldn’t let me schedule a season pass for the show when I tried a few weeks ago. There wasn’t a new episode set to air in the near future so I couldn’t program it. So that system recorded Mythbusters and Modern Marvels instead. The two TiVo boxes were set to record Rescue Me on the FXP (the Pacific feed of the FXNetwork) channel at 10pm Pacific time. Unfortunately DirecTV dropped FXP and replaced it with the regular, East-coast feed of FX, so not only was the show airing at 7pm Pacific instead of 10pm, but it was now on channel 248 instead of channel 78. So one TiVo recorded Girls Next Door and the other one recorded what was probably its 3000th episode of Law & Order.
So now I have to wait for FX to replay the premiere on Friday night. All three DVRs are set to record it. Damn.
June 11, 2007
Are you wondering what media I consumed this weekend? I knew you were. And so I shall tell you.
June 11, 2007
My mom just sent me the following text message:
I just dumped a venti starbucks on my work computer! Help!
Attempts to contact my mom via her cell phone have failed. Unfortunately even if I could get her on the phone, the only advice I could give her — after over a decade of working in the computer industry — is to maybe try to shake the liquid out and blow-dry it.
When the revolution comes and the computers try to squash humanity out of existence, hopefully some of us will remember their Achilles’ heel: ill-placed cups of coffee.
