The Life and Times of the Watters Family

Talk About Turnover!

As I watch the apparent disintegration of the RSS Advisory Board (now down to Adam Curry and Rogers Cadenhead), frankly, I’m a little sad.

Despite his frequently distasteful style, Dave’s numerous tangible contributions to the syndication space have been enormous. It would be a shame for any of them to lose the momentum they currently enjoy. Hopefully, they’ll get the board vacancies filled by a group of people that are committed to the success and growth of the RSS 2.0 format.

Didn’t They See This Coming?

According to the artcile, placing farm animals under the care of French B-list celebs for a reality show resulted in the death of 15 chickens, a hen and a grey cock. Apparently, the company that provided the animals is suing the show’s producers.

Right. Because they thought it would be good for the animals.

Illegal Use of Hands

The Smoking Gun : While seated on the bench, an Oklahoma judge used a male enhancement pump, shaved and oiled his nether region, and pleasured himself

This beats the Judge Calabresi misconduct story, hands down.

And up…and down…and up…and down

UPDATE: Reuters is also carrying the story.

Andrew Grumet Gets "Funky" With RSS And ATOM

In his post Embedding Atom elements in your RSS 2.0 feed, Andrew Grumet explores the value of using ATOM elements, particularly <atom:author>, to replace core RSS 2.0 elements.

I certainly applaud the effort. Anything that makes RSS 2.0 more useful is great as far as I’m concerned. What’s odd to me is the fact that he appears to get a pass WRT “funkiness” from Dave Winer.

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Flash & Windows XP SP2

I’ll post more on this later once I’ve had a chance to install Windows XP SP2 RC2 and poke around a little with the various settings, but here are some links to the conversation so far regarding Macromedia Flash content and the new popup blocker in Microsoft Internet Explorer in Windows XP Service Pack 2:

• Initial conversation in jeffdav’s comments in late March
• Comments in John Dowdell’s blog regarding the above jeffdav post
• Comments on June 21st jeffdav post regarding new default popup blocker behavior

MLB All-Star Travesty

Once again, we’re a little less than a month away from the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, and the voters have missed the boat…again. Although I shouldn’t be surprised, like previous years, this years voting is shaping up to be more of a popularity contest than a reflection of on-field performance. For instance, it seems clear to me that, barring a colossal meltdown, Carlos Guillen should be the starting shortstop for the American League this year.
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No Brainer!

Note To Self: Don’t trample 4-year-olds to get foul balls at baseball games. Additional Note: If you do happen to mess up the first part, give the tyke the ball before the national press calls you an ass all over the place.

People should channel all of their Steve Bartman angst at this numbskull.

What Should Be Audio Blogged?

Well, since I’ve gone to the effort to list the advantages of text over audio for traditional blogging, I should probably spend some time exploring what audio blogs could be used for that would add something useful to the blogosphere.
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Advantages of Text Blogs Over Audio Blogging

Dave Winer has begun an experiment in audio weblogging. Various other experiments in Audio Blogging have been tried and I haven’t liked a single one. Now that Dave has seemingly revived this movement, I figure it’s worth commenting on.
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Shades of Me

Dilbert has been truly enjoyable this week.

• Monday, June 7th
• Tuesday, June 8th
• Wednesday, June 9th
• Thursday, June 10th
• Friday, June 11th

Many times, in moments of introspection, I’ve wondered if I’m not similarly perceived by my own coworkers. However, I’d like to think that I’m actually a productive and contributing member of the team, even if my attitude comes across as a bit arrogant. And anyway, I prefer to call it “confidence”.

Life Assessment

Mark Pilgrim: Obviously, the ‘relationships’ category is my weakest point. This should not come as a raging shock to anyone, but it’s somewhat depressing to have it confirmed by a random quiz on the internet.

Personally, I scored a 57 on this “quiz”, with my highest scores in the Money (16/25) and Relationships (14/25) categories. Like many of the commentators on Mark’s site, I guess I disagreed with the premise of many of the questions, so my score is probably closer to “perfect” than it appears. I was, however, surprised that so many were downright offended by options like “I hear well” or “My bed is made daily”. Sheesh. Get over yourselves.

Redesign v0.9, etc.

So I’ve completed the initial stages of the redesign. I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak it as time goes on. The primary goals were to give the pages a little more definition as well as a more flexible page layout. In the future, I imagined that I’d want the flexibility to add various “features” to the site, and this allows me to do that without having to redesign again for a long time. Granted, I’m not a professional designer and I tend to favor “boxy” layouts.

A little bit of restructuring has occurred as well. Although the index page points to the blog index currently, I’ve laid the groundwork for having a homepage that isn’t the blog’s front page. More re-organization will likely come as I continue to adapt my MovableType installation (2.6, not 3.0) to my preferred blogging style.

I tried a few other blog systems and I just didn’t like any of them. Maybe I’ll jump on the WordPress bandwagon someday, but for now, I’ll stick with what works. While there remain a couple of nice-to-have features that I’m currently lacking w/ MT 2.6, all in all it is a good product that continues to get the job done.

Now, hopefully, I’ll be able to focus more on generating content and less on the actually layout/software I use to maintain it.