blivet.com

While typing just now I noticed yet another long black hair lying across my keyboard. Could it be one of my wife’s coarse but saucy locks? No, it’s just a quill from Casey, my German Shepherd. If it had been a short black follicle found wedged between the keys, that would have originated somewhere on the backside of Penny, my Labrador Retriever.

There’s not a surface in my home untouched by dog hair. It’s in my wallet, my socks, my underwear. And in just about every orifice of my body. You don’t really want to know the details.

Time to shave the pooches.

After finding this Strong Bad Email link on Wil Wheaton’s blog, I’ve spent the last hour roaming around the entire Homestar Runner site. As I’ve often said, I don’t get out much. Even in a virtual sense. But you would think a dedicated surfer like myself would know about this diversion already. Already I’m hooked. This does not bode well for me getting any work done tonight.

But at least my new AirPort Extreme Base Station was delivered today. Not that it matters with these old iBooks.

From the FedEx tracking information, it looks like the PowerBooks are on there way to Anchorage, Alaska. That sounds bad considering I live in California but that’s the normal route from Taiwan, or so says the shipping company. And I guess that explains why they’ll probably end up in Memphis, Tennessee before they head west.

Whatever. Just get your G4 aluminum goodness over here.

I haven’t tried Kung-Log since version 1.3.1 so I downloaded 1.3.6 tonight and was surprised to see how much it had improved. Adriaan Tijsseling seems to be listening to his users. The organization of menus is much improved and the application is even more stable. And now that it seems to be handling update publicity correctly, it’ll be my weblog editor for awhile.

Two minor annoyances: you can’t do multiple or extended selection via standard modifier keys in the “Recent Entries” or “Drafts” tabs. Weird. I don’t know if this is new behavior (since I trashed my older version) or it’s always been that way. Also, the “Select All” command is available when focus is in the drawer but it does nothing when invoked. Both of these problems make it extremely painful to delete multiple drafts.

Anyway, good thing I just upgraded to Movable Type 2.63 according to this.

I can’t believe I didn’t notice Movable Type 2.63 was available last night and I went to bed without upgrading. No wonder I didn’t sleep well. Well, that puppy is installed now and all is right with the world.

More changes to the site arrived late last night and today. I’ve finally enabled comments and trackback for entries, even the older ones. It took a lot of hacking to get both to behave and look the way I wanted but I’m happy with the results so far. Once I tell David Hyatt he can link to my site then I’m sure someone will actually start using it. I’ve also changed the Creative Commons license used here to a less restrictive version to encourage sharing.

In an effort to be a little more security conscious, I’ve written a “robots.txt” and an “htaccess” file for the site. Hopefully that’ll help stem the tide of terrorism around here and protect blivet.com in way that duct tape and plastic sheeting just can’t.

While this list, transcribed from the apparently unavailable SFX Magazine article, is amusing it leaves me wanting a real interview with the creator of my favorite modern myths. Instead, just sound bites. Pity.

One interesting response is when Whedon is asked for the best line of dialogue he’s ever written. Unwilling to commit to an exact line, he quotes Angel in the episode “Amends” from Buffy’s third season, “It’s not the demon in me that needs killing — it’s the man.” Yeah, that’s up there with the best. And haven’t I felt like that as well.

It’s not every Tuesday night, even in Sunnydale, that you get to see an entire underground army of Neanderthal super vampires. Scary.

I really love Penny, my five year-old Labrador Retriever, but while I lay here in bed trying desperately to fall asleep she’s curled delicately on top of my wife’s pillow doing her best imitation of an exploding lumber mill. Normally the dog is further from my sensitive ears near the foot of the bed but my wife is in the next room with my son who’s still recovering from a virus. And Penny is an opportunist.

Anyway, this animal really knows how to pass air through her nostrils. I’m tempted to pull the pillow out from under her and smother her with it but then the guilt might also keep me awake.

My wife says I snore worse than the dog but I’ve heard no evidence to prove this theory.

After I saw one of the little aluminum gems today, I decided to forego the wait for and expense of the 17-inch model and smack my Amex card upside the head with a demand for two, yes two, fully loaded 12-inch PowerBooks. One for myself, of course, and one for my wife and son to share. These will replace our trusty but rusty 18 month-old iBooks very nicely. Heck, they’re actually smaller and almost the same price. More importantly, that 17-inch model is way too big to lug into the bathroom.

I could have phrased that headline “Has Potential(s)” but that would be cheap. More importantly, I really have to stop reading Herc’s spoilers. Especially with only seven more episodes in the season. Better make sure the series finale is a surprise. Will it really be the finale? Considering a world without Buffy sickens me.

At least Angel will still be around next season. But no episode this week which, more than Angelus, really bites. Especially after that cliff-hanger with Cordelia last week.

Just shoot me but I’m still fooling with the site design. Tonight’s hacking is on the style sheet. So if things look weird, force the page to reload. Depending upon the lameness of your web browser, you may need to empty your cache.

Woof. Well, it figures that Google, Yahoo, or some other big internet/media portal would buy Pyra Labs eventually. I wonder what Evan is worth now? Best not to think about that.

I keep telling everyone at the office that blogging is big time and this proves I’m not completely crazy. Does this give Blogger an edge over Movable Type now? I hope that Ben and Mena make lots of money but here’s hoping they don’t sell out to just any knucklehead with a big check.

Right after I posted my last entry, successfully I might add, with Kung-Log, it popped up a dialog announcing a new version was now available. I hit the “Download” button and it nicely launched Safari to get the disk image. And now Kung-Log has a nifty new icon and a bug fix. Get it here while it’s hot.

Earlier this morning I noticed this post by Mena Trott on Six Log about an update to Kung-Log for Movable Type version 2.6. And I’m thinking, “Why didn’t I know about Kung-Log before now?” I guess I don’t get out much. But I did get Kung-Log then and started playing with it.

The funny thing is that not minutes before seeing that post I was underwhelmed with the support of Movable Type’s features in NetNewsWire’s “Weblog Editor” and I realized I might be stuck with Movable Type’s web-based interface to do all my blog editing. Now I really like Safari but a specialized editor is always better for things like blogs than a general purpose tool like a web browser.

Kung-Log was fairly easy to configure but too bad it can’t auto-discover your blog’s XML-RPC URL via RSD like NetNewsWire. Then again, if NetNewsWire supported the extended entry field or most of the other cool Movable Type settings I might not have even tried Kung-Log.

What can I say about the rest of the user interface? Whenever you title a menu “Special” then you have a UI presentation problem. And the default set of toolbar buttons won’t fit on my iBook’s 1024 by 768 pixel screen with the “Recent Entries/Drafts” drawer open.

Where is the menu or keyboard command equivalent of the “Toggle Entry Settings Drawer” button? Without other access, I’m stuck with leaving that button and its huge title on the toolbar. And most of the other button titles are too big as well.

Often when I changed templates in the “Edit HTML Tags” window I had to restart the application to get them into the “Insert HTML Tags” menu on the toolbar. Something isn’t working correctly there. But it’s not like Safari doesn’t have bugs either.

Still, Kung-Log does integrate well with Movable Type. And it works as advertised. At least for re-editing an existing entry. I’ll find out how it works with a new post when I’m done writing this one. But I’m guessing that a PayPal donation will be following shortly.

Adriaan Tijsseling, Kung-Log’s author, indicates he wants to use Safari technology to replace its current HTML preview implementation. What an excellent idea. I’ll have to send him an SDK when it becomes available this year.

Five years. That’s how long this site, blivet.com, has remained essentially the same single static page. But now I’m publishing a weblog here to put some movement on that fixed expression.

I’ve been planning to do this for over six months. And the delay was more about fear than any technical roadblocks. But a simple vice is really what made it finally happen.

While I did only recently complete moving the site from the Linux box in my house to DreamHost and just as recently getting Movable Type installed, upgraded, and its templates configured to my tastes, these tasks were not what was holding me back.

It was taking that first step and actually communicating or, more importantly, committing to continued communication that seized my mind and my fingers. A weblog isn’t just a single blank page to scare up writer’s block. It’s not a 500-word essay or even something that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. It’s a journal. It’s a chronicle of life. And life is just messy and embarrassing. Boring too.

I’ve never been able to keep a private journal either. So why do this now in the midst of all this fear and loathing? Vanity. Pure and simple. I think the success of Safari made me cocky enough to think I could write publicly and people would read what I had to say.

So now I plan to write here. Often. But probably not about Safari that much. And I’m not enabling comments yet so hold onto your feature requests and bug reports. I’ll find plenty of other topics with which to pack this site. After all, there’s supposed to be “Ten Pounds of Content” here. Consider this the first ounce.