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A reader calls my attention to a piece on the Erotic Hypnosis And News Community website. Apparently, a member of the Erotic Hypnosis community took slight umbrage at a disparagement of his craft that I composed a while ago.
I read his rebuttal and my response is "Well, itsa fair cop." I respectfully stand firm by my statement that if a child of mine professed an intent to run down the path of Erotic Hypnotism, I would be keenly interested in diverting him or her at all costs...even if it meant getting them a summer job at a market research firm.
Still, I agree with the crux of the rebuttal, i.e., that it's better to make a living doing something you love than to make a fortune doing something you hate. "78 years can seem like a long time to go without putting a bullet in your head," I say to the kids who seek my career advice.
(Though I must point out that if you do luck into a Job You Hate that pays a reliable mid-six-figure salary, hell, boy...tough it out for a few years. Then tell the boss where s/he can stick it, put the dough into conservative long-term investments, spend the next ten to fifteen years in a series of colorful, low-paying gigs, and when you hit 40 you can get those business cards that read simply "Playboy and Bon-Vivant."
And at those Park Avenue penthouse cocktail parties, you'll have lots of stories about cleaning salmon in the Bering Strait and cleaning elephants at Barnum & Bailey. You'll be stinking rich, so washed-up supermodels (i.e., 28 years old and 117 pounds) will just think you're Colorful. It's a can't-miss proposition, provided that someone gives you a $500,000-a-year job straight out of college. So chiefly I'm talking to sons and nephews of George Bush Sr. here.
Which is OK because they really need all the good advice they can get.)
| 
After I don't know how many months, I finally found the wristwatch portion of my heart-rate monitor.
It turns out that I (cough) had been using it as a bookmark in a JavaScript reference. Dang, you know, the one place I hadn't looked for it was inside every single book I owned.
I've heard people say that Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness and that An Ordered Workspace Is A Sign Of An Ordered mind. Bollocks. I do housecleaning just to get some of my stuff back, that's all.
| A screed about the finale of "American Idol" got way out of hand; thus as a humanitarian gesture I've posted it here as a standalone article instead.
| Since That Thing That Needs To Be Written resolutely refuses to get Wrot,
(Boy, that's a nice word. Is it a word? Let's see...nope. Dictionary.com's never heard of it. Congratulations, you've just witnessed the creation of a whole new addition to the family of Language. Now go out and get people to use it, or else I'll have to cop to poor grammar.)
...I'm going to take the time to address a few queries:
To the correspondent(s) who were somewhat aghast at my last posting: I'm reasonably sure that if presented with the opportunity, I would not, in fact, bludgeon the "American Idol" guy with a shovel. It would run counter to several of the principles upon which I've based my life. "Don't you go bludgeoning people to death with shovels," my dear old Dad said to me when I was but a lad, on one memorable Christmas Eve. Though more than once, he did say "Do as I say, not as I do" too, come to think of it. Funny, how some things only click into place when you can think about them with the perspective on an adult.
Also, in the past three or four years we've seen plenty of marginal talents who've been elevated to demi-Elvis-hood by virtue of the fact that someone killed them before they could make something better than their middlin' debut albums. And if Justin thinks I'm going to give him that satisfaction, he's got another think coming.
Speaking of Another Think Coming, to the correspondent who tells me she still awaits the retraction of the comments I made about Neil Diamond in the Sun-Times a few months ago: well, he's a better singer than Justin. I'll give him that. But let's return to the idea of living your life with some basic principles. Long ago I swore that I would never go out with my shirt unbuttoned to my navel, that I would never wear a comb-over, and I would never make Sequins into my signature Look. Neil Diamond didn't just do all these things at once: he did all of them at once in a movie starring Sir Laurence Olivier. If sticking by my guns here means that I'll lose the added revenue dollars I gain when you click on one of my sponsor's ad-banners, then madam, I shall simply have to accept the consequences.
Re: that magnificent sign above the branch library near my parents' house — Nope, it's still missing, I'm sad to say.
About that second slice of coconut-cream pie from The Agawam Diner in Rowley, Massachusetts: yes, madam (a different madam), it was just as good after a day in the fridge. It's convenient for me to imagine that your sole email reflects hundreds of readers who are equally fascinated by the dynamics of Agawam Diner pie, so out of a sheer sense of duty I feel that I should buy a whole pie the next time I'm there and bring it home for testing purposes.
And if I'm going to be scientific about it, I'll have to bring home two coconut-cream pies, so I can use one as a control group. "If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right," my Dad used to say to me in the middle of the night, as I lugged another sack of Quicklime from the back of the station wagon to the spot in the woods where he was disposing of another one of the "noisy packages" that Mr. Morrissey would occasionally send over from his South Boston trucking firm.
| Just finished Kevin Murphy's "A Year At The Movies." You might know him better as Kevin "Mystery Science Theater 3000" Murphy, or failing that, as Kevin "Voice of Tom 'The little red fireplug-like robot' Servo." Murphy.
No one can spend ten years of their professional life screening 3,000 of the worst movies ever made and come out the other side with the same minty-fresh soul they had when they went in. The experience left Kevin with a smudge on his love of moviegoing. His Windex of choice was to spend an entire calendar year at the movies: every day of 2001, he attended a public screening of a movie.
The concept sells the book. It sure sold me. A 365-day moviegoing streak isn't as fun to watch as someone eating 50 hot dogs and buns in twelve minutes, but then again, the experience was more likely to result in the Revelation of Insights. There was the added attraction that Murphy might go quite mad in the attempt. Early essays about the importance of the "persistence of vision" effect and its impact upon the acceptance of digital projection would gradually give way to claims that Barry is a good little ducky and so long as they keep his feet iced he should be OK to play in the big foosball game against the purple shag liquids from Xzzarzzax Tech on Saturday. If that's not worth $14.95, I just don't know what is.
In reality, the book was a bit of a disappointment. The problem is that the premise was useful to get Murphy's butt off the canvas and into the theaters and it sure helped sell the book proposal...but after it had served its purpose, he should have abandoned it. The book consists of 52 essays, covering each week of his odyssey. He's exploring film festivals in Scandanavia, where the sun never sets and the disorientation changes his approach to movies. He spends time working in a local megaplex and chatting with projectionists. He describes moviegoing in Australia in such an engaging fashion that you're disappointed when the chapter ends. Most of the highlights of the book are like that. The best bits are where Kevin's in exotic locales running a dust-mop through the dark corners of the theater industry.
But then there are those days when he simply had to grit his teeth, hold his nose, and go see "Jurassic Park III" at the local movieplex for the nth time. It's part of the experiment, so it's duly reported.
Even some of his flashy stunts don't work out, in reality or in print. He spent months growing his beard and hair long so he could dress as Santa and picket the opening of "The Santa Claus 2" at the end of the year. But then, oops...Disney delayed the film's release until 2002. A late-November entry has him sewing immense hidden pockets into an overcoat so he could sneak an entire Thanksgiving dinner — complete with all the trimmings, including a folding table and tableware — into the theater. The theater manager spots Kevin and his wife sitting down to a splendid steaming meal in the front row of "Monsters, Inc." and merely wishes them a Happy Thanksgiving. Both chapters are major anticlimaxes.
Two of the best books in which a talented writer spends some time bumming around the planet propelled by a Personal Quest are Tony Horwitz' "Confederates In The Attic" and Douglas Adams' "Last Chance To See..." Both authors set out on their journeys with simple, self-imposed mandates. Tony became interested in the sudden popularity of Civil War re-enacting and spent a year travelling the South, to better understand the hobby and to pick up some insights to the larger mystery of our current relationship to the War. Douglas Adams toured the world trying to find some of the planet's most endangered species. What a bad deal these books would have been if they'd have been methodically broken down by week. "Week 41. Burkina Faso. Turns out that the Jenkins' Peppered Warbler is actually the name of the signature chicken dish at the Ouagadougou Hilton's rooftop grill, and not an endangered species. Oh, well. Next plane out is in four days, have luckily found a place that sells golf shoes in custom widths."
"A Year At The Movies" would have been a far stronger book if it had been allowed to find its own pace and rhythm. In the end, we care way more about The Smallest Licensed Movie Theater In The World than we do about Kevin's desperation to find something, anything to see at 10:30 PM to keep the streak going. We live in an age when $500 can equip any living room with digital film presentation and six-channel surround sound, and going to an actual theater is increasingly an exercise in which cynical people patronize theaters run by cynical corporations to watch films made by even bigger and more cynical media conglomerates. As such, people would have found real resonance with the simple premise "I'm spending a whole year re-discovering my love for having a Shared Experienced in a darkened theater with 400 strangers."
Still and all, "A Year At The Movies" gives you a solid $14.95 worth. I don't know if the experience did anything for Kevin Murphy, but reading it made me re-commit to seeing movies in actual theaters. As I write this, I've got "Taxi Driver," "Blood Simple" and "The Hustler" sitting in my DVD carousel eight feet away waiting to be spun...yet I'm wondering if there isn't time to catch a midnight screening of "One Hour Photo" somewhere instead, and I'm asking myself why I've never attended a film festival. That's a Win no matter how you slice it.
| Hey, has anyone out there ever rolled their own RSS feed from scratch? Enough people have asked me about tracking changes to this site that I'm thinking about adding RSS to my homemade blogger app.
I won't be doing anything ambitious with it, like making the entire content of the blog available via XML...I just want to wire up an engine so that the Sophisticated Modern Software that some people use to learn of updates to their favorite sites can inform said users of updates to this site, assuming of course that "one of their favorite sites," this is.
(See? Do you think you can find that sort of grammar just anywhere? Some people are going to be kicking themselves to learn that this stunning display of syntactical origami had been sitting here for days before it occurred to them to check in. And to think that I could have prevented this misery by simply spending a few days learning about RSS and then a spending an indefinite number of months Intending To One Day Get Around To Adding The Code To Support It!)
("We here at Andy Ihnatko's Colossal Waste Of Bandwith Seriously Intend To Get Around To Serving The Needs Of Our Readers, Someday Real Soon, When We Have Time, Probably." If there's a better slogan for the back of the tee shirt, well, I dunno what it'd be.)
I've been reading a couple of basic intros (particularly the PurplePages FAQ) and I think I'm starting to get my head around this. But if there's an info source or a book that just gave you a full-blown case of the Quivering Jennys it was so damned good, lemme know, OK?
So far, do I see any drawbacks to RSS? Well, there's the idea that I might have to come up with a title for everything I post here, if only for people watching the RSS feed. RSS works gangbusters for news sites, where tight, descriptive headlines lead to dense, content-rich articles. On a site like this, however, the headline "Boy, This Assemble-It-Yourself DVD Storage Unit Would Be A Lot Easier To Put Together If They'd Just Given Me Some Longer Screws" has the tendency to give the whole ball game away.
If I could get away with the feed only reading "Update! September 9, 8 PM" boy, I'd be sitting on velvet.
| OK, wow, lots of responses to yesterday's post about RSS. I'm too lazy to launch Excel and make a big Fox News Channel-friendly 3D pie chart, so imagine a tiny green sliver labeled "You should check out [name of helpful online RSS tutorial]" overwhelmed by an enormous orange hunk with the legend "I haven't the foggiest...but please please please please PLEASE go off and figure it out!!!"
So I've gone off and figured it out, thanks in no small measure to Green Sliver Contributor Brian Geiger, who sent me a sample .RSS file that he thought would work. I stress that I'm not the dullest steak knife in the sofa but his email caused me to shift gears from "OK, I'll try rolling together an .RSS file later" to "Damn, so I guess I've no excuse not to get this running tonight."
Now the bad news is that I'm not ready to publish it yet. First, because I'm still working out the best way to implement this. I've been adjusting the file manually and am now on Version Three, in which the "Headlines" are the date and time of the post and the content is the first paragraph thereof. Which for me is a real bargain, as I don't have to specify anything when I post a new entry. My blogger can just pop the required info straight out of the window. Looks like a winner so far.
And secondly, because obviously I haven't rewritten my blogger to support this yet. Every time I post I have to edit and upload the .RSS file by hand, which means that if I'm in a rush, I might not do it. Plus, while I've happily stolen TidBITS' method of storing .RSS files within the site, I haven't committed to anything yet, so if I gave you a Beta URL it might change.
So rest assured that some time (hopefully within a week or two) you'll see a new XML button on the site and an announcement that YellowText is now broadcasting.
Broadcasting your site to newswatcher-apps is actually no more complicated than creating HTML, if you're curious. What confused me initially was the same thing that confused me when I wrote my first HTML file way back in — dear Mother of God...nearly ten years ago? I'm used to writing code, where if the compiler or the interpreter doesn't get exactly what it wants, it spanks you and refuses to budge. So the first time I wrote an .HTML file, I wanted to make sure I was Formatting things precisely the right way and #Including everything in the header that the browser and server wanted to see. When in truth, HTML files from a dozen different authors will be formatted in a dozen different ways and they all work.
Ditto for .RSS, which is just an XML file. The mechanism for .RSS is what the IRS would be like if they were continually stoned. Yes, there are highly complicated rules, forms, and procedures, but if you wanna do it like this instead, the software that parses the file is all like hey mannnn...thass okay, like, I don't wanna harsh your mellow, dude, I'll just take the file and I can...I'll take the...hey, look at that toaster, that's just too much, man...
So as you can guess, my initial quest to just download a bunch of .RSS files and see what they were supposed to look like turned out to be less than efficient.
| Okey-doke. I'm sure it'll be wholly disorienting for all of you to read this posting and realize that I'm doing it for me. "But Andy Ihnatko is always the light and soul of generosity!" you will sputter.
Alas, it's true. I'm posting this because I think I've written a successful block of code here and that when I post this, my blogger will update the local XML file and send it to the server. Worked fine here in the confined spaces of the test bunker and I think it's time for a live-fire exercise.
But as for you, the home viewer, I'm clubbing you over the head and locking you in the trunk of my car and taking you to Dullsville. Hey, how about this:
Which Peanuts Character Are You Quiz
That's kind of amusing, right?
Well, grit your teeth. This new code will be ship-shape toot-sweet and the series of fascinating posts about Adding RSS Features To My Homemade Blogger shall cease.
Push the button, Frank...
| The TV gets turned off now and will remain off for 22 hours or so.
I don't believe that the networks are being expoitative with their 9-11 coverage. It's simple: I think each network is just absolutely terrified of people thinking it's Not Doing Enough and is determined to do as much as everbody else, if not more. So I'm not offended.
All the same, I don't want to be a part of this. I have found my own relationship with the events and I require no reminders. More importantly, in the past few months I've only just begun to stop associating my flag with people who want to sell me things, be they a song about putting a boot up someone's ass, a political agenda masquerading as patriotism, the beer and snack chips in the commercials that ran before and after the Super Bowl halftime show, or especially any bit of tacky plastic with an American flag silkscreened on it.
It's taken a while, but I finally have my flag back.
Once again, my flag means what it's meant to me ever since I was a kid: my flag is the flag that my fellow Americans abandoned — in many forms and in great quantity — on the surface of the Moon. Once again, my flag symbolizes the power of what's possible when 250,000,000 people all want the same thing...and they're lucky enough to live in a country where that actually matters.
There's a good chance that someone on TV today will say something which will ruin the flag for me again, even if it's just for an hour. No thanks. I've just seen a really funny Letterman show followed by a really funny "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and I'm not watchin' TV again until the Real Funny Letterman Show comes back on.
Go out of your way to laugh at something today. You'll find some good candidates here on this site, thanks to the Law of Averages. But if you want a sure-thing, may I suggest this, on Mark Evanier's site?
| When I decided to keep the TV turned off all day on Wednesday, I didn't think I was leading a national trend. Honest. Maybe it's an indication that I actually ought to be running everything. Who better to lead than the man who has no obsessions about power or influence, who yearns to get the job done so he can return to his simple life of the homestead and the plowshare? "Ihnatko: Now That There's One Humble Bastard." So easy to picture it on a bumper sticker. Alas, my numerous mail-fraud convictions mean that a run for Sewer Commissioner can't happen. Damn that barbaric "Eighteen Strikes" law!
But a trend it was, apparently. I got lots of email from folks telling me that they were doing the exact same thing. Even the guests on tonight's late-night TV shows were on the bandwagon. There they were, on television, talking about how they're not watching any television today. In retrospect, that seemed to violate some law of causality.
I switched the set back on at 11:30 or so and immediately received a reminder that Cheap Irony remains your best Irony value. As soon as the audio came on, a local newscaster began somberly talking about how the nonstop TV coverage of the one-year anniversary was re-awakening fears of panic and hopelessness in some people. He read off a list of helpline numbers. As always, television doesn't hesitate to throw a drowning person a life preserver...and it's tied to a rope that's tied to a freakin' boat anchor. You just don't know which end they're going to throw first, that's all.
I'm glad that the coverage was there for people who needed it. I'm sure some people were cheered by the ceremonies. But I was also glad that my TV has an "off" switch.
(Hey, enjoy it while it's there. All the broadcasting industry has to do is call it an Anti-Piracy Measure and bango, turning your TV off or changing the channel mid-show will become a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "It's like this, Senator," they say, delivering this month's check, "If 'According To Jim' is paid for by advertising, and the viewer switches the set off or changes the channel before the commercials, he's getting the show without paying for it, right?")
| Testing something out, sensation-seekers. Stand by.
| 
| At this point, I should really state that YellowText is certainly not a weblog about RSS. Perish the thought.
See, that would indicate that this blog actually has some sort of purpose. When actually, it's most influencial driving force is brownian motion. So if you're new to this blog, not to worry, the changes I'm making are, apparently, all finished now and you won't hear me blathering on and on any more about testing this and adjusting that and et cetera.
Except for the next posting or so, when I explain to everyone what the new features are and how to use them.
And possibly one or two after that, when everyone starts using these features and turns up a major bug or seven.
Hey, Look, It's An Interesting Link! Push the button, Frank.
| | You caught me. I'm actually just writing a whole bunch of new entries because I'm hoping that as soon as I announce the new RSS feed, lots of people are going to want to try it out. It'll work a lot better if there are plenty of blog items that no one's seen yet.
This, the flurry of posts here. Well, the next post is something good, something I was going to post anyway. In fact, it's been sitting here in an open window for the past fifteen minutes, waiting until I'm just One Post Away from announcing the RSS feed.
So bear with me, please. Next one's a Maserati, I swear, so long as my swearing this doesn't constitute anything that I'll have to back up with demonstrable evidence later on.
| | What's the absolute ultimate in peer-to-peer music sharing technology? Swapping iPods with somebody for a while. It's like being at a party and spending some time at the bookcase next to the stereo with your head crooked at a 90-degree angle, trying to figure out your host's overall taste in music...with the critical exception that you can load the whole smash into the trunk of your car and drive off.
You get it? It's not like the times when I've been given a 128M USB key filled with tunes and handed it back the next day filled with stuff of my own. That's a cakewalk. By making some wise selections, you can present whatever self-image you want. "Romantic Softie" = Lots of Tony Bennett. "Sophisticated Yet Exciting" = nothing but Bill Evans. "You Grew Up In The Eighties? I Grew Up In The Eighties, too!!!" = Elvis Costello and lots of stuff from the Stiff Records boxed set.
When you hand over your iPod, though, you have no secrets left to hide. You can explain that the crappy bubblegum-pop track is part of the library that Apple PR pre-loaded onto the thing before they sent it to you, honest, I swear to God, but as for the rest you just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best. And hope that the entirely edible lady who wants to borrow your iPod understands that just because I have 14 CDs of Broadway show tunes it doesn't mean I'm gay. And just because I've got a whole CD of Johnny Cash songs about shotgunning wives and tossing their bodies down wells doesn't mean I'm a misogynist. And I want to stress once again that I have no idea where that N'Backstreet track came from. Go ahead. Quiz me and everything. I do know that the weiner with the drug problem and the cacky hair isn't the one who dumped Britney Spears. Other than that, zip.
My friend sent the iPod back loaded with some new discs. I'd been looking forward to this new CD from Alan Moore. He's an author who became a megasuccess through some extremely shrewd planning: (a) he saw to it that he was a skilled and inventive genius, which is always a good start, (b) he grew his hair and beard freakishly long, which looks boffo on book jackets, and (c) he managed to cultivate a reputation for not giving interviews. That's a fact: nearly every single interview with him begins with the statement that he doesn't give interviews. Any man who can simultaneously get publicity by appearing to shun it is definitely a man who can run a major airline if he chose to.
So I have this appointment this afternoon. I plug the iPod into the car stereo, find this Alan Moore CD, and drive off. Alan Moore's specialty is moody, Jack the Ripper-type stuff set in the slums and scums of 19th-century London. The CD turns out to be a series of instrumentals, actually, with his Victorian voice overs.
I thus spent about fifteen to twenty minutes hearing about abused workers crushed to death by fillage and rubble during the construction of the new Victoria Line. Then there was the song about urchins who eke out an existance by sifting through rivers of raw sewer filth hoping to recover lost coins and jewelry becoming overcome by the fumes and drowning in the muck, and then came the big Top-40 number about a profound blackness that made its home within the soot of the skies and the streets and set up shop feeding off the tension of the newly Industrialized city, a dark force with its own will and motive, a massive stage the dimensions of which we can barely acknowledge yet must numbly play our parts as guided by unseen, clawed hands; with neither fanfare nor discussion, surely we now find ourselves as insignificant slabs of meat being made ready for market.
At that point I turned it off because I had arrived at the Red Cross Donor Center and a massive bureaucratic agency would soon be punching a hole in my flesh and draining off my blood.
On that basis I was actually quite pleased that the music wasn't the sort of stuff you'd hear during the scene changes in an episode of "The Brady Bunch."
| | And now we bring RSS Theme Week to a close because I have completed the task of creating an RSS feed for YellowText.
Let's get straight to it: YellowText now works with an increasingly-popular new(-ish) class of Internet app known as RSS Aggregators. The upshot of that is that you don't have to come to the site to find out if there's anything new. If YellowText has been updated, the Aggregator running on your desktop will tell you.
Now, modesty forbids me from suggesting that you'd run this app just to learn of changes to my humble little slice of synaptic gumbo. Thousands of sites have RSS feeds, so clicking into your Aggregator will tell you that there are new articles on YellowText, SlashDot, Wired News, Salon, et al. Instead of fluttering from bookmark to bookmark, just one window gives you the status of all the sites you're particularly interested in.
And that tells the story. You can't get everything via the Aggregator. Just a list of current headlines and a brief description of each. Items you haven't seen are highlighted and a double-click will send you to the webpage.
There are a bunch of different aggregators out there. My fave Mac app is NetNewsWire (pictured). On the Windows side I've tried and liked NewzCrawler.
NetNewsWire and NewzCrawler work more or less the same way. You get a one-window view of the sites you're watching and will update the view automatically. Each of them can throw up an alert when it finds changes, assuming you're so twitchy about missing out on any of Danni Ashe's new nudie pics that you want to be yanked away from whatever you're doing whenever they appear on her site.
Setting up these apps for the YellowText feed is a snap.
1) Create a new channel. In NetNewsWire, go to the "Subscriptions" menu and select "Subscribe." In NewzCrawler, go to the "Channel" menu and navigate through the "New" submenu to "New Newsfeed."
2) Type in the URL of YellowText's RSS feed:
http://www.cwob.com/channels/yellowtext.rss
3) Have the aggregator refesh your subscriptions.
That's it. All the information the aggregator needs is in that .rss file.
People have been asking for a simple way to learn about site updates since I started the Colossal Waste of Bandwidth, but I couldn't come up with a satisfactory solution, which isn't a big surprise when you consider how little actual time I spent working on the problem. OK, it's taken seven years, and the steady development of a fundemantal networking technology that takes 95% of the work out of my hands, but you finally get your wish.
Folks have also been asking how they can link to individual entries here. That's not been possible; with existing versions of this blog, the only post with a unique URL is the newest one.
Well, to make the RSS work the way it's supposed to, I had to give my blogger app a new infrastructure that tags each item individually. Therein lay Opportunity. "Why make this available just to Aggregators?" I thought. "Do I work and slave for the pleasure of software intermediaries? Nay, I say! Nay!"
(Which was only understandable. I just saw "Spartacus" again yesterday so I've sort of been in a Slave Uprising mode for much of the past 40 hours.)
So take a look at another new addition: the "Link2" buttons scattered around this blog are direct links to the items they follow. If you think one of these little bagatelles I've written is worthy of passing along to your Aunt Fresca, click on the button and cut-and-paste the URL from the window that results...or copy the URL via your browser's contextual menu. Slap that baby into an email and you're on velvet.
Putting together the RSS feed was actually a lot simpler than I imagined. Of course, if I were using someone else's blogger system, it would've been simpler still: I'd just remain on the sofa reading "People" Magazine and eating grapes like a pampered caliph, while the guys and gals behind Blogger Pro and LiveJournal spend sleepless nights behind the scenes, making my blog RSS-capable. Since my blogger is my own creation, I had to do it all myself. My knowledge of the state of Liza Minelli's marriage and How Princess Di's Sons Are Getting By has suffered greatly. Fortunately, I was able to keep my non-dominant typing hand free, so I still managed to get the grapes down OK.
Nonetheless, it's a demonstration of the power of the 'net. RSS is one of those Really Cool Things that's Just Starting To Go Big. It's slick and it's fairly sophisticated: your website can essentially "syndicate" parts of its content to millions of client apps. That's a ridiculous amount of cool.
Sunday, I knew little about RSS. I knew just enough to be able to BS an audience into thinking I know everything about it, provided that the RSS question came close enough to the end of my lecture that I could run out to an ATM and cash the check before the speakers' committee had a chance to stop payment. Yet! Because RSS is an Open Standard, it didn't take long to find exhaustive documentation online as well as several examples. So long as I understood and played by the published rules, every resource that exploits RSS (and there are a hell of a lot of 'em) can use my feed, whether it puts my lead paragraph in a window, throws an alert into the corner of the screen, or makes someone's cellphone go deedleDitdoodleBipdeedleDit.
No licensing fees, no Strategic Partnerships, no added hardware, no regular maintenance, I did floss twice a day while I wrote the code, but I was going to do that anyway...well, as usual, all this Open Standard required of me was a Will To Excel (and a welcome arrival of a span of time during which I happened not to be watching much TV).
As always, Your Comments Are Appreciated.
Incidentally, if you're not going to use the RSS feed, don't sweat it. You won't even know it's there. But just this one time, you'll want to scroll back through the past few hours. I back-loaded the blog with lots of new entries just so that everyone accessing the site for the first time via an RSS aggregator would have lots of things to click on.
Keep Watching The Skies!
| | Okey-doke...I guess I wasn't done building the RSS feed. Now that the Installed User Base of the feed has gone from five to about a jillion, I've learned that just because my copy of NetNewsWire (etc.) can read everything properly I shouldn't assume that it's all hunky-dory.
I've heard from some folks who couldn't access the feed. Each of you made compelling arguments but it was the statement "Look, not even Internet Frakkin' Explorer thinks that yellowtext.rss is a properly-formatted XML file!" that finally penetrated through the impressively-thick walls of the Fortress of Arrogance and given the choice between (a) convincing the XML Standards Committee and thence the rest of the world that my concept of A Proper XML File is in fact superior to their own or (b) simply making a simple change to the file, I made the simple change to the file. It was a nice, sunny day today and I wanted to go outside and play, you see.
The problem: I got too fancy. I had slipped in lots of extra formatting so the XML file would look prettier when I examined it in BBEdit. NewsWire-type apps are very laid back about subtle inconsistencies, so I had no idea the file wasn't up to snuff. It loaded it up just fine on Lilith and on my Windows box, so I just clapped myself on the back and called it a night.
I've just made the changes to the file and to the code that maintains the file. Explorer likes the file, as does Mozilla. We'll just post this little bagatelle (the one you're currently reading) and if everything's skittles and beer, I can pick up my Blind Arrogance right where I left it, next to the croquet set in the backyard.
As usual, if you have any problems accessing the feed, do please let me know, eh?
OK. Push the button, Frank...
| | I did something pretty fun last weekend, but dash it, while it took me all of seven minutes to write the first couple of paragraphs, Number Three adamantly refuses to be written. But stick around, because it involves my possible participation in a Clint Eastwood movie.
(This is what's known as a "teaser," folks. I got the idea from "Inside Edition.")
In the meantime, I now need to explain what "Push the button, Frank" means: it's from "Mystery Science Theater 3000." At the end of every show (every episode from the seasons starring TV's Frank, anyway) Doctor Forrester would give that command to his henchman, who would then push the button on the Gizmonic console that cut the feed from Deep 13 and started the end-credits. It's a good line to pull out when you need to abruptly end something.
Apparently, lots of you have been kicking yourselves purple trying to remember where y'all have heard that phrase. Kick no further...unless you're into that. This is the Internet, after all.
One quick note, too, so long as I'm here. This week has been a demonstration of why I can't be too aggressive about setting up my junk-mail filters: I never ever ever know when my Inbox is going to receive something that's (a) unsolicited and (b) interesting.
Example One: Some guy at Yamaha emailed me over the summer to say that the company's coming out with a new line of MIDI keyboards. Would I like to take a look at one when they ship? Sure, I said. Yamaha makes a bunch of neat consumer instruments and it'd be fun having one at the edge of my computer table for a little while.
Santa Geoff, my FedEx guy, showed up yesterday and backed the truck up into the driveway. Usually this only means that he strained himself playing beer-league softball and thus can't throw the package onto the porch all the way from the street. But no, he deployed the handcart and in the shadow of my puzzled looks, he proceeded to wheel an enormous cardboard coffin up to my front door.
Ah.
OK. I didn't know that Yamaha was introducing a new Digital Grand Piano. 88 full-sized keys and everything. Okey-doke.
I'm not complaining, not a bit, surely. But a couple of months ago I imagined that I'd pull this keyboard out from time to time during the workday and noodle around a bit on it in my search for Le Mot Juste. Now, I'm imagining placing an enormous brandy snifter on the corner of it and hoping that any honeymooners who come through my office will toss in a couple of bucks and ask me to play "We've Only Just Begun."
I am also pleasantly relieved to recall that I didn't actually sign any sort of document promising to send this thing back. I say this not because I intend to scam a semi-pro digital piano off of Yamaha, but because I don't really intend to spend $80 shipping this 100-pound monster back.
Example Two: An email from a publisher asking permission to include one of my scribblings in a Dutch book of popular quotations.
I hardly knew what to say.
Part of me wonders if this isn't some sort of scam. After giving my consent I'll be offered the chance to buy as many handsome library copies of Uk, Giyyat!: A Compendium Of Popular Dutch Wisdom as I like at $49.99 a throw. The other part of me (the one whose driveshaft is connected to my Secondary Arrogance Processor) wonders if at some point over the years I've written something that unknowingly has become the "Sh*t Happens" of the Netherlands, appearing on bumper stickers, novelty baseball caps sold at gas stations, and in the speeches of unpopular political candidates desperate for some media play.
Well, what the heck. Consent granted.
Example Three: Yes, I knew that when I read this email it would turn out to be a come-on for some sort of domain-registration service...but seeing an email addressed to you with "Protect your name in Canada!" can provide you with a nice little break in the day.
There I was, thinking hard about this next book chapter I needed to polish, when a chirp from my email client and a quick command-Tab to bring my Inbox to the front of the screen suddenly sent me way off track. "Yes, but is it possible that I have Canadian enemies?"
Those two words were in itself amusing enough. What do you have to do to acquire a Canadian Enemy? Every Canadian I've met has been pleasant, easy-going — OK, clearly I'm talking about the ones I've met outside of a hockey rink but stick with me — generous, and not willing to make a harbor a grudge or make a fuss over something stupid.
(My guess is that when you live in one of the world's coldest heavily-populated areas, every BTU of energy is too precious to waste on yelling and screaming, and that given the quality of the local product it's a shame to have your mouth open and not be pouring beer inside it. End of aside.)
So when someone at a party complains about being the victim of a Canadian vendetta, they invite suspicion. Either they don't understand the simple and charming ways of our fur-trapping neighbors to the north, or they're typical American jerks who, when they give Canada a thought at all, reduce them to a quaint, rustic stereotype. People like that make it more difficult for the rest of us, you know?
| | It's an odd thing when you take a break from reading a great new book and you hit the website of one of your favorite writers and he talks about this great new book he's reading and it's the exact same book. Particularly when the book in question isn't available here in the Land Of The Free and has to be ordered through Amazon.co.UK. You doubt your eyes.
I scrolled back up through the blog. Cognitive blanks are the sporadic result of careless reading, I knew. Clearly, having just spent three hours reading this book, my brain was still in the middle of a massive write operation and, like a desperate "Jeopardy!" contestant who figures that "Who is Marilyn Monroe?" has got to be right sooner or later, it kept buzzing in and screaming the title of the book.
But nope, it's the same book. It occurred to me to click his mail link and say "Hey, I'm reading that book, too!" but I've never met the man before and this would fall somewhat short of how I'd like our first exchange to go (i.e., he emails me out of the blue, demanding to write an embarrassingly positive blurb for the back-jacket of whatever I do next, and then gives me the phone number of a franchisee that still makes Coca-Cola in 16-ounce green glass bottles and ships to any domestic US address).
| | Is there a word for the sense of vague accomplishment you get as the result of picking up a huge jar and tipping out the last tablet from a two-month supply of calcium supplements? It seems like there ought to be a word for it.
Today, I finished off a two-month supply of Tums Bone Health. This was the end-result of a sister's idle comment over the summer: she seems to think that cola leaches calcium from your system, leading to frail bones (which I'm cool with) and heart trouble (which I'd sooner avoid). I also finished writing an article that'll be seen by about a million eyeballs a few months from now. To be honest, I'm kind of more proud that I made my way through that whole jar of Tums. The process of writing is not without its challenges, of course. This afternoon, it was going so well that the only thing stopping me from throwing myself out the window to a messy end ten stories below was the knowledge that I'd have to stop partway down and dig an eight-story hole in the yard under my office window...which seems like an awful lot of trouble just to get out of writing a closing paragraph.
But then again, when I divide 70 tablets by Four Chewable Fruity Flavors, I discover that I've spent about two and a half weeks eating those hateful little green ones that don't taste like anything I even remotely approve of. Let's see Vladimir Nabokov top that.
| | Waltham, Massachusetts. Lunchtime, today. I'm stuck at a red light behind a Pontiac. I see the 6000LE nameplate on the trunk and for a split-second I actually think "Wow! When did Google start making cars?"
This has been a public service message from the It's Been How Long Since You've Been Out Of The House?!? Council.
| | A treadmill. A treadmill, for God's sake!
I mean, during my regular Constitutionals I pass by a great deal of junk that's been dragged to the curb. And I'm a real good sport about that. When I stop and root through the boxes and don't find anything worth coming back for in my car, it's not like I scribble an annoyed Post-It and leave it on the homeowner's screen door.
But if you own a house at the top of the one Immense Freakin' Hill on my 10K route, don't leave a treadmill on the sidewalk. That's downright antisocial. "Not only can I not be bothered to actually go out and exercise, exposing myself to the hoots of my intellectual inferiors," you are saying, "but I now can't even be bothered to not be bothered." Sending that message to one in my condition runs counter to the unspoken agreement we all made when we decided to stop living in trees and try and make some sort of use out of these opposable-thumb thingies.
Message received, sir or madam. I diverted myself around your treadmill, though in my oxygen-deprived state I'm lucky I'm not out there still, having trotted straight on the apparatus and by now beginning to wonder why it's taking me three hours to cover the final ten yards to the top of the hill. "You are wise, I am dumb," I noted, "you are watching 'Wheel Of Fortune,' I am watching a minivan full of junior-high kids laughing and giving me the finger."
I really would have marched straight up to the house and given that thoughtless jerk a piece of my mind. But up ahead, the gas station and aluminum recycling center had suddenly vanished from the top of the hill and were replaced by a craggy bluff where a chalk-faced man in a black robe beckoned me to come sit and play chess with him.
(Nice guy, too. Weird that someone so keen on chess had never encountered the Chameleon Gambit before, though. He was a good sport about it and promised that we'd play again real soon.)
| | I love AppleScript Studio.
Unless this bit of blogger code fails to work as intended, in which case I hate AppleScript Studio.
Push the button, Frank...
| | Another test.
Here's what's going on behind the scenes: I finally have a few hours (and the mental frame of mind) to begin converting my blogger scripts to work with AppleScript Studio. AppleScript is, by itself, just a scripting language. It works behind the scenes and the user isn't really supposed to know that it's doing anything at all. You just run this script and your applications do what they do all on their own, without your having to calculate a result in one app and then paste it into a second to make it pretty and then send it to a third app to email it to a hundred people.
Its shortcomings become apparent when your scripts become more complex. Like this blogger. As I keep adding features to it, the script keeps running into more and more decision points that require direction form the user. Do you want to post this straight away, or just cache it for later? What are the keywords for the associated Google search? Is there a slug associated with this one?
Plain-vanilla AppleScript forces you into some clunky solutions. My special BBEdit Scripts menu contains not one, but two YellowText items. They're the same exact script, except that the one marked "Cache" has its uploading code stripped out. I fire off the one I want and bang: I have to walk through a short but clumsy series of AppleScript's pre-fabbed, one-item dialog boxes to provide the script with the input it needs.
The only alternative would be to somehow encode this within the posted item itself. I'd have to start every new entry with "KEYWORDS: foo bar baz" and then have the script strip that line out before sending the post to my weblog. That's even clumsier.
AppleScript Studio makes AppleScript a part of Project Builder, which is Apple's core development system for MacOS X. Meaning that anything you can do in Objective C, you can do in AppleScript. I'm still a bit skeptical that if someone wanted to design a traditional, full-blown app they'd want to do it in AppleScript. You could. You could also travel from Boston to Winnipeg via a pogo stick. But for taking an AppleScript that's gotten out of hand and making it purty and more useful, Studio is aces.
You can add a user-interface to your script toot sweet and get it up and running in no time. Go into Project Builder and create a new project. Choose "AppleScript Application" from the list. Then y'go into the Interface Builder app and draw your UI graphically. I built me a dialog box with two fields (one for the keywords, one for the slug) and four buttons (Cancel, Cache, and Post, and a checkbox to choose whether this one gets a slug or not).
The rest of the job is little more than clicking each of the buttons and attaching AppleScripts to them. All I had to do by way of re-coding was find the bits that collected information from those horrid pre-fab dialogs and have the script pull it from those fields in the custom dialog instead. Outside of those three lines of AppleScript, it was a cut-and-paste job all the way.
AppleScript Studio is more or less free, too. Just hit Apple's Developer site, sign up as a developer (free), and then you can buy ASS along with Project Builder for about $20...though oddly enough, you won't find that acronym anywhere on the website.
It's a depressing sign of advancing old age that I've had Studio since the winter and am only now building anything useful with it. When I learn new languages and development environments, I like to do it the way I did it when I was a kid: total immersion. Focus on nothing else until you "get" it. Carry a binder of printouts with you everywhere you go, including that small room with the bright lights and the echoey acoustics. Emerge from the house days later dirty, smelly, and with a successful, productive app to show off.
Alas, that's largely the stuff of kids. As you grow older, you lose your ability to obsess (Britney Spears stalkers excluded, of course). Another way of looking at it is that with broader experience comes a far wider array of interests and the inability to obsess over just one thing at a time.
Either way, I probably don't have any decent excuse for smelling this bad so I'm off for a shower.
| | Oh, how sad! I mean, it's one thing if your acting career has hit the skids with such a resounding "squeebeedeebeedap!"
(Forgive me, readers; I don't know what sort of sound an acting career makes when it hits the skids. I bet it harmonizes well with the theme from "Hollywood Squares," though.)
...that you have to go on a TV "celebrity" reality game show just to keep your AFTRA health insurance. It's even worse if it's not "Fear Factor" (NBC) or even "Celebrity Boxing" (FOX) but something for UPN, for God's sake.
But what if Reuters releases a news item about it on their website and you discover that between you, Emmanuel Lewis, Dennis Rodman, M.C. Hammer and someone from the last season of "Baywatch" you're the only one whose name is not a link? That even freakin' Webster has made the papers often enough to have one or two Related Stories?
People, stop right now and send a big mental hug to Mindy Cohn. I think she probably could use one.
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