because not enough websites start with the letter “Z”
Posted in nerdliness on Apr 29th, 2008
In Random Is As Random Does, I talked about how I configured some smart playlists in iTunes to provide a better random sample of the music I most wanted to hear from my MP3 collection. Basically I created smart playlists for the least played tracks, the least recently played tracks, the most played tracks, the [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Apr 28th, 2008
I currently support four public facing sites that use Wordpress as the back-end content management system (CMS). I also have a Wordpress test platform on my laptop, where I tinker with several different themes, that supports another four sites. So, I’ve got eight different Wordpress installations to update each time a new release is made [...]
Posted in life, nerdliness on Apr 21st, 2008
Zanshin.net is just a speck of lint under a finger nail on the long arm of the Internet. As a weblog it gets few visitors, and even fewer comments. While the domain has existed for over 11 years now, the site has been formatted as a blog only since December 1999. I have no accurate, [...]
Posted in life, nerdliness on Apr 15th, 2008
For the first time in several years, I am free of my cell phone contract. When I moved to Kansas in 2004, my cell phone was nearing the end of its two-year obligation. Without realizing the consequences (and without being told about them) I called Cingular and changed my phone number to the new area [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Apr 3rd, 2008
All of us have heard of the “six degrees of separation” theory, which implies that you can get from any person on the planet to any other person on the planet with only six intervening connections. For example, I know my father, whose best friend, in turn, is a former Washington DC lobbyist, and has met with former [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Mar 31st, 2008
Ever since switching my site’s back end over to Wordpress in late December I’ve had to use Camino or Firefox to edit or produce new postings to my site, as there was a bug in the TinyMCE implementation that Wordpress was using. Any entry edited via Safari had all of its <p> tags stripped out [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Mar 12th, 2008
The first instant messages I sent were within AOL’s “wading pool” using version 1.0 or 1.5 in about March 1993. Soon thereafter I left the wading pool and started swimming in the open, unfiltered Internet ocean. One of the first pieces of software I played with was the first version of ICQ. [...]
Posted in elsewhere, nerdliness on Mar 11th, 2008
Okay, I can see where my productivity over the next couple of days is going to take a nose-dive. Adding a wonderfully minimalist aggregation site to my daily rotation may require I rethink some of the other sites in that list. That or find an extra hour or two in the day.
You can check it [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Mar 10th, 2008
Shawn Blanc has put up an excellent review of his new 15″ MacBook Pro over at his site. In the Unchanging section of the review he makes the point that Apple products age very well:
… it is not uncommon to see someone still using their four or five-year-old PowerBook on a daily basis. Even [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Mar 9th, 2008
Snap Shots, those popup windows that give a preview of the target page of a link, are to my thinking highly annoying. You can turn the feature off by visiting their FAQ and finding the link that leaves a cookie on your machine to disable the feature on any pages you visit. Unfortunately, if you [...]
