Trying Shangri-La

Asides

So I’m going to take a whack at this “Shangra-Li Diet” thing I’ve read about on several blogs, most notably here. I’m not having a weight crisis, but I think 5-10 pounds would put me in a healthier class for my height. I bought the book and read it this morning, it basically just repeats itself a lot and seems to have a lot of filler, but it may be useful to some folks as a motivator. You can get all the important details from various blogs. Mostly I’m interested in it to see if the mind hacking really works, and I’m willing to endure Glenda making fun of me about trying something out of a diet book for the sake of you guys ;). Apparently I don’t own any sugar, extra light olive oil, or a scale, but I’ll post updates as I get going. Update: The author has a WordPress blog.

Share Your OPML

Asides

Share Your OPML has relaunched and appears to be built on WordPress. This was one of my favorite services a few years back and was far ahead of its time. I still think moving OPML around is too hard, it would be nice to have some sort of OPML normalization service that could log into different accounts at places like WordPress, Bloglines, and Google reader, grab your file, auto-discover any feeds for entries that don’t have a xmlUrl, and merge everything together using the updated attribute. Hat tip: Niall and Johan.

Driving on the Left

Asides, Travel

We’ve been driving all around the Dublin area, through Slane, Dunleek, Dowth, New Grange, and finally Drogheda and becoming accustomed to driving on the left has been an interesting experience. First in the rental car there are no fewer than 4 stickers throughout the driver area reminding you to be on the left, and there also seem to be signs to remind you about it around all the tourist areas. What I found difficult wasn’t driving on the left side, which was fairly easy to remember, but rather I found myself aligning myself as the driver with the part of the lane I would be in if I was driving on the right side. Needless to say, this can put you dangerously close to anything to the left of you. So my new mantra (oft-repeated by my sister) has become “Guide to the left.” Thank goodness for collapsible mirrors. On the bright side, left turns are easy.

Last Meals

Asides

Dead Man Eating is a weblog dedicated to documenting the last meals of death row inmates. Morbidly fascinating. There seems to be a lot of fried chicken. The weblog also includes things people have sent in as what they would have as their last meal, which generally seems to be enough food to feed a small village.

CNET Buzz Out Loud

Asides, CNET

Thanks to Michael Pate and Josh Jarmin who wrote in about Akismet and WordPress being mentioned on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast on 4/26, I got in contact with the Buzz folks and they invited me in to the studio today for a brief chat. (I still live a block away from CNET.) Molly Wood and Veronica Belmont were fantastic hosts and hopefully Molly can get her firewall sorted out. It should be up on their site later today. Update: I snapped two photos to Flickr during the podcast.

Cross-Datacenter File Replication

Asides, Linux

Anyone have any favorite tricks for geographically diverse real-time file replication on Linux? It seems like most information is pretty dispersed, and suggestions range from every-30-seconds rsync to putting all files as BLOBs in MySQL and replicating that. There has to be a better way. (The scariest part is Microsoft seems to show up first for most Googles I can think of, but Windows is not an option.)