Try To Take Over the World

Josh: So what are we doing tomorrow night?
Matt: The same thing we do every night, Pinky…

The other highlight was when Josh decided going to hell would be like the end of the Wizard of Oz. Pshaw. Everyone knows the Wizard of Oz is an allegory of William Jennings Bryan and the free silver movement.

Spring Broken

On this delightfully dreary day I’ve decided to bundle up for a spell with some hot tea and get some serious coding done. In fact that’s much how my day has been so far: code, code, code, surf blogs, (4 hours later) code. We’ll see how this goes…

Search Updated

I’ve cleaned up the ht://dig search engine quite a bit, though I still have to hack it to be XHTML 1.1 compliant and fit better with the site, but after updating the index I got these interesting stats:

./htstat
htstat: Total documents: 11490
htstat: Total words: 1933258
htstat: Total unique words: 17660

The bulk of those pages are from the photolog, which is currently 5200 photos, but before the index was huge because my URLs weren’t very tidy and sometimes the same thing would have 10 different ways to access it. That’s still true a bit, but I’m working on it. Also I’ve been working very hard on a new project, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet.

SxSW Interactive

So, is anyone else going to South by Southwest Interactive next week? This will be my first time and I’m incredibly excited, but also a little bit anxious since I have no idea what it’s going to be like. I’m going to be staying in Pflugerville with my wonderful sister but I suspect I’m going to spend most of my time in town.

If you’ve been before, I’d love to hear whatever tidbits of advice you have. If you’re going, definitely let me know and hopefully we can meet up. I’d love to start putting some non-Houston faces with the domain names :).

Recovering

Last night was grand, and the pictures will be up shortly. I’m also catching up on some other backlog stuff around here. There have been several requests for some vintage content, so I’m digging back through my computers grabbing some old pictures and such. I’ll post when I put them up because the reverse chronological nature of my photolog which just started last summer means that anything from earlier times is going to wind up in the back.

Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, I want to mention that there’s a new requirement if you get a a key you have to take a picture with it and email it to me. If I give you the key personally I can take the picture but for the key receivers around the country you’ll have to help me out here.

Open Keys Update

If you remember the plan was to distribute keys to my car to as many people as possible. Today I got started, giving keys to my parents, Sarah, Sarah, Josh, and Iram. Tomorrow (I guess today, dang it’s early/late) I’m going to mail out ones to Yale (Rachel), Berklee (Rene), NYU (Julie), and my favorite artist-whose-show-I-haven’t-seen-yet-but-will-ASAP (Elissa).

I personally test all the keys before sending them out, and I squeeze some writing onto them. If you want one I’m still taking requests.

Spring Break

Well technically spring break started for me yesterday at 2:30, but today is my first full day off. I’ve got some fun stuff planned for this week, but it’s a little difficult since it seems everyone has a different week off for spring break this year. I’m going to try and get all the work out of the way at the beginning of the week so the rest I can relax (and head out of town). The Jason Moran concert tonight and Sarah’s party should get it off to a nice start.

Biting

When did it get so cold??? I am cold to the point of desperation there. Now I know, some of you native (or born-again) Notherners are reading and thinking “42 degrees? Ha! That’s jogging weather!” and you are probably right. But how should I get warm? I’m not conditioned to deal with this.

Email Encoding

The Hiveware Email Encoder is quite nice, and it seems like it’s been updated to encode the email in a very strange way, but it works. What would be nice is to have a PHP function that would allow you to do this conversion on the fly, like <?php echo email_encode('email@example.com'); ?> and it would echo out all that cool stuff. Someday…

Greg Palast

Saw an interesting speech by Greg Palast today, in which he made a lot of very strong assertions about a number of issues, most notably of the 2000 presidential elections. He is not as much as a wack as I expected him to be going in, but I’m going to reserve further judgment until I read his new book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. I did get to have a brief but informative conversation with him after everything about his time “undercover” with Milton Friedman and situation in Venezuela, which he called the most badly reported story since Vietnam. He seemed like a very nice guy, despite his inflammatory views and writing. Check out some of the articles on his site if you’d like more background.

Because They’re Watching

This is just post to let everyone know that you can now browse PhotoMatt securely. The secure site is functionally equivalent except it doesn’t display the Wanderlust code because it will pop an annoying error since it’s loading remotely. It uses a self-signed 1024 bit SSL certificate which will pop up as not being from a trusted authority the first time you visit but if you add it to your trusted certificates (usually just a button click away) it won’t bug you anymore. Why do this? Because I can.

This will appeal to exactly 2 people.