Hit Diggity!!!

Meta

Click here, right now. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What is Matt making us click now? Maybe I shouldn’t, although that date thing was pretty funny…” Well to save the lazier among you some trouble, that’s the second page of Google results for “matt” and yours truly is at #13. Now before you call me the most narcissistic blogger ever in my defense I was merely vanity surfing my referrers when this popped up. Vanity surfing is not nearly as bad as vanity searching.

Anyway I’ve joked for a long time that the only reason I’m on the web is to become the #1 hit for “matt” on Google, it’s been the brass ring of my online existence. Before this latest Google dance I was somewhere toward the end of the 18th page if I remember correctly, so obviously something has been going right. Better yet, I now have a nice short hit list of people that have to go so I can make #1. 😉

I am so going to start using this at parties!

Image Fun

Uncategorized

Been playing with manipulating images with PHP all night, something I haven’t done much since I had the fancy capital thing on this site, and that wasn’t as much manipulating images as generating images using truetype fonts. With GD included PHP is very easy to use for this sort of thing. I’m storing the images themselves in the database as BLOBs, along with a bit of meta-data I grab from them when they’re uploaded using a web form. I have a small PHP script that returns the images from the database, resizes them to whatever width I specify in the query string, and does “funky” caching so if the image has already been generated/grabbed it returns just about as fast as reading it directly from the filesystem would. I have to have some fun because the site I’m doing this all for uses tables.

Speaking of tables, everyone head over to Big Pink Cookie and see how there aren’t any there. I recreated the basic layout in CSS and then helped Christine tweak it till it became the beauty you see before you now. If you’re curious, here are some of the changes I made:

  • The CSS and Javascript is now in seperate files, as to be easily cached.
  • The header graphic is now a h1 tag with the text hidden and the graphic as the background.
  • The latest pictures from Pixelog at the top of the page are now an ordered list, styled to display horizontially through CSS.
  • There is a “rapper” div (gotta have some flava) of a fixed width centered using margin: auto and a IE workaround.
  • Inside that there is a content and menu div, the menu has a fixed width and is floated on the right.
  • ms that were previously all preceded by “::” are now unordered list items with the :: effect recreated through a list image. Now if Christine wants to change the way her menu looks she just has to edit one file instead af change hundreds of double colons.
  • It now loads really, really fast. Especially when compared to before.

It might still have a stray error here or there that’s keeping it from validating, but give it a few days and all those should be ironed out. More importantly, it validates in spirit. I can now add Christine to the list of site I check when I’m browsing on my Palm over a 9.6k connection. Best of all, I think CSS no longer makes Christine’s eyes bleed, and she can see Tantek again.

Late Night

Personal

… and I need some sleep. Finishing up an admin package for a client tomorrow, as well as some satisfying personal project stuff. It’s Sunday so I don’t want to set the alarm, but I don’t want to sleep all day either. It’s been a nice weekend.

New If This Darn Thing…

Uncategorized

Well I picked up a motherboard at Fry’s with my dad, and hopefully this will resolve the desktop issues I’ve been having. The new motherboard is pretty sweet, and was quite cheap. I’m quite disillusioned of expensive motherboards with this one failing months after I got it. With the strong prospect that I’m taking my laptop back again it’s important that I at least have a working desktop though, so this will be good. It works!

While It’s Hot

Meta

Not that I’m advocating anything, but now probably would be a good time to buy some PhotoMatt, especially since the price just drastically dropped and there is a new juicy front page link that hasn’t been picked up by the bot yet. Is this wrong? Maybe, but all’s fair in love and BlogShares.

In other meta-news I stole some buttons from the incredible Eric, but the real reason was I have a strange irrational desire to please this thing.

I better get to sleep though. I’m sitting in a rehearsal at 10, presenting for HPUG at 1, and again at the Web Technology SIG. Stop by HAL-PC if you’re interested.

Next Semester

Uncategorized

I just finished registering for all my classes and I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out. I don’t have an amazing Monday–Thursday schedule like I did this semester, but the classes should be quite good. Here’s what I ended up with:

  • 3332: Philosophy of Language
  • 1336: U.S. and Texas Constitutions and Politics — Introduction to the constitutions and politics of the United States and Texas, emphasizing constitutional structure, federalism, separation of powers, limited government, public opinion, elections, and civil liberties. Taught by A. Little, who I had this semester for Politics of the Greek Theatre and was great.
  • 3310: Introduction to Political Theory — Recurring themes and problems in the study of politics; draws upon classical and modern works. Taught by the inimitable R. Lence, who is a very colorful character and a fantastic teacher.
  • 3319: Politics of Social Policy — Public policy initiatives in areas of civil rights, welfare, education, human resources, and housing, including criteria for evaluating proper impact. Taught by R. Lineberry, who I haven’t had yet but is one of the “theorists” of the Political Science department.
  • Jazz Band and Lab — Haven’t finalized all this yet because I haven’t heard back from the director about the times.

You’ll notice there are no economics classes there. This is more a result of the classes I’ve taken than a result of changing interests. I still love economics, in fact I’m going to be interning at the Dallas Fed this summer, but the classes and department seem mediocre. Moreover I’ve been wooed by the Political Science department, as my educational experience with their professors and classes have been outstanding.

In further changes for next semester I’ve decided I’m going to start a notes blog. What I really need is some sort of rich-text document management system, but I can make the blogging paradigm fit my needs. Classes can become categories; everything will be searchable, dated, archived, accessible from anywhere, and support various meta-data. What I’ve been doing so far is a combination of text files and folders, and frankly it’s weak. I haven’t decided yet rather I’m going to make it public or not, but even if I do it probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me.

Mouse Pad

Uncategorized

Mouse pads are probably the most personal and often changed components of most people’s computing setup. I have come to the conclusion that every mouse-pad has a story behind it, and I’m curious to hear them. What’s yours?

I’ll start it off. I have two mouse-pads, the first has a Picasso painting on it, Three Musicians. My mother got it for me as a present, and I believe she got it from a museum store. The other one I use at my desktop has each of the Presidents of the United States on it in chronological order. I bought it when I was in Washington D.C. for the G8 camp over the summer, which was a wonderful experience by the way, and we visited the Lincoln Memorial. Your turn. 🙂

Psychological Egoism

Essays

Okay you know the drill. This is a paper I turned in today for my Ethics class. It deals with psychological egoism, and if you have any leanings toward this moral theory I’d be interested in hearing your feedback on this. My language is strong in the paper, but that doesn’t mean my mind isn’t open. I didn’t have as much time to put into the print (PDF) version of the paper this time, but it’s still a nicer way to read it than the HTML below.

Every human action is at its root a selfish act; even acts that are altruistic on the surface are primarily motivated by a deeper selfishness — or so a psychological egoist would say. Psychological Egoism is a descriptive theory that rather than suggesting, as ethical or rational egoism does, how people ought to live, suggests how people actually go about their lives. The assumptive nature of the theory introduces a number of possible avenues for refutation, some of which are very compelling. Continue reading Psychological Egoism →

MySQL 4.1

Uncategorized

Well everyone and their dog’s host is using MySQL 4.0 now, so in my quest to forever remain on the bleeding edge (and after some local testing) I installed it on the server and it’s humming along nicely. People may think that staying with the latest version is less stable or something, but I’ve been following the 4 branch since it went public and in all that time I’ve only had one problem (with 4.0.4 I believe), and a minute later I just downgraded back to my old version and reported the bug to the mailing list. It was fixed in the next release. What’s that you say? Your host is still on 3.23? You want a query cache and sub-queries and UNION? Well I know a place where the bandwidth flows freely and the software is always up to date. Let me know you’re signing up and I’ll hook you up with a discount. Update: Whoa! Either there’s something wrong with my benchmarks or there have been some major performance improvements in this version. I’m extremely impressed.

Pages That Groove

Music

I know I’m too tired when I visit a page with terrible graphics and cheesy MIDI music playing in the background and think, “this is sort of nice.” To be completely honest, whatever the music is it’s mesmerizing, and quite relaxing. Maybe PhotoMatt could use some good relaxing background music… (Or maybe just video game music.)

The Infamous Becca

Uncategorized

Becca aka Teknoferit aka “the Intern” knows me way too well, and anticipates my thoughts before I think them. I spent a month working with her almost every day, and she has come closer to organizing me than any girl has before or since. Go check out her new site.

Rebecca Lammons is also the ghost editor of this site, going behind my posts and making the half incoherent coherent and leaving fully incoherent alone mostly. (Uhh…) She has some awesome photography in her gallery, and if you look closely you can actually spot a few pictures of yours truly.

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

Uncategorized

I’m still holding on to my personal ban of war posting, as there is enough of that going on already, but a post by Lucian really grabbed me, though the commenter Walker has a good point about the story’s conclusion. Anyway my english professor gave me a copy of this poem today which really speaks, especially when you think about the story of Abraham and Isaac critically, in light of all its implications. It’s written by Wilfred Owen, who for those of you not familiar with him is widely regarded to be the poet (at least for England) of the first World War. He was killed in battle a year before the war ended in 1918.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold.
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Peaks and Valleys and Belly-Buttons

Humor

I don’t usually like to discuss traffic, but here goes. Over the relatively short history of this website there have been a number of peaks in the traffic here, usually coinciding with some particular event. The first big surge came with the MTCurly plug-in, which is now really starting to show its age. However a single link from Todd Dominey had the counters rolling. Then there was quiet in the land, and I slowly but surely built up a readership of people searching for “enron women nude” and other interesting things. And then of course there’s Tantek, Christine, Jeffrey, Kathy, and Rannie.

Then came my pilgrimage to South by Southwest, and as a result of meeting people and posting summaries of the sessions, my hits rose predictably. At least until this picture showed up in Kottke’s link blog and had my head spinning and the counter rolling.

More recently, two incidents have made me rethink my entire approach to blogging. First my blog was invaded by the French. I’m not kidding. If anyone can tell me what this means I would greatly appreciate it, because all I know is it links to a photo of the lovely Sarah C. with one of my keys. Since then a number of comments have been left on various pictures of Sarah that say things like “Sensualité.” Speculation has run wild, especially since no one I know can get a good translation of the text, but the general consensus is that Sarah is secretly some sort of underground “entertainment” star in France and her rabid fans somehow stumbled across this site.

But today was the day that broke all the rules. I was expecting a bit of traffic from the new stuff but it came instead from a surprising source. Yes, I’ve been Barlowed.

Anyway, this is all tangential to what I’ve been trying to say the entire time, my new revelation. The whole writing thing has been done. People don’t need another interesting website, they’ve got so many of those they line them up like cattle in aggregators and extract their content in such a manner as to get through as many as possible. What the world is really thirsting for is web celebrity paparazzi. You want scandalous pictures of the web personalities you know and love, and I want to give them to you. We can have the exposé pictures, something like Tantek using Safari; the scandal photos, which could involve pretty much any situation with a certain blonde SxSW panelist; and finally the relationship tracker, where to start, there are tons of these going around.

I see untold dozens of dollars waiting to be tapped in this nascent market. Obviously this is too large a task for me alone, so any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m also curious to hear some thoughts on this. How long before we see Josh Davis while standing in line at the supermarket?