Asymptomatic

I fear it is not working for me. When I added Contenture codes to this site back when they opened the doors to the public, I thought it was a system with a lot of promise. Today, I'm not so sure.

Looking at my Contenture dashboard today, I can see how much I've earned by putting the Contenture code on my site. A whopping $0.52. Any money is more money than nothing, you might say. But there's more to it than that.

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I upgraded Habari to the latest 0.7, where all of the plugin configuration has changed, and I put my site into maintenance mode while I was doing it so that visitors wouldn't break stuff while I was working.

And I forgot to turn off Maintenance Mode.

So for about a week, this site has been serving nothing but "Hi, I'm an idiot!" to anyone who happened by. That's not good.

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I've been reading a lot about the Palm Pre for the past few months. Let me say that a different way: I've been reading a lot about the Palm Pre for the past few months. As last week wound to a close, I started dreaming about the Pre, waking up in a sweat because my dreams had me stepping to the counter at the Sprint store after waiting in line for days only to find that they had just run out of stock. It was a terrible bit of business, but that's all over now.

What's been bugging me about all of the reviews I've read lately is that they have a particular character that I find suspect. There are several types, but most of the reviews I've read have a large subset of a particular set of traits.

• They're a gizmo uberblog that cares more about eyeballs on their ads than real reviews.
• They aren't ever going to be users of the device themselves.
• If they are going to use the device themselves, they already think it's the best thing ever invented.
• They already are so attached to some other device, that anything released must be compared to it incessantly, usually as something inferior.

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A quick update on the weekend's shenanigans -- Berta and Abby went camping with the Girl Scouts over Friday night, so Riley and I had a boy's night out.

I picked up Riley from school early, and we headed to the movie theater to see Up. It was good. The movie is about a guy named Carl who meets a girl, falls in love and makes a promise, and the promise becomes an adventure; one that drags along an unsuspecting Wilderness Explorer named Russel. It's a good movie, in the traditional Pixar style. Much better than Wall-E. The beginning of the movie is very sad.

After the movie, Riley and I looked for a new watch for him at Target. He picked out a Batman watch. I picked out a watch with flames for him. His watch had Batman and a plastic band. The one I picked had a date window and a fabric band with velcro. Yesterday, he wore his pick. Today he wore my pick. I should ask him which he likes better.

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I mentioned at the end of yesterday's "Work Should Feel Wrong" entry, one of a series on my personal principles, that today's principle is the hardest of the bunch to describe.

Roll the clock back to my college years (hey, it's not that far...) and visit one of my Calculus study sessions with Brian. For whatever reason, Brian always went to class and needed help with the homework, and I never went to class and helped him with his homework. Be that as it may, it was during one of these sessions that we discovered this principle - more of an axiom - about the number zero and it's strange properties.

Because I'm lazy, I enlisted Brian's help via instant messenger this afternoon to reflect on the nature of the zero rule. He describes it thus:

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