Having an uncommon name is a blessing and a curse. I like my name, which is interesting because there are many people who do not. I do not recall the exact numbers, but there as a large percentage of people in a recent Wii poll who did not like their own name.

What's nice about an uncommon name is that you don't get confused with other people. It's very easy to request "owen@somedomain.com" instead of the lousy "o.winkler@somedomain.com" because there aren't many Owens to request the address. You don't have to postfix the uncommon name with a last initial for disambiguation.

The downside is outweighed by the upside, but it's still there. Sometimes you need to spell your uncommon name for people that don't recognize it. "No, it's o-w-E-n." And the worst is when someone else nearby shares your uncommon name, and someone calls it, because you aren't used to hearing your name used to refer to anyone but you. It's confusing.

There was a girl in my junior high named Ellen who had a locker down the hall from me. This caused me endless confusion at the end of the day when people would yell her name over the din of post-school hallway chatter and I would mistake it for my own.

And that's where I'm at with name commonality today. Over the last 10 years, the name Owen has become increasingly more common. In 1991, it was the 465th most popular baby name. In 2005, it's the 60th. In the year I was born, 0.02% of all male babies in the US were named Owen.

I think Owen as a name is even more common these days in our area. There were two kids at Chick-fil-a the other day named Owen. Their parents were amused that they would call their child from the little play area and both would come running. I was not amused every time they called my name, usually in a fit of, "Owen, stop throwing your food."

Of course, I stopped immediately.

Have you noticed this going on?

You're driving down the road, doing your own thing, and you see a bird. It's just a little generic bird, sitting in the road. Maybe he's with a friend or two.

You're doing 40 on this back road, heading toward this bird. He sees you. Maybe his friends leave, maybe not. But he sits there. Staring at you. As if his little feathery body is even going to leave a mark on your plastic bumper. But he won't move.

You might tentatively slow down, to give him a chance to take flight. Or, like me, you might have gotten over the idea that these little wretches are doing anything but taunting you, and gun the engine. In either case, at the last possible instant, the little avian takes flight and launches himself off the road.

This is too common. Or, if they're not already in the road, they lie in wait in the nearby trees to swoop down at your car, like it's some kind of teenage bird rite of passage. They fling themselves at your speeding car, seemingly without care for their own teeny lives.

Have these creatures somehow adapted to our human global domination? I don't remember them exhibiting this behavior in my youth. They would scatter when cars would approach. It's as if they all at once decided that they weren't going to be afraid. They were going to make a game of it. Is this evolution in a single season?

If so, it's only a while before humans catch on to their brazen attitudes, and stop caring about their little game. After all, what gave them the idea to be afraid of our cars in the first place? Probably having seen a few of their friends get run into!

I've given up caring about birds that don't know better than to avoid cars on the road. It's our Darwinian duty to allow the fittest to survive, and these birds aren't fit.

I am working on finishing up Habari's WordPress importing facilities. This is the middle step in a long chain of personal development that is probably being done somewhat out of order, just because some things need to be complete sooner than the things they depend on.

For example, I need to have a working body of sample posts to test any work I do on a database independent library for Habari. Habari is database independent now, but we're intent on building an abstraction class so that you can plug in new databases as needed instead of having to code any database-specific stuff directly into the core. In all, it's a good idea. So I need test data.

Also, some folks have suggested that there will be more incentive to make things work better if I'm forced to use the software. Personally, I'd be happy to use Habari for Asymptomatic, but there is one problem... Getting my old blog data into the system.

The current Habari importer is functional, if a bit unpolished. The problem is, as exists with every import and export procedure that I've looked at, my database is too large. Yes, I've been blogging regularly since 1999. My compressed database dump for Asymptomatic is 15MB. WordPress' export tries to dump the whole thing at once. That doesn't work. The current Habari importer tries to import the data all at once. That doesn't work. So I need something a little more functional.

Also, it would be nice if I could clean up the implementation while I'm poking around in there. For one, it would be cool if other importers could be written to import from other blogging tools so that other people could try out Habari.

A brief aside -- like most things in Habari, the importers are classes. Actually, Importers are classes that extend the Plugin class. Plugins in Habari are basically classes that extend the base Plugin class. By naming the class members in the plugin with specific names, those functions are called at the appropriate points in the code execution to return plugin information to the core or output as required. Importers have the additional requirement in that they must implement the Importer interface. By doing so, they declare that they implement specific functions that are used by the system for importing. It's a way for the system to use language constructs to enforce that an import plugin contains all of the functions it requires to function properly.

Yes, it's all programmer-speak, but it boils down to this: Cool.

Anyway, to build the import system, I've been using some new-ish PHP editing tools to gain the benefit of a debugger. I've got a whole separate post cooking about the comparison of the editors I've tried, but I'll reveal that I'm using PHPEdit for development and debugging.

I've been adding software to my system to be able to have the proper tools for development. As a result, sifting through my Start menu is a pain in the butt. I've been using Colibri to avoid touching my Start menu, but there are some things that I wish it could do. I long for software like Enso, but with the scriptable feature they say is waiting in the future, and perhaps not in Python.

So...

I started up Delphi and installed a few components. And in about two days, I have a working prototype, which I call Ozone. It looks vaguely like Enso. It uses Windows+space as a system hotkey instead of that stupid "hold down capslock" idea. It uses a SQL-capable database to keep track of commands. It is scriptable in Delphiscript (and possilby VB script in the future). It can display interactive HTML output in a floating window, which is useful for showing command results that do not actually run programs. It can track the currently running processes so that you can start a batch of applications (start a development environment) with one command. It can record keystrokes and mouse events for playback on a command execution.

A couple of things left to do: Track changes in the Start menu directory so that programs are automatically detected when added or changed. Improve autocomplete to produce filenames that are most frequently executed.

The scripting will eventually allow you do add todo entries to a list, then display the entries. Each of these things will be accessible by pressing a keystroke and typing a command. Adding some timer features could allow the program to display some alarms, which would be handy. All of these things could be as custom as the script that is applied to the command allows.

But it's not quite done yet.

So it's convenient to blame the delay of Habari releases on the fact that I can't launch programs by typing their name after a single keystroke, even if that's not entirely the case. But I'm looking forward to the functionality that my little (under 1MB in two files, including the database) Ozone program provides, and hope that it's useful to others if I release it soon.

Over this past weekend, Berta and I trekked through the snow to the March WordPress Meetup at the Ten Stone Bar and Restaurant on South Street in Philly. We entered into an interesting conversation with Johnathan, who works on the blog section of philly.com.

Johnathan was concerned with getting readership to the blogs. He asked many questions about what it would take to get any of us as a reader. The general answer among the group in the conversation was "a minor miracle". Our conversation has me questioning why news media is failing to do its job, on both the front of reporting actual news and evolving with the advent of blogs and user-generated content.

There are different kinds of news - newspaper, TV, radio. I find all of them lacking somehow. TV and radio news are the most sensationalist pieces of crap reporting out there. They've devolved from any merit they might have had into fluffy soundbites from celebrities. Just like MTV no longer plays music (if it really ever did), TV news no longer reports news (if it really ever did).

Newspaper reporting is a different weird thing. Personally, I find the media delivery poor. I do not like the texture of newspaper, or picking up the soggy rag from the porch when it rains, or having to wash my hands after handling it. Newspaper, physically, is only truly suited for lining bird cages. In regard to the reporting, it's hard to say whether it fares any better.

The primary problem with newspaper reporting (if you jump ahead and make the assumption that the reporting is more thorough than TV or radio) is that nobody cares. It's interesting how I can say that TV has whittled down its "news" into fluff that people will sit for, and then follow it with the idea that newspapers report on actual news, but nobody cares. I think there is a great middle ground that is untapped by the big media companies - user-rated/generated content. But the newspapers seem to fail at that, too.

Even TV could be improved by being viral. It drives me insane when you hear a report on TV or radio news that only gives you a fraction of the full story before moving on to the next, but if they directed you to more information on their web site, they'd have served a better purpose.

For example, a story on KYW reported that a school trip to Florida had gotten stuck there during the recent snow closures. With few flights able to enter Philly as a result of the snow, the students were stranded in Florida. Sure, it's a human-interest piece, but where are the details? What were they doing in Florida in the first place? Did they perform a concert? Was it simply a class trip? The radio blip mentioned that they had sent their baggage on home, but they weren't able to get home themselves. How does that happen? The story didn't even mention what school these kids had come from!

If you're going to do a 15-second spot like this, the least you could do is provide a viral link to your web site. The KYW site is pretty lousy in regard to providing additional details for the radio-reported news. If the stories on the site mirrored the radio news, but did a few extra things, the site would be very useful and people would have more reason to listen to their radio program.

For example, if the details that didn't fit into 15 seconds were revealed on the site, that would provide additional value. If users could leave comments on the story asking questions, the reporting could be expanded to include answers to those questions. If enough people asked questions about it, the radio story could be improved, or it could be promoted to be more prominent.

This is the nature of the web - interaction. I'm not suggesting that newspaper sites dive fully into the Digg model of user-only reporting, but that they use the web as an integrated tool to aid their traditional publication. It's almost offensive that they think they can throw a few blogs on their site and think they've fully entered some new age of reporting. No, some investment in thought and software development needs to be made, and your idea of what reporting is needs to shift to include the web as part of the solution.

I'm on the other end. I come in from the web. I'm not going to read your paper ever unless your web site gives me a reason to do it. If you use the paper as the portal into things that I normally wouldn't seek on the web site, then maybe I would find value in the paper.

But hey, I'm a realist. I know that newspapers are not going to integrate, and it's just a matter of time until you all just die off. Until then, here are a few tips from a blogger who has been online longer than you:

• Bloggers give outgoing links to other bloggers - If you want people to care, then you have to talk about them. This media, the web, is not about what happened to them, it's about what happens to me.
• Stop writing for print - You can't write a paragraph on the web that's five sentences long and expect the common blog-reading audience to bother reading. Check into some of the fine guidelines produced by web usability experts. Write more details in smaller chunks.
• We don't care who you are until we care who you are - I can name 10 high-profile, A-list bloggers off the top of my head. None of the people in this list are your columnists. I don't know their names, and I won't know their names unless they actually do something important on the web. Don't expect that I'll care when you drop their names when they have no cred in this media.
• Don't pretend you're in the trenches by being sub-par - Only 1/3 of the blogs I surveyed on Philly.com used a custom layout. All of the other ones used a standard Movable Type or Blogspot (???) template. You might not want the baggage that goes along with seeming like a professional reporter, but don't ditch your baggage by looking like an amateur blogger. There are plenty of designers in the area who would love to customize your blog layout for you.
• A blog is a blog - One surefire way to get me to never return to your site is to add a link in your blogs listings to a site that is obviously not a blog but a propaganda site. Wow.
• Popups suck - Haven't we learned this a long time ago? Tell your advertisers, "no popups". I don't even like seeing the little "Firefox blocked a popup" bar. There's no excuse for this.

There are a few other things, but I'm weary of pointing out what's wrong with this ill-conceived media project in its death throes. The moment, and I mean the moment, that someone produces the right software to do it, it's all over.

In my teens, I was plagued by nightmares of nuclear annihilation. I'm not sure what brought it on, but I would frequently have nightmares usually ending in seeing missiles flying through the air, the sounds of them falling from the sky, and then wake up just at the point of impact. And the worst part of this is I would usually end up laying in bed awake, eyes wide staring at the window, through which he morning sun was doing a great impression of a nuclear explosion. There's nothing like waking up from a dream about atomic destruction to a pretty realistic visual approximation of atomic destruction.

The nightmares have subsided. Maybe with the end of the cold war? But I haven't had any nightmares like that in a while. So, last night...

I had commissioned some art sculpture for some reason. The artist produced my sculpture as these four poles of wax. Each pole was about four feet tall, and brown with rounded tops. The sides were not smooth - the sculptor had formed each pole by hand from block wax. They were mounted on some wooden base in a straight line about four inches apart.

Impressed with the effort, I asked what had inspired the work. Apparently, the sculpture had been inspired by a vision of the artist of the future, and represented the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The artist had apparently foreseen a great plague, and was inspired to create this thing.

I was no longer impressed by the sculpture. And that's when the alarm went off.

Now, today is not my day to get up with the alarm (which is a silly notion that I should describe in more detail in a different post), so I got up, pushed the snooze button, and went back to bed for 7 minutes. I did this 8 times. And in between each press of the snooze, I dreamed more about the artist, the sculpture, his premonition, and the eventual destruction of the human race. Note that I'm never able to do this on purpose with dreams I enjoy. Yet, in slow-motion, mumbling curses about the four horsemen while I stumbled to the alarm clock, the end of our world unfolded in 7-minute increments.

I hate these dreams that seem like portents. Thankfully, we survived the nuclear annihilation of my teens. Hopefully, the plague never materializes either.