Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Thunderbird Is a Pain In the Butt
November 17, 2006

It’s pretty late, but I’m riled about Thunderbird. There are oh, so many annoyances that I just can’t take it any more. I’m about ready to try anything.

I am tired of Thunderbird marking just anything that comes in as spam. The “adaptive filters” are a joke. I reset the filters, and in three days it’s marking everything as spam. It can’t tell the difference between incoming mail from mailing lists that I’m on and the ones that look like they’re from a mailing list but are just an embedded gif advertising Vi4gr4.

Atom Is Making Me Angry
November 12, 2006

Greetings, authors of blog-posting desktop clients! This post is for you!

Actually, this post is about you. I’ve spent the past four hours trying to implement Atom Publishing Protocol. Actually, it’s been days longer than that as I’ve been implementing and re-implementing accoring to the various documentation I’ve found online, but I’ve spent the past four hours just trying to get Ecto to work with my APP server code, and now I’m flat-out angry. It’s not just Ecto, and I’m not sure that I should only blame the Atom architects either, so let me explain my issues.

I’m trying to implement a lot of the Atom Publishing Protocol as a server. I want to be able to list blog entries, update them, and create new ones. I have written my Atom implementation to the most recent spec, and when I access the entrypoints using raw Telnet and HTTP headers over port 80, I get the appropriate responses back from my server according to the spec.

This seems great, but this is not the end of the battle – The so-called “Atom clients” I’ve been able to find just don’t seem to support the spec.

An Excuse for Total Slackdom
November 11, 2006

It seems like I haven’t written anything in an eon, and you might think I’ve finally grown tired of the tedium of maintaining this blog (perhaps I have, when it’s so easy to characterize as such?), but no, I’ve actually been quite busy.

Yesterday was my last day working for Kruse. I had been working there for more than 10 years, and while I’ve appreciated the time I’ve spent there which was entirely positive, it was time for me to move on. I spent the latter half of the week cleaning out my office (all of which is currently still all in my car, so I know what I’m doing today) and otherwise finalizing details of my departure.

Ringmaster
November 06, 2006

If you meet me online, like on IRC or skype or any of a number of instant messaging services, then you’re likely to see me use the moniker “ringmaster”. Why is this?

(cue flashback effects)

I Don't Know How To Party
November 01, 2006

The kids went out with Berta for Halloween last night, two of them all dressed up. Abby wore a mermaid outfit (rather than the Abby-sized peasant outfit we spent too much money on at the Renaissance fair) and Berta wore her peasant outfit. No… Riley refused to wear his knight’s plastic armor, shield, and sword, so he toddled around with them wearing just the gray sweatsuit I bought to put on under it.

While they were off collecting candy from our neighbors, I was doling it out myself to our neighbors’ kids. The kids started coming early - around 5:30pm. One of our neighbors from up in the cul de sac came by with a retinue of kids from that end of our street. He reiterated what another neighbor had told me a few weeks ago.

Most of the residents of our street apparently congregate at the cul de sac to hand out candy, rather than giving out candy from their houses. In this way, they can save the kids the trouble of trudging to each house, but it’s really just an excuse to gather and be social.

So after a few neighbors popped by with their kids, telling me to head up with a lawn chair to the cul de sac, I bowed to pressure and lugged my zero-G chair from the family room up to the patch of shrubbery at the other end of the street, and sunk into my typical quasi-social mode - the one where I don’t feel like I fit in and am not quite sure how to act.