Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

What Happened to the Meetup?
April 15, 2006

I’ve been looking forward to this month’s WordPress meetup all week. Colin made mention of it via the 9 Rules blog, and that got a lot more of the Philly-area bloggers interested, if not for the WordPress meetup itself, but for the Blogger meetup that immediately follows. It’s really something that I was looking forward to, but it wasn’t meant to be for me.

Sometime Friday evening I started having severe tooth pain. I did not enjoy dinner, and when I got home the pain was so significant that I hardly slept.

Building a Shelf in WordPress
April 13, 2006

Today is not the first day I’ve heard someone reference a web site and say, “Look at that cool shelf!”

What the heck are they talking about?

Maybe you’ve noticed it on my site, and maybe not because my design is purposefully inconspicuous. There is a small tab just under the masthead on the right side that says “More Stuff”. When you click on it, a large area slides open with a bunch of information on it. This is the “shelf”.

Personally, I’ve been calling this thing a “slidebar” (as opposed to a “sidebar”, no “L”), but I guess the Mac naming conventions apply somewhat. I first saw this type of thing on Shaun Inman’s site. But I’ve since seen it spread around to other sites, too.

Wanna learn how to make one and add some WordPress stuff to it? Let’s do it!

American Freddie Mercury Idol
April 12, 2006

Unfortunate Event indeed. Abby and I had just finished watching the end of A Series of Unfortunate Events, when I switched the TV back to satellite and saw American Idol contestents trying to sing Queen.

I sat in front of the TV dumbfounded, and I couldn’t turn away from the trainwreck. I know Queen fans who are turning over in their graves who are not even dead yet.

One of the contestents actually had the gall to say that he hadn’t even heard the song he was going to perform until a week prior. You’re a singer vying for a place as a so-called “American Idol” and you didn’t know that song? How long have you been living under a rock?

Note that I haven’t been watching this poor show all season, so I have no idea of what chaff they’ve already thrown off. But for pity’s sake, I can only imagine how bad they must have been to have only these fools remaining. The quality of the contestants is so pathetic, I wonder how anyone can stand to watch the show.

April Philly WordPress Meetup - Saturday, 15th
April 12, 2006

If you’re in Philadelphia this weekend, come join us for the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup at 2pm on Saturday. We’re a pretty relaxed group, and we’re definitely not all geeky (ok, I’m usually the only geek present) so don’t think that you need to have technical skills to come hang out.

We talk about WordPress and general blogging, and if you have technical questions there is usually someone around who can point you in the right direction. For example, we have had discussions on how enthusiastic new WordPress designers can create more advanced themes for WordPress. We’ve talked about the best plugins to use for different purposes. And we’ve also talked about recipies for desserts. Like I said, very informal.

The Playstation Generation Doesn't Get It
April 11, 2006

A Timex Sinclair 1000 PackageI was waxing nostalgic with some other folks on IRC the other day about computers that we had grown up with. My very first computer was a Timex Sinclair 2000.

The Timex Sinclair 1000 was state of the art for a home computer at the time. 2K of memory. A 1/8 inch phono port to plug in the tape recorder to save and load programs. I was lucky to have a couple of accessories: The chicklet-style keyboard overlay and the 16K memory expansion pack, which was the size of four decks of cards and was so heavy that I had to duct-tape it to the expansion port in back to keep it from falling off.

Of course I proceeded from there to the venerable Commodore 64, and on to the Amiga. But before our conversation could carry me completely through my computer evolution, they started to discuss (for some reason) video games, especially some of their old favorites. This included revealing some of their reasoning why those games were favorites, and that’s where the problem in this story begins.