Asymptomatic

My head hurts too much right now to solve these classic mathematical fallacies.

Berta has now been gone on a work trip for two days, leaving me with the kids.

It’s not as horrible as I could make it out to be. I could, for instance, mention that Abby handed Riley one of the soft sugar cookies (those things will be what truly killed me in the end), and he proceeded to rub the icing into the brand new couch. Or the NFL-style tackle “hugging” of the 1-year-old by his older sister, bouncing his poor noggin off the living room floor. Or the screaming fits that ensue whenever I try to use the bathroom. (Yes, please consider how awful it would be if every time you went to pee, someone stood outside the door and wouldn’t stop screaming, and then when you came out, acted as if nothing odd occurred.)

Contrary to all that, there are a whole lot more fun things we’ve done that Berta’s been away than there have been things to complain about. Abby and I have been building a volcano (I hope to have photos of the completed work online when it’s done), and talking about how to add money. Tomorrow, we’re planning on learning how to play Blackjack while the last bit of paint dries on the Volcano.

Riley has his own little quirks. He’s been getting up in the morning and insisting on watching TV while wrapped up in two of his knit blankies. Not one. Two. Fortunately, he doesn’t want to watch TV all day. He’s kind of self-regulating. When he’s done, he climbs down and starts grabbing toys to play with. In the evening, he’s not that interested in TV at all.

But no, that’s not what’s killing me.

Should I feel obliged to leave positive feedback on an eBay item that was shipped without incident or special attention?

I recently placed an order for an MP3 player from Creative Labs. Their entire refurbished sales department operates through eBay. They’ve sold hundreds of refurbished items, so their reputation for successful transactions is not hurting. Plus they’re a giant corporation with a generally good reputation. So why would they send me an email asking for feedback?

We noticed you have not left feedback for item number 5828610064, Creative Zen Micro 5 GB Black MP3 Player w/ Warranty, and we were wondering if there was a problem with the transaction. If your item has not yet arrived or if you are experiencing any problems with it please let us know.

We also encourage you to leave feedback for us as you feel appropriate.

Well, ok, they’re concerned that something didn’t go well. And that’s good. That’s a sign of good customer service. But since they’ve done nothing that I would complain about and nothing out of the ordinary that I would rave about, I would only feel comfortable giving them neutral feedback. And really, that’s not what they’re looking for. More to the point, being a large corporation, they probably wouldn’t care as much as any of the smaller sellers that would prod me into giving them the thumbs-up/thumbs-down feedback.

Here’s another post in the guise of informing readers of something that is really for my own edification.

I’ve got a handful of Firefox extensions installed that I find useful. I tend to try out an extension and then not like it and disable it. But this short list has stuck with me, and when I consider upgrading Firefox the availability of these plugins are essentially what times my upgrade.

Let’s do away with the doom and gloom: In spite of recent context-deprived accounts, WordPress isn’t anywhere near ditching any of its feed formats. But what is all this talk about removing feeds from our favorite blogging tool? Let’s have a rational look…

WordPress currently supports four standard feed formats for syndication: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0 (aka RDF), RSS 2.0 (aka RSS2), and Atom 0.3. All of these feeds are at least vague implementations of XML, and allow applications (feed aggregators) to gather data about your posts without actually visiting your site. This can be done because these formats are machine-readable - that is, a computer/server can be configured to automatically visit your feed and parse out the data that it provides into usable chunks.

There are certain problems with the feeds that WordPress provides, and whether these really are problems depends on your perspective. But let me tell you what I see from a coder’s point of view, and why you should consider listening to my argument.