You didn’t know about me.  Gee, thanks Rich.

I usually don't do these things anymore, but seeing as it was Rich that tagged me I thought I would make an exception.

1. I am a countertenor, meaning that I can sing in the alto range.  Up until 5 years ago I was actually a sopranist, meaning my range extended into soprano.  Oddly enough I usually sing Bass when I perform, since I have an unusually low end for a countertenor.
2. When I was 15 (1992) I had my ears pierced, and wore earrings, and usually a big 'ol chain, until 3 years ago (click for very bad, pictorial evidence And look, long hair!).
3. I am a published poet.
4. Even when I want to, or need to I am unable to cry.
5. I can play, with varying degrees of skill, the following instruments: Guitar, piano, french horn, trumpet and saxaphone.  I hope to pick up Cello sometime soon.

And that is it, I refuse to tag anyone else with this meme, the insanity stops here!

Continue Reading ]

The Pulitzer Prize is for exemplary work in the field of Journalism, and as such is restricted to recognized Journalistic Entities.

Newspapers and other periodicals submit material to the Pulitzer, not individuals; furthermore by the stated statutes of the Pulitzer Commission itself (emphasis added by yours truly):

8. Must I be a U.S. citizen to apply for a Pulitzer Prize? Only U.S. citizens are eligible to apply for the Prizes in Letters, Drama and Music (with the exception of the History category in Letters where the book must be a history of the United States but the author may be of any nationality). For the Journalism competition, entrants may be of any nationality but work must have appeared in a U.S. newspaper published at least once a week.

What this new development means is that blogs that are run under the direction of a newspaper or periodical are now eligible for inclusion, not any random blog.

This is not, I repeat not traditional media finally validating the everyday joe blogger as a serious journalist.  And I don't think it should.  I am not belittling the contribution of private citizens to a new breed of journalism by any means... but there is a difference.  What we need is an equivalent of the Pulitzer for private individuals who blog about world changing events...

Continue Reading ]

UPDATE: I have a fix for the time problems.  You need to add the following code right after line 93 of stream.php (that line should look like this: $date = strtotime( substr( $item['pubdate'], 0, 25 ) );):
$date -= 3600*N;
Where N is how many hours you need to remove.  If you need to add time, then change the -= to +=

I really like the concept of Jermey Keith's Lifestream, and after reading Mike's cry in the dark for something akin to this, that caches, I decided to create a plugin/page template combo that replicated Jeremy's code, but using only bits and bots that are present in WordPress.

This doesn't really address much of Mike's needs... I am pretty sure I could easily wedge this data into an RSS feed if I wanted to, but I don't really care to at the moment.  Maybe tomorrow.  What this does do is use the bundled versions of snoopy and magpieRSS to query and render the content.

This gives us built in caching, and a mechanism for retrieving the data that gets around host restrictions on fopen and the like.

There are currently two caveats to this code:

1. Twitter doesn't have a valid RSS feed, so magpie chokes on it.  A quick trip through feedburner fixes that right up.
2. I can't for the life of me, get my del.icio.us feed to display correctly.  A trip through Feedburner couldn't even fix it.

So there swell, I have a Lifestream, now I just need to stay on top of updating it.  If you would like to take it for a spin, you can download the code, sans CSS, over here

Continue Reading ]

When Khaled approached me, asking for some help with exporting his blog content, which would eventually become Broken Kode Season 1, we spoke a little about blogs, blooks and what moving your prose from this medium of immediacy and interaction, to a more traditional, non participatory one meant.

I also confided in him that I was thinking along these same lines as well (publishing some or all of my posts here on Sillyness as a book through LuLu), I just wasn't ready yet.  One reason that I wasn't ready to undertake this large task was that I had no idea what I wanted out of a dead tree version of Sillyness.

Continue Reading ]

So yeah, I have heard the news that Redmond will be paying a "percentage" of profits generated from the sales of the Zune to Universal Music Group, to "offset the revenue lost due to music piracy".

What kind of morons are in charge over there now anyway?  I have read all the arguments... and I just don't buy that Microsoft can afford to lose that kind of money just to de-throne Apple's iPod.

At some point that war chest will run dry, and then what do you do?

On the bright side we now have been given carte blanche to download music from the internet illegally... if you own a Zune that is.  Thanks for picking up the tab for the little man Microsoft.  And what leg will the RIAA have to stand on if a Zune owner is sued for illegally downloading music?  The argument is that the industry is losing money, well now they are being compensated... do the lawsuits stop?

I think we should all go out and by Zunes, right now and find out.  What do you think?

Continue Reading ]

And I mean live.

Expect so much broken-ness and unstyli-ness that it might make you want to smack your mamma.  Seriously.

I love live redesigns, but usually I try to have most things done before I go live with a new theme... I thought this time it would be fun to let everyone follow along as I discover how this layout ends.

Fear not, if inspiration leaves me, or I get to busy to focus on the site in the next few days I will go back to one of my other themes; but I think this will be an interesting experience.

Continue Reading ]

Yes folks, if you use my notepad plugin there is a reason to rejoice.

I have been prepping this plugin for release for the past 3 weeks.  There is some code cleanup, but most notably I have added note integration on the Write Posts page.  Below the image uploader you should now see a 'Notes' area. If you click the 'Use for this post' text some javascriptiness will add the text of that note to the edit area.  It should work when using the Rich Text Editor, and when not.

Leave any comments or bug reports here in the comments.  Go and get it!

Continue Reading ]

From Sun.

This is quite possibly the Greatest Thing Ever ^(TM).  Paul, can I have one of these to power the website?

Continue Reading ]