Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

On This Day: Jan 11

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 11…

There are 24 posts previously published on January 11th

  • 2025
  • 2024
  • 2020
    • Prepping For ‘Star Trek: Picard’ – A Procrastinators’ Guide: “To help you prep (or at this point, cram), TrekMovie presents a list of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes that showcase Jean-Luc Picard’s exploits with the Borg and Romulans, plus a few essential Captain Picard episodes that reveal his character. We also include a bonus ... Read more ➡
    • DJing on Twitch The first of a hopefully ongoing experiment with DJing live to Twitch. ➡
    • DJing on Twitch Kicking off an experiment with DJing live on Twitch. More to come! ➡
    • On This Day: Jan 11 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 11 ➡
  • 2018
    • Book three of 2018: Software, by Rudy Rucker. 🌟🌟🌟 ➡
    • Current amusement: as I age, I’m getting a respectable start on “old man” eyebrows. But they’re much thinner on the outsides of my eyes than the insides, so the end result is occasionally a very Vulcan/Romulan upwards slant to my brows. I’m ever more saddened that I’ve never been able to lift just a single ... Read more ➡
    • Chucks of the day (57): Blue faux-leather high tops with black sidewall trim. #chucks #converse ➡
  • 2016
    • I have got to start remembering to do this before the very end of the night. Because then I do weird stuff like this. (11/366) ➡
  • 2014
    • We were going to Do Stuff today, until we decided the day was better spent relaxing in our jammies. ➡
  • 2013
    • You’ve Got A Dirty Speech Synthesizer An amusing little anecdote about Watson, the IBM supercomputer that was featured on Jeopardy, that might seem a little familiar to those of my friends who are parents. ➡
  • 2009
    • Links for January 9th through January 11th Sometime between January 9th and January 11th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too! • Anchorage Wedding - Stephanie & Royce • Seattle P-I put up for sale • Knitting for Psychos • Computer geeks learn to flirt • UPDATE: MACWORLD THREATENED BY DEATH RAY ➡
  • 2006
    • Help: .htaccess redirects Never having quite gotten the hang of .htaccess redirect requests, I'm hoping someone out there might be able to give me a hand with this. ➡
  • 2005
    • Face Analyzer Jacqueline pointed out the Face Analyzer. This struck me as worth killing a few minutes playing with, so I grabbed a recent headshot of me from when I got my new glasses, and sent it in. The results were something of a surprise. ➡
    • Malicious Software Removal Malicious software removal? It's bad enough that so much of their software is fairly malicious in standard day to day operations, but now they're actively promoting a product that, judging by its name, will gleefully and with great gusto go rampaging through your computer, removing the most useful pieces of software it can find? ➡
    • Who are you? So. You're the head of a highly secretive company. You're known for being temperamental and very mysterious. The goods your company produces are highly popular, but they're developed in secret. When they're introduced, they're invariably accompanied by much anticipation, a media blitz, and fans the world over salivating over the newest products. Who are you? ➡
    • 6 year old webserver While talking with Prairie about how Macs generally tend to have long lifespans, I looked up the original introduction date for the 350Mhz Blue and White G3 that acts as the webserver for my site, and found out that it was originally introduced on January 5th, 1999. ➡
    • Mac mini (and more) Only the sketchiest details so far, ganked from MacRumors' live update page, but…the Mac Mini is here. ➡
    • Macworld 2005 Keynote The keynote for this year's Macworld starts in about an hour. I won't be able to 'liveblog' it as I have the past couple of years, as little things like work and Apple's decision not to stream the keynote are getting in the way. ➡
  • 2004
  • 2003
    • A call for help! The 'hide/show smileys' links in my comment forms only work in IE — Gecko-based browsers ignore the javascript, and kHTML-based browsers don't even display them! Is there anyone out there who can help me with this? ➡

On This Day: Jan 10

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 10…

There are 34 posts previously published on January 10th

  • 2025
    • PKD Day This year's nominees for the Philip K. Dick award were announced today, and I already have my copies! ➡
    • Facebook alternatives (an incomplete list) With a lot of people talking about leaving Facebook and other Meta properties, but also often expressing frustration with the most popular other options not having the same functionality, I started thinking about what could be done, where, and how. Here are my initial thoughts. ➡
  • 2024
  • 2021
    • An Ursula K. Le Guin Short Story Inspired The Big Mystery For ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 3 – TrekMovie.com: ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most famous stories and often used in classrooms discussing ethics in literature. ➡
    • Difficult Listening Hour 2021.01.09 Unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants, let's-see-what-happens mixing. This week ended up being (nearly) all '80s alternative. ➡
  • 2020
    • The One Remaining Use of the Word “Macintosh”: “Some weeks ago, I was struck by the thought that Apple had almost entirely managed to scrub its corporate communications of the word ‘Macintosh.’ It’s not surprising, of course, but I was curious if the company had slipped up anywhere.” ➡
    • On This Day: Jan 10 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 10 ➡
  • 2019
    • OTC Contraceptives Now Covered By Insurance in Washington As of January 1, 2019, all Washingtonians with state-regulated insurance can now pick up over-the-counter contraceptives for free at their in-network pharmacies, according to the Office of the Insurance Commissioner. ➡
    • 21st century blogging problems: When a prominent blogger tweets a link to an old blog post of mine about Pixar’s lack of diversity in their characters that is showing raw Markdown instead of rendered HTML (now fixed, of course). How embarrassing! ➡
  • 2017
    • When we got home yesterday, there was a good four or five inches of snow on the driveway, but we were too tired to deal with it. Then it snowed more today, so we had at least six inches to shovel after work. It sucked, but we did it! Can we be done with winter ... Read more ➡
  • 2016
    • Approaching the end of season six of Voyager. Trying to decide what I think about the introduction of the Borg Babies to the show. (10/366) ➡
  • 2015
    • I haven’t worn a watch in decades. Got an inexpensive one to start getting used to it again before the Apple Watch is released. Just in case, y’know. ➡
  • 2014
    • Almost the weekend! ➡
  • 2013
    • This Far, No Further I don't mind disagreeing with people, I don't mind people disagreeing with me, and in the right circumstances, calm, rational discussions of disagreements can be quite good. However, the line has to be drawn somewhere, and I've now found two places where I'm quite comfortable drawing that line. ➡
    • Give It A Crablouse Here's the second of my contributions to mashup culture: Give It A Crablouse (Lord of Acid vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers). ➡
  • 2007
  • 2006
    • iTunes MiniStore Apparently, one of the changes made to iTunes was **more advertising**! _Yay!_ I was just lamenting the fact that I didn't see enough ads while deciding which song to play next, and here Apple's gone and taken care of that for me. ➡
    • Apple Intel Ad Music: Moby The music in Apple's clever Intel processor ad sounded _really_ familiar, and after running it around in my head for a bit, I figured it out. It's Moby's 'God Moving Over the Face of the Waters', which I have on the soundtrack to Heat. ➡
    • SeaBlogs Overrun by TrackBack Spam This is just sad -- sixteen of the twenty-five displayed TrackBack pings to Seablogs are TrackBack spam. Is anyone paying attention to moderating the site? ➡
    • Seattle Pillow Fight So here's the deal... **SEATTLE PILLOW FIGHT** is going to be a Guinness World Record breaking event held right here in Seattle **THIS SPRING IN 2006**! ➡
    • Macworld ’06: Dawn of the i(ntel)Mac Big news of the day, of course, is Steve Jobs' keynote address at Macworld 2006. I'm not exactly up-to-the-minute on this, but I just got home from school and I'm watching the video stream of the keynote now. ➡
  • 2005
    • Bloggers’ Rights and Blogophobia With the news of another weblogger losing his job because of posts on his weblog the issues of what webloggers can and cannot expect to be able to post on their weblogs has started bubbling 'round the blogosphere again. Now there's a proposed Bloggers' Bill of Rights — but how useful is it? And which companies should really be singled out? ➡
    • Dominant Intelligence You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator. ➡
    • The Phantom in 15 Minutes While she's not posting much at the moment due to work on a book, Cleolinda Jones has graced us with another Movies in 15 Minutes parody: The Phantom of the Opera. ➡
  • 2004
  • 2002
    • Free association, job possibilities, and haiku If I'd been kidnapped by alien space pirates and forced to endure hours upon hours of back to back Hardy Boys television episodes overdubbed in Tagalog in a devious attempt to brainwash me and force me to assassinate Sonny Bono with nothing but a Ronco Turnip Twaddler, three jars of Nutella hazelnut spread, and a 5-inch length of dental floss -- that would be worth writing about. ➡
  • 1995
    • [From Usenet: 1.10.95 0448] I do suppose, while not being necessarily one of the 'big names' (with a gun? sorry...seemingly obligatory lyrics reference) on a.m.nin, I might as well pitch in... ➡
  • 1994
    • [From Usenet: 1.10.94 0643] This is hardly official, but as far as I know... ➡
    • [From Usenet 1.10.94 0610] Was curious as to whether anyone knew of an ftp site with .gifs of the cover art to any or all of KMFDM's albums...I love Brute's artwork, and would love to get my hands on some. ➡
    • [From Usenet: 1.10.94 0552] Really? Bizarre...up here in Anchorage, it actually is fairly 'easy to find,' as both locations of Mammoth Music (the local 'alternative' music store) regularly have at least one copy on the shelves, and I even see it fairly regularly at Camelot... ➡
    • [From Usenet: 1.10.94 0539] You might want to try... ftp.uwp.edu/pub/music/pictures I've gotten some fun stuffs from there...but if anyone else has some good places to go, please clue me in also... ➡
    • [From Usenet 1.10.94 0539] First off, I'm insanely jealous whenever someone casually starts off a post about BlackHappy with 'some friends of mine....' `` Anway... ➡
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Short Treks E10: “Children of Mars”: A curious and moody prequel that sets up a bit of backstory, but mostly won’t really fall into place until Picard starts. Guessing that “synths” might be androids based on Romulan experiments with Borg technology? 🖖

On This Day: Jan 9

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 9…

There are 37 posts previously published on January 9th

  • 2024
  • 2023
  • 2021
    • 📚1/2021: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1969 Hugo Best Novel This was excellent, and rather remarkably topical for being 50+ years old. Addressing gender and politics personal and national, and though many points are quite dark, with definite hope. ➡
    • Historians Contextualizing the Capitol Insurrection: A Roundup: A list of their publications is below, in alphabetical order by author’s last name. This is a dynamic document, and will change as historians publish more pieces. ➡
  • 2020
    • I don’t really keep up with automotive news, but…um…Subaru? Everything okay over there? Bonus: As long as this model exists, any contest/competition that awards a car as a prize, but doesn’t offer this model, obviously gives no FUCKS. ➡
    • Short Treks E10: “Children of Mars”: A curious and moody prequel that sets up a bit of backstory, but mostly won’t really fall into place until Picard starts. Guessing that “synths” might be androids based on Romulan experiments with Borg technology? 🖖 ➡
    • We now know that cuttlefish have stereoscopic vision…: because scientists tested the theory by having the cuttlefish wear 3D glasses and showing them 3D movies of shrimp and watching where the cuttlefish tried to strike to eat the shrimp. Not only is it cool, but CUTTLEFISH WEARING 3D GLASSES! ➡
    • Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse: “Hopepunk stories are not specifically climate-focused and, more importantly, do not necessitate hopeful worlds. In the age of Trump, this basic act of extending to another person kindness, rather than disdain or vitriol, becomes a political narrative….” ➡
    • On This Day: Jan 9 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 9 ➡
  • 2019
    • Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep And doesn’t know where to find them She has one ring to bring them in And in the darkness bind them — @IceBergMama on Twitter ➡
    • TIL: Titivillus was the “patron demon of scribes”, blamed for causing typos. I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyvyllus … I muste eche day … brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes. ➡
  • 2017
    • Book four of 2017: Hexomancy, by Michael R. Underwood. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ➡
  • 2016
    • A relaxing day at home. Helping Prairie make dinner (homemade pizza and buffalo chicken) by staying out of the way. This is often my best method of helping in the kitchen (until cleanup, which is usually my responsibility). (9/366) ➡
  • 2015
    • Somebody has to pay for ‘free’ I think Obama's general idea is a good one, and I support it and the thinking behind it. I just wish I could be more optimistic that students in Washington would actually have a chance to take advantage of it. ➡
  • 2014
    • Almost forgot to take a picture today (dunno if this is formally a shot-a-day project, but this’ll be nine in a row, and that’s a good trend), so you get me kicked back in my chair while watching TV. ➡
  • 2013
    • Just Can’t Get Flexible in 1999 Now that I've run through all the long-form mixes I had laying around, here's the first of two mashups I've put together: Depeche Mode vs. Prince. ➡
  • 2009
    • Link Journalism Even though I'm 'just' a consumer, not a journalist in any sense, and not involved with or affiliated with any of these organizations, I'm fascinated by the effects of the evolving connections that technology is making possible between the media and the public, and within and among the various media organizations themselves. ➡
  • 2007
    • 4,000 Lattes…to go? From this morning's introduction of the iPhone, as Steve Jobs was demonstrating various features of the gadget (as reported by [MacRumors)... ➡
  • 2006
    • 35.30572% Geek At least, according to the Original Geek Test, that's my final score. ➡
    • It’s Illegal to be Annoying No, I'm not kidding. Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime. ➡
    • Andy Rosen: Early punk photos I came across an article in today's Seattle Times about Andy Rosen, who'd taken a lot of photographs of the early punk scene in London -- and is just now starting to showcase a lot of never before seen photos on Flickr. ➡
    • Ego up, ego down Perfect scores can go two ways: perfectly good...or perfectly bad. ➡
  • 2005
    • Hey…what’s all that white stuff? Well, it finally happened — after nearly a week of wild rumors and near-panic (I had no less than three of my customers at work plan 'snow days' last Thursday based on the weather reports), it's finally actually snowing in Seattle this morning. ➡
  • 2004
    • blockquotes in TypePad and MovableType Over the past few days, a few people have been posting in a thread on the TypePad User Group, trying to figure out why every so often, using the blockquote tag would suddenly cause display issues in a finished post. ➡
    • Jobs/Mayer collaboration online The composition created by Steve Jobs and John Mayer during the Macworld keynote while demoing GarageBand has been posted online. ➡
    • Curls? I'm starting to wonder just how long I can go before I get sick of the curls and shave my head again. It could be just a few days — or it could be months. ➡
    • More on the iHPod Additionally, one (and only one) report — that at the moment, doesn't seem to be taken terribly seriously by most people — claims that HP 'will be working with Apple to add support for Microsoft's superior Windows Media Audio (WMA) format to the iPod by mid-year.' ➡
    • Kodak moments …the bottom line is simply anybody but Bush. And by 'anybody', I mean anybody who can realistically have a chance of defeating Bush — and by that, I mean the Democratic nominee. ➡
    • ecto beta available The creator of blogging client Kung-Log has rewritten, updated, and renamed it, and has just relased the first public beta of ecto, which I'm playing with now. ➡
  • 2003
    • Why does [Pres. Bush] want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up. My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? ➡
    • Lots of categories Categories are now listed in each individual post, and there's a lot more to choose from. Am I too anal yet? I've gotta be getting there. ➡
    • Ain't goin' down… Someday, I would dearly love to hear Garth Brooks' 'Ain't Goin' Down 'til the Sun Comes Up' as covered by Ministry. Possibly with Les Claypool doing the vocals. I can hear it in my head — I just wish I could hear it with my ears. ➡
    • Browser Daydreaming Respoding more seriously to Phil Ulrich's question of what I'd like to see in a web browser, I daydream for a while about perfect UIs and plug-in based rendering engines. ➡
  • 2001
    • Words of Wisdom I normally nuke just about every piece of random e-mail I get, but I got one today that I actually thought was worth sharing: Things I wish I'd known before I went out in the real world. ➡
  • 1996
    • [From the archives: 1.9.96 0314] Created a page to shamelessly promote myself, with the various (okay, two) clubs I'm dj'ing at currently. (grin) Hey, somebody's gotta do it, right? ➡
  • 1995
    • [From Usenet 1.9.95 0231] I've seen it on two discs...the import version of the HLAH single (pink and blue cover, no halo number listed, only three tracks to it. ➡
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A Brief History of Convention Ribbons: “If you’ve gone to conventions like CONvergence, you may have seen the ribbons imprinted with catchphrases and clip art people stick to the bottom of the their badges—in some cases, collecting large trails of them. CONvergence does a great job of explaining how you can get your own ribbons on its site, including a variety of different vendors that print them. But what is the real purpose of badge ribbons, and how did the tradition get started?” (There’s a fair amount of ribbon collection/trading at Norwescon as well.)

Our Idols are Fallible

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Isaac Asimov has long been, and still is, one of my favorite authors. He was also a person who regularly sexually harassed women. Both statements can be (and are) true, without me having to give up the former or condone the latter.

His history with women is no secret, and is the subject of the article Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall:

Over the course of many decades, Asimov groped or engaged in other forms of unwanted touching with countless women, often at conventions, but also privately and in the workplace. Within the science fiction community, this is common knowledge, and whenever I bring it up in a room of older fans, the response is usually a series of nods. The number of such incidents is unknown, but it can be plausibly estimated in the hundreds, and thus may match or exceed the long list of books that Asimov wrote.

…I regularly hear the argument that Asimov was simply a product of his era. You certainly don’t need to look far to find parallel offenders, including Asimov’s friend Randall Garrett, of whom Frank Herbert recalled, “You could follow his movements … by the squeals of the women whose bottoms he had just pinched.”

But excusing Asimov by saying that some of his contemporaries were guilty of similar transgressions is like downplaying his productivity by pointing out that other authors were prolific.

I find it important to recognize and consider the flaws in the people and the media that we enjoy, rather than shrugging them off or brushing them under the proverbial carpet. It doesn’t mean we have to “cancel” things, banishing entire swaths of previously-enjoyed content when we discover the creator said or did something we find problematic (though in some instances, we may decide to; each person has to determine that for themselves depending on their values and the situation in question). But learning how to hold ourselves and others to higher standards means not ignoring the failures when they appear.

Domain Switch

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In a project that didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would, I’ve just moved my personal site from its former home of www.michaelhanscom.com to its new home here at michaelhans.com.

The reason for the move is simple: The “…com.com” repetition at the end of the old URL formed by the end of my last name and the .com top-level domain suffix has always bugged me a little bit, and so the new URL is simpler and more clever.

It has been pointed out to me that this new setup is likely somewhat less optimal in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as “the SEO power of [thing].com is probably less than that of [first-part-of-thing].[second-part-of-thing]”. However, 1) I’ve had my time at the top of the search results, and I’m okay with continuing to drop down in the rankings a bit, and 2) I’ve stopped running ads or paying any real attention to my statistics/site visits/rankings, so SEO just isn’t at the top of my concerns right now. I’m not going to ignore that entirely, but it’s simply not a major concern.

At this point, the move should be complete: All content has been transferred over to the new domain (and I’d like to take a moment to plug the WordPress plugin Duplicator, which made moving my blog much easier than I thought it would be; it wrapped everything up in an archive, I moved the archive to the new location, ran the installer, and that was it–it even scanned the database to replace any links to www.michaelhanscom.com inside blog posts with links to michaelhans.com, which was one of the tasks I was dreading), the .htaccess redirects are in place and working properly, and I’ve adjusted all external connections so that they all point to the right place.

All in all, a rather surprisingly uneventful move.