Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Friday Five

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This is one of those ‘net memes that has been going on for quite a while now. Figured I’d go ahead and jump on the bandwagon.

  1. What is your favorite scary movie?

    I have such a hard time with ‘favorite’ lists — narrowing any category down to a single entry is damn near impossible. The first ones that pop into my head, though, are The Blair Witch Project, Alien, and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

  2. What is your favorite Halloween treat?

    Candy corn, definitely. Love that stuff.

  3. Do you dress up for Halloween? If so, describe your best Halloween costume.

    I haven’t in years, but I think the best I ever had was ‘The Blue Beetle’, when I was a kid. We got a blue snowsuit, and mom sewed an extra pair of arms onto it, connected to my arms with string, so that they moved with mine. I couldn’t tell you anymore where we came up with the idea for the costume, or even whether or not it had antennae, or anything else — but the costume, and especially the arms, has stuck in my brain for years afterwards, so I must have been pretty impressed by it back then.

  4. Do you enjoy going to haunted houses or other spooky events?

    Something else I haven’t done in years. I had fun going to them with friends a few times, but I think they lost their luster after a while. How many times can you walk down a dark corridor, waiting for someone to jump out and yell “BOO!” before it starts to get boring?

  5. Will you dress up for Halloween this year?

    It’s not looking like it. Again. Someday I’ll get back into it…

(Thanks to the Friday Five)

A reminder

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Just a quick reminder — NaNoWriMo kicks off in just over a week. For the month of November, posts to The Long Letter may be pretty sparse, as I’ll be spending the majority of my free time from work either fighting my way through my NaNoWriMo attempt, or huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth and quietly gibbering to myself when I actually realize what I’ve gotten myself into.

Also, a quick word of warning from the NaNoWriMo website:

You are an arteest, and no longer have time for things like cooking and grocery shopping and laundry. Start demanding favors and treats from friends and loved ones now. That way they’ll be fully acclimated to the new you once November rolls around.

Two Towers protest

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This just might be the single stupidest thing I’ve seen in a very long time. A group of people have put up a website protesting the title of the next Lord of the Rings movie, “The Two Towers”, because, “The name of this movie will undoubtedly cause a return of the emotions felt on Sept 11th which left so many people in the nation feeling stunned and in a state of shock.”

From their FAQ:

The movie is intentionally being named The Two Towers in order to capitalize on the tragedy of September 11. Clearly, you cannot deny the fact that this falls under hate speech. We believe that if they will not willingly change the name, the government should step in to stop the movie’s production or to force a name change.

Just amazing.

Why movies are bad

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Most movies seem to follow the following formula to success:

  1. Hire big actors for the gross national product of a small nation
  2. Spend another few GNP on special effects
  3. Give a wino in the parking lot 5 bucks and a slightly used cigarette for a script

— substrate, on MeFi

Valid RSS

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Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have just created an RSS Validator. I’ve run my feeds through, and can now ensure that I offer valid RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds for use with newsreaders/aggregators.

I even managed to get my own little addition to the feeds going without breaking them — yay!

Admittedly, I can’t honestly say I really know or understand the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0. But hey. They’re both there.

Microsoft switchers – oops!

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So Apple‘s had their ‘Switch’ campaign going on for a while now, touting stories from ex-PC users who have switched to Macintosh computers. Apparently the campaign is doing fairly well — at least well enough for Microsoft to start a similar campaign of its own.

Unfortunately, since they (apparently) couldn’t find any customers that had actually made the switch from the Mac to Windows, and were happy about it, and willing to talk about it — they had to combine fictional accounts a hired freelance writer’s story with stock photography, as pointed out on /. earlier today.

Apparently, this isn’t a rare practice, either. I especially like the page where the people in the photograph are using a Mac 6100.

Methinks Microsoft’s marketing folks need to work on their game a bit.

Thanks to Scripting News for this one.

Small update to RSS feed

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Lately I’ve been reading a ton of sites daily (65 at current count) via NetNewsWire Lite. While this allows me to skim through a huge amount of information in a short time, one of the disadvantages is that none of the RSS feeds that the sites provide give any information on comments to a given post (this isn’t a limitation of NetNewsWire at all, it’s part of how the RSS feed is written). Since I’ve often found some really interesting stuff in the discussion threads after a post, this is a bit of a downside.

So, while I doubt that very many people subscribe to my RSS feed, I figured I’d at least make my feed give me the information I want, and changed my feed template slightly. Where the code used to say…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]></content:encoded>

…I’ve altered it to say this…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]><MTEntryIfAllowComments> <![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryCommentCount$> Comments)]]></MTEntryIfAllowComments><MTEntryIfAllowPings><![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$> TrackBack Pings)]]></MTEntryIfAllowPings></content:encoded>

…so that in my RSS feed, there’s a short display line that tells whether I’ve gotten any comments or TrackBack pings for an entry.

Maybe if I’m really lucky, someone a little higher up in the blogosphere heirarchy will stumble across this and the idea will start to spread.