Tech

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 7…

There are 34 posts previously published on January 7th

• 2024
  • Year 50 Day 250 Post-club days are now for lazing around. ➡
  • 🎥 65 Weirdest _Princess Bride_ remake ever. ➡
  • 📚 Clarkesworld Issue 208 edited by Neil Clarke Favorites this month from Chi Hui and Marie Vibbert. ➡
• 2023
  • Nic Cage is a Trekkie 'I'm not in the _Star Wars_ family, I'm in the _Star Trek_ family.' ➡
• 2021
  • ITV on the Trump Insurrection A good seven-minute overview of yesterday's events in Washington, D.C. ➡
  • 20 Macs for 2020: Now that this is done, I’m bookmarking it so I can come back and read through the full thing. Eventually. Someday. :) ➡
  • This shirt seemed particularly important today. ➡
• 2020
  • It’s Got a Great Beat, and You Can File a Lawsuit to It: “Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap. Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working ... Read more ➡
  • Defining the decade: ten years of Apple on one page: “Apple had to graduate through the passing of its founder, juggle relationships with an ever-expanding list of consumer and professional market segments, and adapt to the public attention and scrunity that only comes along as a consequence of being the biggest company in the world.” ➡
  • On This Day: Jan 7 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 7 ➡
• 2018
  • Chucks of the day (56/56): bright all-pink waterproofed low-tops. These will be great for Jan. 20th! #chucks #converse ➡
• 2017
  • Selfie with moose! ➡
  • Time to start heading home. I’ll put up a fuller post later, but thanks to all of you who made it to my dad’s service today. It was very appreciated. ➡
  • Book three of 2017: Attack the Geek, by Michael R. Underwood. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ➡
  • Pretty Alaskan sunrise over the Chugach range…at 10-o-freaking-clock in the morning! Gotta appreciate those five hours of sunlight we’ll get today! ➡
• 2016
  • Another workday done. Taken on my way to coax Prairie out of her office. It didn’t take much coaxing. :) (7/366) ➡
• 2015
  • Default Human Being We need to realize that our concept of the 'default human being' is highly dependent upon our own culture and ingrained biases. ➡
• 2014
  • Snow! ➡
  • These two just would not stop squabbling. Had to banish them to opposite sides of the desk. ➡
• 2013
  • Where Time Becomes A Loop Number seven from my old collection of mixes that I'm re-posting. We're moving back into longer sessions again, with this one coming in at just under an hour. ➡
• 2010
  • Links for January 5th through January 7th Sometime between January 5th and January 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too! • The Online 78 Rpm Discographical Project • Best Buy Optimization Is a Big Stupid Annoying Waste of Money • Word of the Year 2009: Distracted Driving • The Science of Success • The Darwin Awards ➡
• 2008
  • Pre-Seattle Days Those who follow me on Flickr will have noticed this already, but I've been spending some time digging through my old archive CDs and uploading a bunch of old photos from years (and digital cameras) past. At this point, I've made it through all my digital photos up to the last few days before I bailed out of Anchorage and migrated south to Seattle. ➡
• 2005
  • Gallimaufry 3 Third verse, same as the first… ➡
  • Netflix and Best Buy? Interesting — Netflix' header navigation tab graphics have changed (less rounded and all gold tones now), and there's a Best Buy logo next to the Netflix logo up top. There's nothing in their Press Releases section about partnering with Best Buy…is this something that's been announced at CES? ➡
• 2004
  • This GarageBand is a hit You look at an application like GarageBand -- you can't get that on another platform at any price. People will buy Macs on the basis of GarageBand. ➡
  • Firsts For how many of you was your first sexual experience consensual? For how many of you was your first penetrative sexual experience consensual? ➡
  • Zeugma Cool word of the day: zeugma. ➡
  • Even if it…what? This little $20 app is a must-have, even if it weren't made by Microsoft. ➡
  • Works for me! Republicans for Voldemort ➡
  • This town is a mess I won't be surprsied at all if today turns out to have more accidents, simply because since it's not snowing, people will think that they can drive normally. Conditions like this certainly don't make for safe driving, though, and it's my bet that quite a few people will be figuring that out over the course of the day. ➡
• 2003
  • Revamping the Archives My archives finally approach something resembling user-friendliness. What I did and why I did it. ➡
  • More on Safari In order to give it something of a workout, I went ahead and set Safari to be my default web browser. Mark Pilgrim has a good rundown of current CSS bugs that he's uncovered in Safari so far (thankfully, though, it renders djwudi.com just fine). Amusingly enough, I may have just found one more while I was reading his post. ➡
  • Thoughts on the keynote Just a couple quick thoughts I had regarding some of the news from Steve Jobs' keynote speech today at MacWorld. ➡
  • MacWorld Expo '03 Keynote Summary of Steve Jobs' keynote address at MacWorld San Francisco. Lots and lots of really cool stuff that I can't afford! ➡

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 6…

There are 37 posts previously published on January 6th

• 2024
  • Year 50 Day 249 Out at Seattle’s goth club the Mercury with friends for their Caturday night of musical randomness. ➡
• 2023
  • Museum of Glass Another day of wandering around a museum, enjoying the pretty sights, and getting back into practice with my camera. ➡
  • 🎥 Enola Holmes 2 Like the first, it was a cute and entertaining adventure, though not quite as good as the first. ➡
• 2021
  • Trump could be removed from office today, if Pence would actually act to uphold the oath he swore to protect this country. I’m absolutely fine with letting Pence be POTUS46 for the next two weeks, and letting Biden take up the mantle of POTUS47. ➡
  • Meet The Black Women Who turned Georgia Blue: “Yep, it was Stacey. But don’t forget about Nsé, Helen, Tamieka, Melanie, LaTosha and Deborah.” ➡
  • Trifecta There's still a lot of work to do. But at least now, we have a good chance of actually being able to get things done. ➡
• 2020
  • 📚 two of 2020: Encounter at Farpoint, by David Gerrold ⭐️⭐️⭐️ A fairly straight adaptation, only a few notable differences from the broadcast episode. As a friend noted, quite amused by the descriptions of men (competence, personality) and women (they’re hot!). 🖖 ➡
  • You Can’t Keep Your Relatives’ Skulls: “In theory, people get to decide what happens to their body after death. In reality, it is near impossible to get legal permission to display a relative’s skeleton.” I’d never considered this before, but now that I have, is it weird that I’m a little disappointed? ;) ➡
  • I’m going to be (slowly) moving my web presence from michaelhanscom.com to michaelhans.com (because it’s a clever URL), and suddenly had the amusing urge–which, to be clear, I would not actually succumb to–to legally change my last name to “Hans.com”, complete with dot. ➡
  • On This Day: Jan 6 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 6 ➡
• 2019
  • A quote from N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third in the Broken Earth trilogy. ➡
  • When you want a warm drink in the morning, but the power is out and your apartment only has an electric stove. ➡
• 2017
  • One of the earliest photos of my dad I think I’ve ever seen. Late teens or early 20s, I’m guessing? Which would put this photo from sometime in the early to mid ’60s. ➡
  • Me and my mum! ➡
  • My parents’ nativity crèche needed a #tinydinosaur cameo appearance. ➡
  • Took the #tinydinosaur for a romp in the snow. Dinosaurs don’t wear boots, so it was pretty cold on his toes. ➡
• 2016
  • Home, fed, exercised, and relaxing in front of the TV. The usual evening routine. (6/366) ➡
• 2014
  • Whoever decided to combine the fun and excitement of the first day of classes with the energy, smiles, and cheer of a Monday is so fired. (Okay, it’s not that bad, but this idea amused me.) ➡
• 2013
  • ToriMix v2 Number six in my old collection of mix sessions that I'm putting up for download and podcast. Another 'theme' mix, this is a forty-five minute mix of Tori Amos dance remixes. ➡
  • Pickpocket Magic This profile of a professional pickpocket in the New Yorker is fascinating. There's also a video clip of Apollo doing his thing. Amazing. ➡
• 2006
  • Weblog Hot or Not? A little bit of silliness being resurrected after finding an old post -- is my weblog Hot or Not? ➡
  • Etymologic Here's one for dad: Etymologic. In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to solve. ➡
  • Portfolio 1: The Berger Partnership Landscape designers The Berger Partnership are using one of my photos on their website detailing their work on renovating Cal Anderson Park. ➡
  • Moles and Trolls, Moles and Trolls! Snagged from lemurlad -- and as he pointed out, these results shouldn't surprise _anyone_ who knows me. I'm a Real Genius genius! ➡
• 2005
  • Weekend Project: Keyword Search While running ideas and vague concepts related to my tag-categorization wishlist of the other day, I figured it was worth poking around in the Movable Type Support Forums, where I found these posts by ishbadiddle -- and while he's calling it something else, that looks to be (nearly) exactly what I've been looking for! ➡
  • 13 Free Songs from iTunes Have an iPod? Want some free music from iTunes? ➡
  • It’s official: Six Apart acquires LiveJournal Looks like the rumors were true: Six Apart acquires LiveJournal. Congrats to both Six Apart and LiveJournal — I'm looking forward to seeing where you all go with this. ➡
• 2004
  • iTMS updates Along with all the other introductions from this morning's keynote, the iTunes Music Store got a lot of new goodies. ➡
  • Home early A gallery of pictures of the downtown Seattle area that I took during my quest for a bus to get me to work have been uploaded to the Hanscom family photo gallery. Enjoy! ➡
  • At least 4 inches so far! I've got about half an hour before my next possible bus (on a different route), so I'm going to head back out and get some more pictures. Expect a fairly large gallery when I get home tonight! ➡
  • Macworld SF 2004 Keynote Macworld SF 2004 Keynote notes, updated live as it happens. ➡
  • Seattle is Closed ;) By my estimation, there's between half an inch and an inch of snow in downtown Seattle right now, and it's coming down strong. ➡
• 2003
  • Gibson gets a blog Noted sci-fi/cyberpunk author William Gibson has just started his blog. No RSS feed, though, which means I'll probably forget to check it on a regular basis. Bummer. ➡
  • Searchling I just stumbled across Searchling, a very cool little mini-application for OS X. When running, it adds a system-wide search field that allows you to search Google, Slashdot, or a few other sites. ➡
  • So many books, so little time In a fortuitous bit of serendipity, I just re-discovered a website I'd found a few months ago, but forgotten to bookmark — All Consuming, which scans recently updated weblogs for Amazon book links, and uses that data to track what books are currently popular in the weblog world. Nifty stuff to explore! ➡
  • Web Writing Style Guide Popular sites filled with cutting-edge Internet cognoscenti (such as Slashdot and ShackNews) give the lie to this harmful and destructive myth: they are brimming with horrific grammar, atrocious spelling, gratuitous abbreviation and childish, arrogant attitude. To be "in" on the net, you must write like a wanker. ➡
• 1996
  • [From Usenet: 1.6.96 0000] Okay...just read this last night, so dug up the passage, as I remembered this discussion while I was reading.... From the hardbound edition of the first three books of the Belgariad, pg. 514 (Magician's Gambit, near the end of Chapter Ten). ➡

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 5…

There are 30 posts previously published on January 5th

• 2024
  • Year 50 Day 248 The new main entrance to Highline College is looking much better. ➡
  • 📚 A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick Actually quite a bit funnier than I expected it to be. ➡
• 2021
  • Lots of Reason to Laugh Whether it’s war and peace or public relations and gardening, sorting out the truth is a complicated endeavor when it relates to Donald Trump. ➡
• 2020
  • 📚 one of 2020: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, by Fredrik Backman. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A great first book for the year, this one is wonderful. Touching, heartfelt, and hilarious, and a beautiful blend of real and fantasy worlds. An instant favorite. ➡
  • On This Day: Jan 5 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 5 ➡
• 2019
  • At the DoubleTree SeaTac for today’s Norwescon planning meeting, and Aki Con is here this weekend! Having another con here with people running around in costume feels so much better (home-y) than on weekends when it’s just a “normal” hotel. ➡
  • Book two of 2019: The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #hugowinner 📚 ➡
  • Trump’s bizarre Rose Garden news conference shows why he’s impossible to negotiate with: Forget impeachment, it’s more and more obvious that the 25th Amendment should be under serious consideration. This man has no business holding the office of President. ➡
• 2016
  • Icicles! (5/366) ➡
  • This well-hung snowman appeared in front of my building today. The students are back in town! ➡
• 2015
  • Santa or eyeball? This time of year the candy bowl on my desk is always an amusing mix of leftover Halloween and Christmas candy. ➡
• 2014
  • Mmmmm: Pork chops with baked apples, green beans, and sweet potato. ➡
  • Prepping for the zombie apocalypse? Or cooking up meth? Either way, looks creepy. ➡
  • Another morning walk, this time along the John Wayne Memorial Trail down the Iron Horse State Park. ➡
• 2013
  • Blurry Boundaries Honestly, I'm not entirely sure just where the boundary between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' violence lies for me. I like my horror creepy and/or with a good dose of humor mixed in. Today's trend towards ultra-violent torture porn just makes me feel ill. ➡
  • A Fine Day’s Mix The fifth of my old collection of mix sessions that I'm posting. This one is another 'theme' idea I had, and depending on how much you like the base song, could be either enjoyable or excruciating. ➡
  • Free Islamist SF anthology eBook A Mosque Among The Stars was the first anthology that dealt with the subject of Muslim characters and/or Islamic themes and Science Fiction. ➡
• 2008
  • Better Buy I may not ever get to a point of just stopping by to browse, or remotely look forward to having to dive into Best Buy...but at least at the moment, I don't feel the need to actively avoid the store or it's sales droids when I do stop in. And, for Best Buy, that's saying a _lot_. ➡
• 2005
  • Timeline Meme I guess it's a good day for picking up on memes — this one comes from Mike: the Timeline Meme. ➡
  • De-Lurker Day Well, the day's actually almost over, but I just now found about about this thanks to Carla saying hi — today's been declared De-Lurker day! ➡
  • Veronica Moser, Type Key Spammer While there's a fair amount of chatter today about spammers shifting tactics away from comments and towards Trackback, I ran into a different approach — my first TypeKey authenticated spammer. ➡
  • On Ebonics As someone who's long had an (entirely unschooled) interest in language and linguistics, much of what's in here is absolutely fascinating. ➡
• 2004
  • :hover support in IE! Hot damn — someone figured out how to hack :hover support into Internet Explorer! ➡
  • I used to be a DJ / Gig’s Music Theater I finally got tired of letting my old domain sit inactive, and have resurrected djwudi.com as a monument (however small) to my years as a club DJ, along with a 1998 archive of the Gig's Music Theater website. ➡
  • How to screw your employees A proposed Labor Department rule suggests ways employers can avoid paying overtime to some of the 1.3 million low-income workers who would become eligible this year. ➡
  • Macworld keynote tomorrow This week is the Macworld expo in San Francisco, and Jim has a good roundup of the current rumors posted. As Lane pointed out, I'll certainly be keeping up with the news during tomorrow's keynote. ➡
  • Sympathy for the Devil remixes Sympathy for the Devil has been one of my favorite songs for years, and I've collected quite a few versions over the years. I'm sure I don't have all of the various versions out there yet, but so far I've managed to dig up… ➡
• 2003
  • Fine tuning Site adjustments: sidebar reorganization, and bringing back the book reviews. ➡
• 2001
  • Babies are so darn cute Miranda had a beautiful little girl on Christmas Eve, and she just sent me a picture of the little munchkin! She's a cutie! ➡
  • High Fidelity Imposters Dream of Hallmark I'd actually managed to go through a couple release days without anything catching my eye enough to spend money on — miracles never cease, eh? After work today I had to go by Suncoast to figure out when I work this weekend, and discovered that I had a paycheck waiting for me. Rock on…but funny, I didn't have it when I walked out. ➡

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 4…

There are 33 posts previously published on January 4th

• 2024
  • Year 50 Day 247 I look like a Starfleet Academy PeeChee folder. ➡
• 2023
  • Museum of Flight Went out to the Museum of Flight and took a few shots with my DSLR for the first time in something over three years. ➡
• 2021
  • DJ Wüdi in 2020 A roundup of my year bringing DJ Wüdi out of retirement. Thanks for listening! ➡
  • Difficult Listening Hour 2021.01.02: Happy New Year! Basically, I just did a search for 'new' in my music collection and then winged it from there. ➡
• 2020
  • Out for a night of goth clubbing at The Mercury. ➡
  • On This Day: Jan 4 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 4 ➡
• 2017
  • This much winter is a new thing for the #tinydinosaur (not so new for me, though). ➡
  • The #tinydinosaur thought that Batman V Superman was spectacular…ly stupid. Wonder Woman really was the only worthwhile part. Is there a bootleg 10-minute WW edit somewhere out there? #batman #superman #wonderwoman #batmanvsuperman ➡
  • Traveling can be stressful, so the #tinydinosaur recommends the occasional ice cream break. ➡
  • People watching with the #tinydinosaur at SeaTac airport. ➡
  • Book two of 2016: Windows on a Lost World, by V. E. Mitchell. ⭐️⭐️ #startrek #tos ➡
• 2016
  • Can we just be done with this already? (Answer: no. More snow predicted.) (4/366) ➡
• 2015
  • The @CardsAgainstHumanity @cah base game, plus five official expansions, two years of holiday bullshit, the 90s mini-pack, and four Crabs Adjust Humidity expansions. I’ve had to split this so the white cards are in the Bigger Blacker Box, and the black cards are in the Case for Humanity box. ➡
• 2014
  • A nice walk by the Yakima river on a brisk winter’s morning. ➡
• 2013
  • Mission Accomplished The fourth of my old collection of mix sessions that I'm posting. This one starts a few that move away from the 'Difficult Listening Hour' series to explore some other ideas I had running through my head. ➡
• 2011
  • Moving Hell, Part II The following is a list of issues we have discovered with the property over the past 36 hours. ➡
  • Adventures in Moving Hell Once again: Wish us luck! We need it! ➡
• 2010
  • School Schedule, Winter Quarter 2010 Well, even though classes don't _officially_ start until tomorrow, I'm already up and running and beginning to dig into the readings for my classes. Here's what I'll be playing with this quarter. ➡
  • Links for December 16th through January 4th Sometime between December 16th and January 4th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too! • Why Is JJ Abrams Obsessed With Alice in Wonderland? • Population of the Dead • The Weekly World News on Google Books • This Dumb Decade: The 87 Lamest Moments in Tech, 2000-2009 • 20 Greatest SF Movies of the Past Decade ➡
• 2007
  • Christmas in Alaska It took a few days, but the photos from our trip up to Anchorage to visit my parents are finally up. ➡
• 2006
  • The Future is Not What It Used to Be Ever since the total, irretrievable collapse of the Internet in a chaos of viruses, worms, spam, terrorism and busts by the FBI anti-porn squad, [bloggers] had become a bigger street menace than mimes, Jehovah's Witnesses, or panhandlers ever were. ➡
  • Plato’s a Putz No, no -- not Plato. Plato Learning, Inc. They're the company that provides the online program that we're using in my math class -- that really shouldn't be incompatible with Macs. ➡
• 2005
  • Quick Review: The Lion in Winter I'm not really sure when I put The Lion in Winter in my queue, nor what prompted me to do so. I'm very glad I did, though — what a wonderful, deliciously wicked film! ➡
  • My best photos of 2004 I've just created a flickr photoset of my favorite photographs from this past year (hey, every news organization on the planet does this, I might as well join in the fun, right?). ➡
• 2003
  • Can corporations lie? Nearly one hundred and forty years ago, towards the end of the Civil War, Pres. Lincoln foresaw the rising power of the corporations that had grown the most due to wartime industries. Now, in a case heading for the U.S. Supreme Court, the corporate world may be fighting to hold onto everything that Pres. Lincoln feared, and that has come all too true. ➡
  • I wish… I'm not too sure how they stumbled across me, but I just got notification today that I've been added to the list of birthdays at I Wish, You Wish. They're working on collecting links of bloggers that have their Amazon Wishlists posted, and listing them alongside their birthdays. ➡
• 2002
  • Rick sent me this quote Video games don't affect kids. If Pac Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms munching magic pills and listening to repetitive, electronic music. ➡
  • The new album from M.C. Escher, ‘Please Escher Don’t Hurt ‘Em,’ featuring the hit single, ‘You Can’t Draw This!’ Hmm...if I didn't babble so much, the title of this post would probably be longer than the post itself. Score one for being talkative! ➡
  • Twitch This is how my friends drink coffee. ➡
  • Now that’s a big gun Maglev technology, basically a big railgun, powering craft from the ground into space. Does my little sci-fi geek heart proud. ➡
  • Chad’s birthday That whole issue of needing to give the appearance of being able to justify your time no matter how slow it is kind of kills much ability to find some interesting ways to kill time. ➡
  • Four Oh Four By now, most websurfers will have seen the standard '404 Error' webpage that pops up when a requested page doesn't exist. Some 404's are cooler than others -- and THCnet has the coolest I've seen yet. If Royce checks my page anytime soon, he should check it out. ➡
• 2001
  • I am Jack’s sense of apathy. This is your life. Doesn't get any better than this. This is your life -- and it's ending one minute at a time. ➡

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 3…

There are 30 posts previously published on January 3rd

• 2024
  • Year 50 Day 246 Something wicked this way comes. ➡
• 2023
  • 🎥 The Menu Best watched as if you’re going to a fancy new restaurant for the first time: no reviews, no trailers, just enjoy experiencing what the chef has planned for your evening. ➡
  • 🎥 Everything Everywhere All At Once Confusing, bizarre, hilarious, unexpected, touching, and sweet. ➡
• 2020
  • Welcome to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: “The Mystery Flesh Pit is the name given to a bizarre natural geobiological feature discovered in the permian basin region of west texas in the early 1970s. The pit is characterized as an enormous subterranean organism of indeterminate size and origin embedded deep within the earth, displaying a ... Read more ➡
  • Norwescon 43 is Coming Up A plug for Norwescon 43, coming up soon! ➡
  • No More Ads For most of you, this probably wouldn't even be noticeable if I hadn't said anything, because I expect you're either reading through RSS or use an ad blocker. ➡
  • On This Day: Jan 3 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 3 ➡
• 2019
  • Looks like I’m just the fifth supporter of The Good News Podcast on Patreon — getting in early before the rush! I’ve been enjoying this podcast since it started, so I’m happy to toss them a few bucks a month to keep it going. ➡
• 2017
  • Just saw a cute group of international students playing on the frozen irrigation canal that runs through the #CWU campus. They’re braver than I am! 😃 #cwupride @cwupride ➡
• 2016
  • Book one of 2016: Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/366) #chuckpalahniuk ➡
• 2014
  • Celebrating the car’s successful resurrection…with booze! :D ➡
  • One of my stocking stuffers this year was a Newton’s Cradle desk toy for my work desk. Always liked these things! ➡
• 2013
  • Difficult Listening Hour 04 The third of my old collection of mix sessions that I'm posting. The keen-eyed might notice that we've jumped straight from DLH02 to DLH04. There is a DLH03, but...well, it wasn't good. ➡
• 2010
  • Condition of Sale This record is sold upon the express condition that it shall not be copied or duplicated and that the full right of property or possession reverts to the Columbia Phonograph Co. upon violation of this condition. ➡
• 2009
  • Congratulations Royce and Steph! Congratulations and best wishes to Royce and Steph, who are getting married this afternoon...in fact, the ceremony starts in about twenty minutes at the time I write this. ➡
• 2007
  • Thomas Jefferson’s Koran Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values. ➡
• 2006
  • First Day of School Well, okay, so there wasn't any big yellow school bus for me today. And no, there wasn't a _short_ bus either, smartasses. Still and all, it _was_ my first day in school in fifteen years, so I figured I had to mark the occasion in some form. ➡
• 2005
  • Wishlist: MT ‘tag’ category plugin What I want now is a way to use tags in my Movable Type installation rather than categories. Barring some kind soul figuring out how to shoehorn such a thing into MT, though, do any of the current weblogging tools support tag-based categorization? ➡
  • Moose or Mouse? Moose causes auto accident by climbing inside the driver's pants. Or not. ➡
  • New Earth Time Rather than having to deal with local time zones and the bother of constantly converting back and forth, NET is an attempt to standardize one global time system. ➡
• 2004
  • Congratulations NASA: Spirit has landed! It's official: Spirit (the first of two rovers sent to Mars) has landed successfully! ➡
  • Madacy != metadata I've babbled before about my anal-retentive obsession with metadata when it comes to my music collection. Today, I remembered one of my major frustrations: the Madacy Music Group. ➡
  • NetNewsWire display bug Has anyone else seen this particular NetNewsWire bug? ➡
  • From vinyl to .mp3 The New York Times has a decent overview of how to transfer vinyl recordings to .mp3 (or AAC, or whatever your digital format of choice may be). ➡
• 2003
  • A tweak here, a tweak there Further changes (including some of the ideas that have been tossed at me in the comments to my last post) will appear as I get around to them. In other words, it could be tomorrow, and it could be sometime in 2007. Around here, you just never know. ➡
  • Everything old is new again I've finally managed to finish up what's been something of an ongoing 'whenever I'm bored' project for the past few months — re-entering all my old posts (two years worth, approximately 700 or so?) that disappeared when my old webserver died in August. ➡
  • tlhIngan Hol Did you know that you could Google in Klingon? Completely bizarre. But cool. ➡
  • Wireless in the classroom In response to this article about the pros and cons of wireless 'net access on campus, Robert Scoble presents a list of suggests as to how teachers can adapt. Rather than panicking and denying all 'net access across the board, why not come up with ways to involve use of the 'net in class? ➡
• 2001
  • Insomnia And let me dream about making mad love on the heath, tearing off tights with my teeth. ➡
• 1996
  • [From the archives: 1.3.96 0257] Okay, changed some things around again. At the request of someone who e-mailed me, I have brought my page about the new teen curfew law back online. ➡

So here’s something odd that I’ve just discovered over the past couple days.

(TL;DR: A WordPress plugin had a bug in the code. I successfully debugged it, just to realize that the author had done the same (in a different way) a few days ago. But I still get to feel good about what I did! Plus, I made another small change.)

Since my blog turns 20 in November of this year, I’m running daily “on this day” posts that include a list of all posts made on that date in previous years. To do this, I’ve installed the posted today plugin, and I pre-schedule the posts with a template that includes the correct shortcode (this is the body text for the Jan 2 post, using curly brackets instead of straight to avoid triggering the shortcode):

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 2…

{postedtoday month="1" day="2"}

The posts have been showing up on my blog just fine (Jan. 1, Jan. 2)…but I noticed that they weren’t showing up in my feed in NetNewsWire, nor were they getting captured by IFTTT and pushed through to my Twitter feed, though they were showing up in my micro.blog feed (which only parses titles and links, not body content).

I verified that the post information existed in my site’s RSS feed, and included the full text of the post with all past posts from the proper date rather than just the text as shown above (so the shortcode was being processed as the RSS feed was generated). Here’s a somewhat redacted (to include only one past post entry) version of the item entry for the Jan 2 post:

        <item>
    <title>On This Day: Jan 2</title>
    <link>https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2020/01/02/on-this-day-jan-2/</link>
            <comments>https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2020/01/02/on-this-day-jan-2/#respond</comments>
            <pubDate>Thu, 02 Jan 2020 16:00:47 +0000</pubDate>
    <dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Hanscom]]></dc:creator>
            <category><![CDATA[blog]]></category>

    <guid isPermaLink="false">https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/?p=16448</guid>
            <description><![CDATA[Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 2]]></description>
                            <content:encoded><![CDATA[Since I&#8217;ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I&#8217;m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 2…
<p>There are <strong> </strong> posts previously published on January 2nd</p><ul class="todaypost"><li><strong>2019</strong><ul><li><a href="https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2019/01/02/12723/"></a> <span class="today_excerpt">“Sen. Romney&#8217;s statement is not a profile in courage. Rather it is another example of the emptiness of the #nevertrump movement &#8212; all talk and no action.”</span> (<a href="https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2019/01/02/12723/">&#x27A1;</a>)</li></ul></li></ul>
]]></content:encoded>
                        <wfw:commentRss>https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2020/01/02/on-this-day-jan-2/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
    <slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
                        </item>

I had a guess as to what was going on, but wasn’t sure…yet.

I’d noticed earlier that the “There are X posts previously published on [DATE]” line that Posted Today includes wasn’t working properly, and was omitting the number that’s supposed to be where the X is, so the line just read, “There are  posts previously published on [DATE]”. I hadn’t worried too much about that just yet, filing it away into the “figure out later” bucket.

However, when looking at the XML data for my RSS feed, I noticed that there appeared to be a garbage character at that point in the data:

This made me think that there was something in the plugin that wasn’t working properly, and the garbage character may have been choking the RSS parsers that NetNewsWire and Twitter use, so they ended up discarding those items.

I took a look at the PHP code for the plugin to see if this was something I could tweak myself, and the answer seemed to be…kind of.

Here’s the plugin code that generated that line:

    // get the grammar right for a result of 1
    $singular = sprintf(
        _x('There is <strong>1</strong> post previously published on %s', 'Single post found', 'postedtoday'),
        $the_date
    );
    $multiple = sprintf(
        _x('There are <strong>%c</strong> posts previously published on %s', 'Multiple posts found', 'postedtoday'),
        $posts_from_today->found_posts,
        $the_date
    );

I don’t really know PHP, but it was pretty obvious that the %c argument should be replaced by the integer for however many posts Posted Today found to display, but for some reason, was instead outputting a garbage character.

I figured I’d just tweak that line to not output a post count, and changed the code to this:

    // get the grammar right for a result of 1
    $singular = sprintf(
        _x('There is <strong>1</strong> post previously published on %s', 'Single post found', 'postedtoday'),
        $the_date
    );
    $multiple = sprintf(
        _x('These are all the posts previously published on %s', 'Multiple posts found', 'postedtoday'),
        $posts_from_today->found_posts,
        $the_date
    );

Unfortunately, while that fixed that error, it then resulted in the %s argument outputting an integer instead of a date; instead of the expected “These are all the posts previously published on January 2nd”, I got, “These are all the posts published on 27”. Well, that wasn’t right…however, the “27” was the correct number of past posts for Jan. 2, and was what should have been showing up instead of the garbage character. Which got me thinking…

As it turned out, according to the PHP manual, the %c argument “is treated as an integer and presented as the character with that ASCII” — and ASCII 27 is the ‘escape’ character! So the plugin was checking to see how many posts were made, coming up with 27, and dropping the number in the right place–but was using the incorrect argument for PHP’s sprintf function, so that instead of outputting the integer, it was outputting an escape character. Similarly, for my Jan. 1 entry, it came up with 26 posts, and ASCII 26 is the ‘substitute’ character, so that also acted as a garbage character in the XML RSS feed.

With that in mind, I tweaked the code to be this:

    // get the grammar right for a result of 1
    $singular = sprintf(
        _x('There is <strong>1</strong> post previously published on %s', 'Single post found', 'postedtoday'),
        $the_date
    );
    $multiple = sprintf(
        _x('There are <strong>%s</strong> posts previously published on %s', 'Multiple posts found', 'postedtoday'),
        $posts_from_today->found_posts,
        $the_date
    );

And just like magic, it worked!

Well, at least, I now get the correct phrase in my post: “There are 27 posts previously published on January 2nd”. I’ll find out the next time NetNewsWire refreshes as to whether this fixes my RSS feed so that those posts aren’t mysteriously disappearing. Fingers crossed!

Update: The mysteriously missing posts have appeared in my feed in NetNewsWire. Success!

---

And then, after going through all this and writing it up, I realized that the plugin’s author had updated the plugin to correct for this error three days ago, and all I really needed to do was upload the latest version of the plugin. So I’m amused, but I also get to feel accomplished for successfully debugging and solving the problem, so yay!

Plus, I’ve made one other tweak to the plugin, so that it adds a link to the end of the excerpt to better handle “microblog” style entries that don’t have titles, so I still get to feel good about that part, as well. :) My coding skills may be underdeveloped and rusty from lack of regular use, but they’re not entirely atrophied!

Here’s the change I made to accomplish that:

Original code:

        // display excerpt if we want it
        if ( $excerpt ) $output .= ' <span class="today_excerpt">' . get_the_excerpt() .   '</span>';

        $output .= '</li>';

My code:

        // display excerpt if we want it
        if ( $excerpt ) $output .= ' <span class="today_excerpt">' . get_the_excerpt() .   '</span>';

        $output .= ' (<a href="' . get_permalink() . '">&#x27A1;</a>)</li>';

Mischief managed!

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 2…

There are 35 posts previously published on January 2nd

• 2024
  • Year 50 Day 245 My first day back in the office at work after the holidays. ➡
• 2022
  • 🎥 Jungle Cruise Perfect lightweight and low-stress entertainment for a lazy Sunday afternoon. ➡
  • TBR Pile Reading Challenge 📚 A reading challenge I just might try to do this year. ➡
• 2021
  • Happy National Science Fiction day! Right now I’m reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. What SF book are you reading today (or what was the last one you read)? ➡
• 2020
  • RSS Feed Weirdness and PHP Debugging Successfully debugging PHP code in the WordPress 'Post Today' plugin. I feel accomplished! ➡
  • Happy National Science Fiction Day, everyone! Spend some time with a favorite SF short story, book, TV show, or film to celebrate. 📚🎬🖖 ➡
  • On This Day: Jan 2 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 2 ➡
• 2019
  • “Sen. Romney’s statement is not a profile in courage. Rather it is another example of the emptiness of the #nevertrump movement — all talk and no action.” ➡
  • Hugo Best Novel Reading I've decided to work my way through reading all of the Best Novel Hugo Award winners over the coming year (or however long it actually takes), and will use this page to track my progress. ➡
  • Book one of 2019: The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #hugowinner 📚 ➡
  • Personal goal for this year (or, well, however long it takes): Read every Hugo Award Best Novel (including Retro Hugos). To date, I’ve read 21 of the 73 (28%), but it’s been ages for some, so I might or might not re-read those as I go along. ➡
  • Linkdump for November 29th through January 2nd An automatically generated list of links that caught my eye between November 29th and January 2nd. • 365 IETF RFCs: a 50th anniversary dive • Is Grover swearing? No, it's in your ears. • Against Peter Jackson’s "They Shall Not Grow Old" • On radical kindness (another aspect of hopepunk) • The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk ➡
• 2016
  • DJ Wüdi emerging from hibernation and prepping for @norwescon #nwc39. Gear is an iPad and @numark_dj iDJ Pro. (2/366) ➡
• 2015
  • Looking for a Shmoe Bones is one of the better shows on TV right now, but this short little clip from S10E08 made me quite literally laugh out loud. Just a wonderful bit of silliness. ➡
  • This Year’s Health Efforts After letting my exercise regimen fall apart in November, it's time to get going again. For my own accountability, this is some rambling about my current status and what goals I have moving into the new year. ➡
• 2014
  • Six months of wearing contacts, and they still kinda seem like magic. ➡
• 2013
  • Housekeeping I did some housekeeping on my Flickr account and severely culled my contacts--from somewhere over 250 to slightly under 90. A little housekeeping every now and then is a good thing. ➡
  • Difficult Listening Hour 02v2 The second of my old collection of mix sessions that I'm posting. A little longer than the last one, and a little more pop-y. ➡
• 2009
  • Books, Books, Books, and More Books! For a few years now, I've been using LibraryThing to track my book collection. Ever since Prairie and I moved in together, we've been occasionally talking about adding her books to the listing...and now, the project is done: our entire library -- all 1,465 books -- is cataloged! ➡
• 2008
  • Condescended Still -- not _every_ geek out there works for Microsoft and has a gazillion expendable dollars..._or_ sees the need to toss out a perfectly good (and, actually, very nice) TV set that works fine, aside from not having the ATSC tuner. ➡
• 2006
  • 2005 Traffic Report I've been using the free traffic monitoring service StatCounter for some time now to get an idea of how much traffic I'm pulling in. Here's a look at the past year's traffic for Eclecticism. ➡
• 2005
  • Visual Halo Nice and easy, and now I've got my own DVD of Nine Inch Nails videos — and even when they are officially released on DVD, I'd lay good money down that the collection won't include the Broken short film, so I've got that, too. ➡
  • Recycle! According to the Seattle PI, recycling is mandatory. So what to do when my apartment building doesn't offer ways to recycle? ➡
  • DVD-R? DVD+R? Argh! Boo to the industry for having two competing and incompatible DVD formats, though, especially so similarly named. If I hadn't had some vague memory of reading about the different formats at some point in the past, I'd probably just have assumed that there was something wrong with my computer or the Superdrive, and been a lot more frustrated and aggravated than necessary. ➡
  • Rollback A little morbid, but it's just how my mind works at times — when all's said and done, is someone going to have to roll back the World Population Counter by however many hundreds of thousands of people died in the tsunamis and their aftereffects? ➡
• 2004
  • We all have our priorities You choose dinner over IRC? HEATHEN. ➡
  • Blog of the Month This was nice — I got picked as 'Blog of the Month' by AndrewBlog. ➡
• 2003
  • Top ten web design mistakes Usability guru Jakob Nielsen posted his list of the year's top ten web design mistakes, and while it's aimed more at commercial sites, I thought I'd take a quick gander and see if there are any that I should worry about. ➡
• 2002
  • Fire your friends Okay, so your friend's passed out from all the booze he drank at your New Years party. Okay, so the old 'hand-in-a-bowl-of-warm-water' or 'shaving-cream-on-the-face' tricks are pretty old. But is dousing his leg in lighter fluid and setting him on fire really the best and brightest idea for a prank? ➡
  • Beyond the rumor sites This time, around, however, Apple -- rather than staying their characteristically silent self -- is doing the online equivalent of tossing a goldfish into a pirahna tank. ➡
  • [From Usenet: 1.2.02 0143] First off, I hope your experiences with OS X continue to improve, as you indicated they had started to in a followup post. Figured I could go ahead and jump in the fray, though... ;) ➡
• 1995
  • [From Usenet 1.2.95 0638] For those who might be interested, Critters Buggin' played a New Year's party up here in Anchorage, Alaska. Pretty damn good show, too. ➡
  • [From Usenet: 1.2.95 0541] A friend told me that reznor had done some work with them, so I went out and picked up their first album, only to figure out trent was nowhere on that, but was still a really good disc. ➡
  • [From Usenet: 1.2.95 0541] I might as well join in the fray...`` Semi-lurker here...been reading for quite a while, do occasinally post bits and pieces... ➡
  • [From Usenet: 1.2.95 0448] True, Bytet is quite fun...as is Fsunjibleableje (if you ever caught them...great early Einsturzende Neubauten type industrial). The Critter's concert was pretty good, too...even a guest appearance by Stone Gossard. ➡