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Thursday, May first, 2003
Well I came up with a cool idea for how the site data should be physically organized -- a script to put that organization into effect -- ran it and bang, it deleted all my posts! So I'm trying to get them back, meanwhile the links are not going to be there, sorry.
posted afternoon of May first, 2003: Respond
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Wow, Modesto made TPM! Check it out! And given that Condit and Peterson are both from Modesto, isn't Geragos sort of becoming the Johnnie Cochran of downwardly-mobile Modesto philanderers?
posted morning of May first, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, April 30th, 2003
About a month ago I ate breakfast at Cheyenne Diner, on 9th Ave. and 33rd in midtown Manhattan. It was excellent -- perfect homefries, perfect sunny-side-up eggs, near-perfect corned beef hash. I hesitated though, to trumpet its virtues based on a single excellent meal... but this morning I went back and it lived up to my expectations. Well, fell short in one regard -- the homefries this time were only very good. But the eggs! This time I forgot to specify sunny-side-up as I normally do and ordered fried eggs; they came over easy as they generally do by default in this part of the country. And these were the best over easy fried eggs I have ever eaten -- ever. This is the best breakfast I know of in Manhattan. I am going to be recommending it to anyone who asks. A note about the corned beef hash -- it is a little peculiar. I like it a lot but it is different from most, kind of goopy or something, I'm not sure how to describe it besides by saying it has the approximate consistency of refried beans -- which is an unusual consistency for corned beef hash.
posted afternoon of April 30th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2003
With regards to my previous post, I want to flesh out the idea of limiting information content in order to increase bandwidth. Actually -- well I guess its accurate to say "I want to flesh out" this concept -- but not sure it is currently within my ability to do so. This must be an existing meme though -- if you have any recommendations for reading on this subject, please contact me.
posted afternoon of April 29th, 2003: Respond
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Ta-da! Jeremy and Ellen join the ranks of the four-doored! Tomorrow evening I am picking up our new car, a Pontiac Vibe; described by Western Driver as a crossover combining aspects of station wagon, hatchback, and sport wagon. It is a pleasant car, and inexpensive. It will be easier to get Sylvia in and out because of the four doors, and useful for hauling lumber -- currently I have to chop everything up into 4 or 5-foot lengths before I put it in the car. Thanks to Ellen's father, Lou Kahaner, for helping us out with the legwork on this -- Lou found us the car dealer and negotiated the price we got, and made sure they didn't give us any grief.
posted afternoon of April 29th, 2003: Respond
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So why did I create this journal? The reasons are severalfold. I've been pretty fascinated by the blogging phenomenon since last summer, when I discovered a couple of the sites I've been reading regularly since -- Calpundit, Talking Points Memo, and Body and Soul are perhaps the "big three" for me -- and have been wondering if I could sustain such a steady level of posting and keep it interesting, and how it would sound if I did. I started my first "web log" before I knew that term, back in 1999 with the READIN book diary; but page generation was manual, not automated, and maintaining the site was a hassle, and I never really got far with it. Although, take a look at the page for Faulkner's The Hamlet to get an idea of where I wanted to go with it. Once I found out about ASP it seemed like the perfect fit -- I just had to learn how to code automatically generated journal pages and good things would come of it. Two things I wanted to learn to do formatting-wise; expressing dates and times in human terms, and displaying links in a hierarchical format. All the m/d/yyyy dates and hh:mm:ss times you see on web pages don't do it for me. They are over-determined and difficult to read. I wanted to express recent dates as "Yesterday", "Last Sunday", and posting times as just "morning", "evening", etc. I think I have come up with a pretty coherent way of doing this! And the hierarchical links, well, take a look at the left hand side of this page, I think they are good. Update: Thinking about the two formatting goals above, I realize they are both concerned with limiting the amount of information presented in order to maximize the amound of information communicated. Funny... And the archiving system I have vaguely in mind could be thought of along the same lines too.
posted morning of April 29th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, April 28th, 2003
In the comments to this post, LanguageHat advises me on the origin of "Ye Olde..." in kitschy business names. He says "Y" is a misreading of the old English character Thorn, "þ" [this is ASCII 0xDE, which represents Thorn in most of the fonts I use -- if you're having trouble seeing it, try switching your display font to Courier New or Times New Roman]. Something I had never really thought about but way cool, and it makes good sense too.
posted evening of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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I put up a hook for the garden hose in our front yard today, and Sylvia helped out, assiduously. [? I wasn't sure what that meant but it somehow suggested itself as the appropriate adverb. Looked it up just now in the dictionary and whaddya know, it fits pretty well. I'll let it stand.] Her description of the activity was, "We're doing shoe rack!" It is up and looks good, though I made a bit of a mistake in the positioning of it. It has two screw holes that are on a vertical axis, and two more that are on a horizontal axis collinear with the lower of the first two; when I was positioning it I was only looking at the lower three holes, didn't realize there was another one, and I put it in a place where that top hole is not near any wood. Oh well -- the three screws should do a fine job of holding it up.
posted evening of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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I should note with regards to my earlier post dissing the Clifford books, that Sylvia thinks they are the bee's knees. She has memorized enough of the two we own ("Clifford's Show-and-Tell" and "Clifford's First Autumn") to be able to do a pretty good job of reading them out loud. A common scene at bedtime story time is, she will give me a book ("Green Eggs and Ham" is currently quite popular) and say "You read that", then take a Clifford book and say "I read that." And lo and behold, she reads! After a few pages she will get distracted and decide to trade books; we generally trade back and forth a few times before either of us gets to the end of our book, then it's time for bed.
posted afternoon of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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This morning I put in date formatting -- it still needs more testing but all in all seems to work pretty well. Places I want to go in the near future: Archives, subject filter, view by date. Long-term goals: comments!
posted afternoon of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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