KODA

Today, this day… after years of ISDN, I finally have DSL. Oh man. What a difference a little bandwidth makes.

Later: This is incredible… hahaha, I’m apt-get dist-upgrading and listening to internet radio at the same time.

Just to let you know, it’s likely to get quiet here for a little while. I’m forecasting a significant drop in the awesomeness coefficient for the next one and a half weeks or so while I wrap up the end of this academic quarter. I’ve got books to read, papers to write!

I am so glad that summer is approaching.

A few minutes ago I was sitting down, munching some granola and flipping through some camera ads laying on the table. I was mulling over some dissapointment from the events that had transpired over the past hour. But then, I had a realization. A realization of how seemingly separate events happened to bring me to experiences I couldn’t have possibly planned for. I have to chuckle at how these events and my intentions have shaped my experience today!

Today I was to meet some friends to hang out and have fun; we’d been doing this for a few weeks and I was really looking forward to it. I was very much anticipating seeing one friend, whom I had missed after her performance the night before. She is the one who originally invited me to these afternoons. I had packed a CD in my pocket I thought she might like hearing. The quickest route to the place where we’ve met is a walk up a few hills, and so I set out walking, making my way to meet my friends.

I logged into Last.fm today, spotting a new message notification waiting for me in the top right corner. Only, something looked different in my status box today. My user icon was a different color – a subscribed color…

As you might have noticed, one of our profile servers (which your account is on) has been rather slow recently. Affected users are noticing that their charts are taking ages to update, and neighbours are not calculated fast enough. This is due to the changes we’re making in the way profile data is stored and searched. [...]

To sweeten the deal we’re upgrading your account with a free 1 month subscription. (or extending it if you already subscribe). Along with the usual subscriber perks, you’ll have access to the beta test of the new site update (in early June). This will give you a chance to try out the new charts system before everyone else, and tell us what you think before it’s launched.

I hereby vow to try to figure out the difference between it’s and its, you’re and your, and they’re and their. I shall hereby try to speak english as a well-formed language, rather than a generic statement for what happens when you put letters together.

For pandas has shown me the light.

Today was spent experimenting with something I’ve intended to for a long time: PHP and AJAX. I finally bit the bullet and started learning it in earnest.

This morning was spent searching for a suitable PHP toolkit to tinker with. The one I finally arrived at is the SAJAX toolkit, a moderately minimal framework for creating simple callbacks and recievers without having to go through the nitty-gritty of the lower-level XMLHttpRequest APIs. After playing around with it for a while, I really like it. There are some things that are quite confusing to me as a first time user, such as the asynchronous nature of things and the effects on variable scope – but all in all it’s quite a nice system to play with.

I also discovered a quite wonderful little Firefox extension called FireBug. It has to be the most clean and cleverly put together all-purpose debugger I’ve ever seen. It’s very beautifully designed, too. It looks to be extremely useful in debugging javascript, css, and xhtml source in the future. It sure helped me out debugging XMLHttpRequests today!

This little poem sprang into my mind one night a few years ago, just out of the blue. Just three words, three orders, and reversed. But is it more than just wordplay? I continue to ponder what it means… and how it can have meaning.

Today was one of those days when things seem to flow… creatively and generally. It was a long day, but I feel I got so much completed that in afterthought I’m glad to have done. The lion’s share of the evening was spent making the comic you see in this post.

It was just one of those random ideas I get in the least opportune moments, like mid-running to the dinner table. In spite of this, I guess I managed to keep the excitement of the concept alive until I was free to work on it. It’s been a while since I’ve done some serious Inkscaping, though I did scoop up a development binary from their (recently redesigned!) official site a few days ago. It was a lot of fun to just loosely work on a picture like this… something I hadn’t really done in a long time.

…spend their first hour on the deck. This is the first time they’ve been in the open air, able to explore the sky, the trees, the bugs, the reflections of the wind chimes, the view of the area outside our house. It’s so exciting for them. Ane was wandering around, sniffing everything in sight. Imo’s tail was jiggling with excitement as she realized that now, after watching from the door for all this time, the deck was hers to explore!

It’s exciting for me, simply watching them

We’d been waiting until the right time, out of concerns that they might jump up onto the ledge and out of the deck. Now, the proverbial cats are out of the bag, and they’re loving it.

I’ve been working tonight on getting a little Blogroll going here in the sidebar. I’ve tried to put together a preliminary list of people and places that came to mind. If you’re not on there, and would like to be, leave a comment and I will gladly add you. On the other hand, if you’re on there and would like to be off, the same applies. I’m not asking for reciprocity – just looking to point to the sites and writings of some good friends.

I doubt these’ll be getting much traffic in the near future, but it’s more of a respect & recognition thing than anything else. You never know, though.

Soon I hope to get a Linkblog going here, though details right now are very sketchy. I was kind of looking for an independent PHP app to put up, since I’m trying to experiment with a variety of systems… though it doesn’t look like there are any specialized apps very widly used. At least, from what I’ve seen so far, google’s results are filled with linkblogs, rather than linkblog software. I know many seem to take the Wordpress route, though I’m reluctant to install another instance or create a category hack here for something that (in my mind) should have it’s own separate space… perhaps I will find something after some more searching over the next few days.