Blankbaby

More redesigning

OK, people. I'm trying something out here, and I'm not sure if it will work. Ain't that the fun of having your own website though?

I have decided to display comments right on the main page, under the entry to which they belong. Why have I done this? Because I feel that Blankbaby is just as much about me as it is about the people who comment, so why not have the comments on the main page? Though the comments won't be the same size as the post, in order to stave off confusion (I don't want to take credit for other people's comments).

No, the layout is still in flux, so this is a very rough sketch of how the final version will look.

What do you think?

This month's meetup... bowling?!

I was just looking at my stats on good old Blankbaby (yes, I say I don't care about them, but I do look at them.  I'm a complicated man, so back off) and I noticed that someone came over to Blankbaby from Albert's post about bloggers' bowling meetup.

We have a meetup scheduled for Dec. 17th, and I think it might be lots of fun to go bowling.

What do people think?  I suppose I should post this on PhillyFuture as well, which I shall do when I get home.

Baby got mp3

Jen points to Jonathan Coulton's music.

Check out his cover of Baby Got Back. It's going on my iPod.

Wordpress 2.0

Owen gives us a glimpse into Wordpress 2.0.

BrickQuest

Is it possible that someone combined two of my interests, role-playing games and Legos, into one mega geeky thing? Yes, yes it is. Ladies and (mostly) gentlemen, I give you BrickQuest.

Found via Boingboing.

An open letter to people who write open letters

Dear Open Letter Writer,

Please stop relying on this rhetorical crutch to help get your point across. It never comes across as clever as you think it might.

Hugs and Kisses,
Scott

If I were a man who swore...

I would be swearing up a storm right now. What has addled my humors so? Why comment spammers of course!

I got home around 6:30ish, because I'm a hard working fool, and ate my dinner. After dinner I feel into a deep slumber, as I'm wont to do.

Fast forward 3 hours and I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed. I log into my email account to see what's what, and what is what? I have 40 emails telling me that people commented on Blankbaby. Great, right?

Wrong.

Those 40 comments were from scum sucking spammers.

Thanks a lot, jerkwads.

I Love My Mac The Song

Damien posted about the I Love My Mac The Song on TUAW earlier today and I just listened to it. Ah, we Mac users are a... creative lot.

However, not to be out done Jim of Seattle wrote a very nice composition (link to mp3 which I think Mr. Scoble would enjoy. Too bad he doesn't read me anymore. Bitter party of one your table is ready) based on the Windows Start up chime. It seems Jim wrote it for SongFight, which is a website I need to check out. The basic premise seems to be people write original songs every week based on a theme and the best song wins. People never cease to amaze me.

Be sure to check out some of Jim's other stuff, it is lots of fun.

Jeff Ulicny (a TUAW reader) wrote this little ditty using a bunch of Mac sounds (including the start up booooong, which I think is a much more satisfying sound than the Windows startup chimes). Jeff also remixed the Brak Show's theme song.

I wish I were more musically inclined, but at least I get to enjoy the work of others.

700th TUAW post

After 11 months of blogging for TUAW I have posted my 700th post.

After 27 months of blogging here on Blankbaby (at Typepad) this is my 2147th post.

Not too shabby for some dude in Philly. What's that saying? Quantity over quality?

Best PostSecret Ever!

Check out more secrets on postcards at PostSecret. Tell 'em Scottycakes sent ya.

UltraNormal

UltraNormal takes the challenge of a two person blog and creates something new and interesting. Ok, maybe it isn't all that new, but you have to admit that it is interesting.

Grover hungers for human flesh

This is hilarious:

Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, a few thousand people are sacrificed in Manhattan to appease the angry god Grover. Luckily for me, I was in Boston.

HI-larious I tells ya! And I know from funny.

Google, land of the Segway

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, rides around the office on a Segway.

And they try to tell me Google isn't evil.

Online conversion tools for Adobe PDF documents

Do you have a PDF that you want converted to text? Adobe has a set of free tools just for you!

Better yet you can attach a PDF to an email and send it to pdf2txt@adobe.com (for a plain text version of the PDF) or pdf2html@adobe.com (for a HTML version of the PDF).

Pretty cool.

I wonder if Microsoft offers the same thing for Word documents (I know they have a free viewer... at least I think they still offer that).

Even waferbaby is playing Mario Cart DS

It is everywhere!

I'm so getting a Nintendo DS. I'm a weak, weak man.

I want to buy drugs for some reason...

But I can't figure out why. Ah well, it'll come to me.

Bush Was Right!

You gotta love any song that includes the lyric: 'France... WRONG!' Check out Bush Was Right! by the Right Brother, who bill themselves as truth disguised as music.

It reminds me of 'We didn't start the fire,' and that's the truth.

Thanks to Paul for sharing this with me!

Congrats to Jeremy

Jeremy has written a book about blog marketing, and he just got his copy. One day I will have written a book.

Oh, you can be certain of that!

iPod: mine is playing wacky stuff, but still I need not a new one

Wow!  That might just be the longest post title here on Blankbaby.  If only I could query my blog's database (how about it, Six Apart people?).

Anyway, I would just like to express a little wonder at the fact that my iPod has so much stuff on it that I have never heard nor recognize.  I don't know what little music elves put this stuff on my iPod, but it is freaking me out.

Secondly, a few folks that I know have gotten new iPods as of late.  I don't need a new iPod but I want one.  However, I am going to wait for the second iteration of the video capable iPods before I get one.

Though the question remains, if I have lots of stuff on my 40 gig iPod I have never heard before do I need an even larger iPod?  How big is big enough?

21st century ligatures

Font people are some of the wackiest people alive. Case in point:

Hey all. I had this weird thought: If, in some bizarre alternate history, chatspeak abbreviations like “LOL” had become popular long before there were computers and character sets, they might have, over time, become new symbols, like “et” became “&” and “at” became “@”. What might they look like?

Blogroll generation question answered

As I was walking home from seeing the Shop Girl (see, I told you that you couldn't stop me) I was pondering my little problem that I was having with NetNewsWire.

I realized that it wasn't a problem with NetNewsWire, I was just dumb. Favicons are always at the same place, and named the same thing, for websites. As long as I have the URL of the site getting the favicon is trivial. Brent commented and said basically the same thing (though he didn't call me dumb).

This script will work, eventually.

Happy Anniversary to Karl and Richelle

Isn't that sweet?

Congrats, many more!

Railthello: Othello online

Check out a Ruby on Rails implementation of Othello called Railthello. It takes minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master (I'll let you decide which one I'm talking about).

A Very Blankbaby Christmas

Some of you may remember (some of you were there) that last year I had to work around Christmas, and therefore I couldn't go see my Mom. I was like a regular Bob Cratchit. However, a plucky group of my friends wouldn't have that and they threw me a surprise Christmas which was dubbed the Blankbaby Christmas.

It was so much fun that I have decided that it must become a Christmas tradition, and we all know that I am a powerful and feared man whose word is the law.

Therefore, I will be hosting 'A Very Blankbaby Christmas' sometime in December at my apartment. Everyone who reads this blog is invited, as is anyone I know!

I'm thinking that Dec. 17th is the best day for it, since that is the Philly Bloggers' meetup day anyway. The meetup in the afternoon and 'A Very Blankbaby Christmas' in the evening. Who could want more?

The only difficulty I see is that this might be too last minute for people to attend. So, what say you all? Should I hold off on having the party until January? Or should I say the hell with it and go for the 17th?

God bless us, everyone.

NetNewsWire Blogroll generation

Ok, so I think I have solved my issue with the blogroll. I'm going to generate a post once a month, or so, that will contain a link to all the blogs that I am currently reading. This post will be in a new category called 'blogroll.' That way I will have a snapshot of what blogs I'm reading over time, and the post is almost guaranteed to be on the front page for the entire month.

To accomplish this bit to techno trickery, I am going to use an AppleScript to export and format my subscriptions in NetNewsWire, take that output and put it into a post in MarsEdit. I already have it working, for the most part, but I can't get one thing to work. I would like to have the subscription's favicon show up next to the name of the blog. It looks like I can use Applescript to get the URL of the icon of the blog, which isn't the same thing. Is there a way to get the URL of the favicon out of NetNewsWire?