Smell the Color 9

I would take “no” for an answer
Just to know I heard You speak
And I'm wonderin' why I've never
Seen the signs they claim they see
Are the special revelations
Meant for everybody by me?
Maybe I don't truly know You
Or maybe I just simply believe 'Cause I can sniff, I can see
I can count up pretty high
But these faculties aren't getting me
Any closer to the sky
But my heart of faith keeps poundin'
So I know I'm doin' fine
But sometimes finding You
Is just like trying to
Smell the color nine

And, for the complete “Music Stuck in Tim's Head” chart for this week:

1. Chris Rice - Smell the Color 9 (Smell the Color 9)
2. Casting Crowns - Who Am I? (Casting Crowns)
3. Damien Rice - The Blower's Daughter (O)
4. Michael W. Smith - All I Want (Healing Rain)
5. Andrew Lloyd Weber - Hosanna (Jesus Christ Superstar)
6. Evanescence - Tourniquet (Fallen)
7. MercyMe - Spoken For (Spoken For)
8. Sixpence None the Richer - There She Goes (Sixpence None the Richer)
9. Meredith Wilson - Lida Rose / Will I Ever Tell You? (The Music Man)
10. Dido - White Flag (Life for Rent)

Of Large Cats and Fuzzy Penguins

Well, I finally admit it on my public soap box at Open for Business: I'm a Mac user. Read my story of how I ended up using a Mac at OfB.biz. The article is part three in a series of columns on the desktop, beginning with “Debate Without End: KDE and Qt Licensing” and then followed up by “I GNU It”.

To Cast a Pod?

I'm pondering if I should dip my toes in the Podcasting waters. Tonight I worked up an entire 20 minute podcast and put it all together in GarageBand — including music — in about an hour. It was rather fun. But I'm not sure if I can commit to regularly taking out the time to do a podcast; unlike a text entry like this, podcasting requires a larger block of uninterrupted time (even if it might not require more time as a whole). When I'm writing a blog entry, I might be interrupted every few minutes, but if I'm recording myself, I cannot be interrupted as easily.

For that matter, I've listened to a few podcasts, and beyond the enjoyment I've gotten at putting voices to the words of the bloggers who are podcasting, I have not found myself becoming a regular listener. It is not a matter of whether the podcast was good, but I've found I simply do not have a lot of periods of time in which listening to a podcast is convenient (unlike text blogging).

Those two reasons make me think perhaps I won't publish my first (and perhaps only) stab at podcasting.

Tomorrow

I wrote up a nice post tonight, but I did not get it quite done, so I guess you'll just have to wait until tomorrow for it. Sorry. I'm refunding a portion of your monthly subscription fees in exchange.

Improved on IE

Asisaid should now render properly on standards non-compliant browsers ( cough Internet Explorer cough) as well as those which obey standards, now. I tested the site against IE 6 on Windows 98, and, as always, continue to test it against Mozilla Firefox 1.x and Apple Safari 2.0. With Firefox now grabbing nearly 10% of the browser market, less than one year after release, I'm a bit more optimistic that Microsoft may soon have to learn to play nice with W3C specifications, but I'm not overly optimistic.

As a side note, I love the new features of Safari 2.0, especially the RSS reader integration. Now, I can keep up with all of my regularly read blogs without having to go to each one just to see if something new has been posted. I added all of the RSS feeds to one bookmark folder on my bookmark bar, and now I can just click that and see all of the feeds aggregated conveniently. I am also appreciating that Apple finally supported embedded PDF's; it is beyond me why Apple opted not to do this with the original Safari, but I am happy to have it finally acting the way it does in other browsers.

Oops

I forgot to give credit to Kevin for finding the quiz I took yesterday.

I'm Sorry...

…for the lack of posting. Things have been hectic this week, but I'll try to get back to posting something a bit more substantial tomorrow or Saturday (at the latest).

It's Been Fun (Not Really)

After much consideration, I've decided that blogging is taking way too much of my time. I could be doing far more constructive things with my time than sitting here on a soapbox every few hours and uttering some incoherent statement on something that most of the world doesn't care about. Does that sound bitter? Well, it is. When I started blogging, I never hoped to become like InstaPundit or Andrew Sullivan, but I admit that I was hoping to at least get enough traffic to support Google AdWords on here. Instead, I've just wasted hours for nothing… absolutely nothing.

Farewell. It's been fun (not really). Hopefully the rest of you will wake up and see that you could be doing far more useful things too — like organizing your socks or picking lint off your sofa.

Update (2005.01.02 01:15 CST): Since this post will remain forever in the asisaid archive, I would note to anyone wondering to take a very close look at the date of the post if it doesn't make sense.

Rough Blog Weather

I've been playing around today a bit to finish up text processing, and after much hassling, was able to get a module known as “SmartyPants” to work. It adds support for “smart” characters such as “Smart Quotes” (notice that I'm using lots of quotes to show this off) to text. SmartyPants takes the straight quotes that I can type in a standard web browser and converts them to nice smart quotes like you would see in a word processor. It also takes care of Ellipses… Dashes — and so on. Combined with Textile (well, to be clear, I'm using Brad Choate's Text::Textile Perl module that was written for his MT-Textile plugin), I should now have an uber-text-processing™ blogware program.

If you noticed the blog was unavailable for awhile… well, that was because I was lazy. Rather than using my “sandbox site,” I used the main asisaid code base for testing. Sorry about that. I'm going to try to implement BB Code support soon, but I'll try to be good about keeping up the site during that process.

Since the site has been down a lot, let me remind y'all that the latest installment of the CYOA Dakmoore saga has been posted here.

Problems and More Problems

Well, trying to post my CYOA entry tonight I spent two hours instead of five minutes. I spent more time trying to get the stupid thing posted than I did writing it. For some reason, Safari (the web browser) is messing up the way it posts data, so that Unicode stuff was getting completely garbled. It took me a long time to figure out where the problem was originating from and along the way, I ran into numerous bugs impacting Firefox as well. Ack! On the bright side, SAFARI (the CMS) now uses Textile to format the text. Textile seems to be pretty popular for blogware formatting, and since it is licensed under the MIT license and available as a standard issue Perl module, I decided to integrate it into the system. This means you can use Textile commands in the comments too. If it causes anything to look weird, let me know.

CSS Blues
Ok, so I thought it would be smart to use CSS on my site and catch up with the times. But now I have a problem. If you look at the CYOA entry, you'll notice that the CYOA graphic is down at almost the bottom of the part of the post visible on the front page, level with the last right hand side div area (obviously, this will correct itself as the CYOA post gets pushed down further on the page). I suspect this is because I used clear: right to make the boxes on the right side stop stacking on top of each other. That seemed well and good, but I'm not very happy about being unable to use align=right or left or any div tags within posts without having them pushed way down on the page.

Anyone out there know how to fix this problem? Perhaps the way to make the content div tag isolate everything inside itself so that those things are “unaware” of the right side bar? I'd be very grateful for suggestions. Tables were so simple…