The Changelog

It's hard to believe that I've been blogging 3 years already. 2003 just doesn't seem that long ago.

My first post was about the Coleman museum. Post #3, still one of my favorites, is about scaring Swedes with Coleman lanterns.

The strangest thing that has happened so far: my review of Greencine turned into the most-commented story on the site, with 40 comments. Most of them griping about Intelliflix. Google Talke & Skype Are Boring was the 2nd-most-commented with 35. Why Do Alarm Clocks Stink? was #3.

Cliff likes to give me trouble because all the most popular stories on my blog are about computer topics.

So here's a list of the 3 most popular stories from the past 3 years:

1. Quick and Easy IPv6 for Debian (15,099 reads)


2. Google Talk and Skype are Boring, and Here's Why (11,823 reads)


3. Tiny Laptops (9,020 reads)

The story about Underwear Rotation alas was only the 10th most popular with 4,951 reads. Terah, you're going to just have to come up with something wackier to get the attention of this crowd.

The least-read story was Terah Says She's Not a Geek with 50 reads. Way under-rated if you ask me.

About a week ago, we spent some time calling, e-mailing, and visiting family and friends. Here are some of the things we heard from various people:

"Really? Good."

"Oh! Congratulations!"

"Happy Congratulations!"

*uncertain nervous silence*

"I'm happy for both of you."

"HOLY COW!"

"Wow!" (Then some excited laughter)

"I wondered. How are you feeling?"

"That's sweet. Thank you [for calling]. You'll be great parents."

"That's very exciting." ... "We'll have to get out the grandparent mugs!"

"Oh, I'm just so thrilled! My first great grandchild!"

"WOW! IS LIFE EVER EXCITING! Blessings to all three of you!"

"Did I hear you right? Everyone -- TERAH'S PREGNANT!"

Yes, you did hear right! Terah is pregnant! She's due in October. This will be our first child.

We're pretty excited! And also a little nervous. And trying to figure out how to arrange our house -- its floorplan isn't the most convenient for young children.

2006 is certainly going to be an exciting year!

How can you go wrong with this headline:

Physics students, duct tape extend faded couch's mileage

Yes, that's right, by using a lawn mower engine and duct tape, they have motorized a couch.

Well, it's finally time to announce my new podcast, Sound of History!

The Sound of History is a weekly podcast featuring full-length, unedited, and uncut historic audio. You'll hear speeches, broadcasts, and events from around the world. Sometimes you'll hear famous people, sometimes not.

Episode 1 is up now. On this episode, you'll find John F. Kennedy cracking jokes about Marx in front of a bunch of newspaper publishers, Ronald Reagan talking about the Challenger, some blues from 1922, and an Edison recording from 1902.

Thanks to Cliff for mentioning that Reagan speech in a comment. That prompted me to go find it.

I'm finding material for this podcast from around the Internet. Some of that music comes from archive.org, and there are various sources for presidential speeches.

I'd like to find some British prime minister's speeches as well, but I'm having difficulty with that. If any of you Brits reading this know of a good site for uncut audio, accessible to Americans, please do let me know.

I haven't had a chance to check this out much yet, but it sounds interesting, and I think Cliff would love it:

The Fray is a site where people tell stories and others comment on those stories, and once a year there are worldwide gatherings to do open-mic storytelling live. (from a post on the Creative Commons blog)

UPDATE: I should have linked directly to the audio archive, which looks like the really interesting part of the site, and the one that CC linked to.

Have you noticed the incredibly annoying dialogs appearing in new Gnome/GTK apps in sid? They no longer allow you to use the keyboard to enter a filename. Not only that, but they are *incredibly* slow when working with large directories. You better go get some caffeine when if you need to open something under /usr/share/doc.

Here's an example from Firefox:



Other apps, such as Gimp, also have this problem.

I have one thing to say to these people: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

The keyboard is still a useful part of a computer, and I have absolutely no inclination to wait 45 seconds for some annoyingly slow dialog to populate because you prefered to remove the ability for me to enter a filename in a dialog box myself.