fling93 loves fishies

The titles are links to the post's excerpt within this category archive page. The dates are links to the post's excerpt within its monthly archive page.

"Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends..."

Hello. My name is Felix. Felix Ling. And I have a blog.

And now that grad school is done, I've come back. A lot has happened. More later…

I'm not dead! I'm getting better! I think I'll go for a walk!

Yeah, it's been a while since my last update. Those of you who know me in real life know that I'm still up and about elsewhere (mostly Flickr and writing friends-only posts at LiveJournal). I still plan to maintain and update this site, but it's going to be pretty sporadic for the foreseeable future (again, RSS is your friend).

But let me just clue you in on some changes.

I'm now a graduate student working towards a Master's in Economics at San Jose State University. What's a Berkeley alum doing at a school like San Jose State? To be sure, the convenient location was the reason I first started taking classes there. But then I started hearing good things about their economics department. It specializes in the Austrian School, which has been very influential in the libertarian movement. And I like a lot of the professors I've met so far (many of which got degrees from George Mason, one of the other schools I was considering). Yeah, my original plan was to take classes for a year and a half before applying to grad schools, but I think that was mostly because I was overly afraid of picking the wrong field yet again. I am pretty obviously an econ dork.

Being a grad student is, obviously, one reason I haven't been blogging. As Dan Drezner says:

Sure, some blogs burn out and fade away, while others become pale imitations of what they once were. Rather than think of these kind of inexorable trends, however, I suspect that blogs, like much of life, are cyclical. Attentive readers can surely point to days or weeks where it's clear that blogging has not been at the top of my priority list. This doesn't mean that I'm fading away… it (hopefully) means I'm acquiring new forms of substantive knowledge that trickle down onto the blog.

Okay, unlike Dan, I haven't written anything that's gotten published. But then again, he already has a Master's and a Ph.D. I'm probably not going to pursue the Ph.D. because I'm pretty leery of academia and instead have an eye towards working on policy analysis at a think tank, where a Master's would be enough. But regardless, less blogging now should hopefully mean better and more substantive blogging later. I don't want to write too much about topics I don't know very much about. So I'm expanding my knowledge. That's the plan.

Another excuse for lack of blogging: I never finished my planned WordPress migration from Movable Type. This means trackbacks are still disabled, which is somewhat of a disincentive for me to write brilliantly. I did start messing around with WordPress, but I ran into problems getting the Textile 2 plugin to render my old posts correctly. Anybody know Perl who wants to help me out? I'm willing to pay. I also want a site redesign. That stupid logo is cute, but unprofessional, and I no longer think I'll ever have enough spare time to actually draw a better one, even though I probably could.

And there's one more reason which surprises me the most. My stats (such as they are) haven't suffered. I haven't updated since April, and yet my stats since then have remained pretty steady. Yes, that's one reason (along with my starting school full-time) that I added Google ads to this site. It's not a lot of money, but hey, I'm not doing any work for it, so I can't complain. Note that I do not choose the ads, and I will make every attempt to continue to write my own thoughts independently of any financial incentives. For those of you who really don't like the ads, sorry! All I can suggest is to use Firefox with the Adblock plugin.

As always, I can't promise any regular updates. I'm tentatively planning on posting some of my better photos from the last year as well as some of the links of the better blog posts I've read as I've been slowly wading back into the blogosphere. But there's a lot going on in my life right now that is likely to intervene. E-mail me or friend me on LiveJournal if you really want to know.

Interoperability

Man, somebody should tell LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga, Flickr, and Friendster (and del.icio.us too, while I'm at it) that they should really consider adding the feature where users can friend people in other systems. Not only would that be hella more convenient for the users, but it will drive more traffic to everybody's sites. Huge untapped market there. Tricky part is just how to display updated friends pages for friends in other systems, but at the very least a text link with an asterisk to show new activity should be fairly simple.

Yeah, yeah, I know. There's already RSS or Yahoo! 360. But it's a pain to track down all the feeds, and you've already done the work of adding them as a friend already. Besides, what percentage of the users out there know and use RSS?

Flinging Four Things at the Meme

Update 3/3/05: Whoops, I'd copied it from Rich's version, which was missing some of the categories. Added those in, but I'm sure I screwed up the order of everything.

Okay, when I get tagged twice, I guess that's a sign I really oughtta participate. So, without further ado:

The Four Things Meme

Four shows I enjoy:

• Mythbusters (oh, I suppose you knew that already).
• Lost
• The L Word
• Battlestar Galactica
• How I Met Your Mother
• Grey's Anatomy
• Weeds
• Robot Chicken

Oh, sorry. Television rotted my brain to the point where I forgot how to count! Or maybe it wasn't the television?

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• Finding Nemo (okay, truthfully I actually liked Monsters, Inc. better, but I can't hurt the feelings of the fishies)
• Garden State (this should not be a surprise to anybody)
• Aliens
• Beauty and the Beast

Four jobs I've held:

• Paper-hatted grill dude at McDonald's
• Word-processing/data entry temp
• Software Engineer
• Senior Software Engineer (which, come to think of it, is an awful lot like Software Engineer, but I haven't had any other jobs that I can recall).

Four cool toys:

• My Canon Digital Rebel (yeah, to me, it's still a toy).
• Astrojax.
• Magz magnetic construction toys.
• The hopes and dreams of other people, bwa ha ha ha!

Four of My Favorite Dishes:

• Tortellini pomodoro alfredo from Frankie, Johnnie, and Luigi Too!
• Halibut sushi (hirame). But don't tell the fishies!
• Couscous with Artichokes, Feta and Sun-Dried Tomatoes (well, Erika makes it without the artichokes).
• Caprese.

Four Web sites I visit daily (uh… not counting Gmail and my Sitemeter stats):

• Last.fm (powered by Audioscrobbler).
• LiveJournal.
• del.icio.us.
• And Flickr of course!

Four places I've lived:

• New Hartford, NY (next to Utica, which is not too far from Syracuse)
• Diamond Bar, CA (about 15 minutes north of Disneyland)
• Berkeley, CA
• Sunnyvale, CA (no, not Sunnydale)

Four places I've vacationed:

• Amsterdam (honeymoon counts as a vacation, no?).
• San Diego.
• Seattle.
• uh… does staying in a hotel in San Francisco count? Or Mountain View? We don't really vacation much.

Four places I'd rather be:

• Washington D.C., making a real difference in this world.
• New York City, living the urban life.
• The engine room of Serenity.
• Behind the wheel of a McLaren F1 car, kicking the arses of both Schumi and Fred.

Four bloggers I'm tagging.

Well, I don't know if they do memes or if they read me, but I'm tagging the four SJSU student bloggers that I know of. San Jose State reprahzent!! Yeah, yeah. This from a guy who was wearing a Cal hat today (well, I haven't bought any SJSU gear yet).

• Dan Esch.
• Dan Sato.
• Lawrence.
• Ryan.
• Shaminder.

Oops, that wasn't four. Yeah, me are an kollij gwajuwett. I suppose that's why I'm going back again to get it right this time.

Pitiful Sweeps Week Wrapup

Okay, okay. I didn't come close to delivering on my promised Blog Sweeps Week posts of kitty cat and Natalie Portman photos. Don't worry. I'll get to them later. Seems like my stats (such as they are) did okay anyway (you can check them out yourself if you're so inclined). Not too many hits on the photos themselves, so I'm chalking it up to the fact that I've been posting more frequently (especially compared to November or December), and everybody knows that search engines love frequent updates.

The economist-wanna-be in me of course would consider this a perverse incentive to write a lot — even if you have nothing to say and even about subjects you don't know anything about. While the political-scientist-wanna-be in me would notice that, like many politicians, I was rewarded for making bold promises that I did not intend to keep. And the journalist-wanna-be-in-me would notice that the blogging medium rewards post-frequency over credibility — much like how journalists are incentivized more by deadlines than really understanding the fields they're writing about. This reinforces the obvious fact that the blogosphere has a long, long way to go from becoming the ideal meritocracy that will unseat traditional media (which is something I admitted even when I pronounced journalism a dying field).

Anyway, I would like to point out that I did actually intend to post every day. I just knew that it wasn't bloody likely with my schedule. Indeed, I was a total idiot and added a class (Beginning Photojournalism) to push my course-load at SJSU to 18 units before realizing it was past the drop deadline. Um, yeah. I guess as an engineer at a startup, I got used to ignoring deadlines as being ridiculously unrealistic. So I get a rude real-world lesson after leaving the real world to go back to school. Go figure.

Also, I ended up spending the bulk of my allotted blogging time working on the write-up for my 2005 Mix CD, which is almost done. Stay tuned for that. No, really. I am almost done. Aw heck, who needs credibility anyway?

Kicking off Blog Sweeps Week

Well, Blog Sweeps Week is upon me (banner courtesy of Ealasaid). Geez, actually it started yesterday, which doesn't bode well for me. I've never really tried to maximize my traffic, mostly using this thing as a place to put essays. I'm told that lists work pretty well, so I guess this week would be a good time for me to write up the post for my “My 2005 Mix CD” (especially since we're exchanging the CDs tomorrow) as well as “My Top Ten Films of 2005.” So stay tuned for those. And in case you were curious, here was my 2004 Mix CD and my Top Ten Films of 2004 and of 2003.

Aside from that, I know posting more frequently would help, and of course, kitty cats and sex are always money in the blog world (thus the banner). To tie this in with my first and my second obsessions, I think I'll also post my favorite photos my kitty cat, Miette, as well as my favorite photos of the hotness that is Natalie Portman (alas, none of which were taken by me). But to keep y'all coming back, I'm going to spread these out throughout the week. I would do a top 7, but because I'm a day late, I guess it'll be top 6.

So without further ado, here's my Number 6 favorite photograph of my adorable kitty cat, Miette. Click on the photo for a larger version. This was from a few years ago. Isn't she cute? She's soooo cute! Come back for more!

Speaking of cute, stay tuned later today for the Number 6 picture of Natalie Portman.

Gosh, grubbing for traffic feels so degrading.

A journalism fling?

Update 12/1/05 Forgot to credit Gene Healy for a link. Whoops!

Last week, I saw Good Night, and Good Luck at one of the South Bay Movie Fiends gatherings that I organize. This film, along with the previous movie we saw, Capote, got me thinking about my future.

This requires some explanation.

Some of you know that I've long been contemplating a change in career. I've already talked through this at length on my LiveJournal (note that this entry is only visible to friends), so let me just rehash it briefly.

Limping through my second blogiversary

Apologies for the long absence. I'm still obsessed with photography, and indeed I have a new toy. So I've been updating my Flickr account much more often than the blog or my LiveJournal, and I've been updating my LiveJournal more often than the blog because, as you might have noticed, I hate writing blog posts without enough time to properly research and edit them. I stick my less polished stuff (and the more personal stuff) on the LJ. And also, my life has taken some interesting twists and turns lately as I move through a period of transition, so I'm feeling the need to document it.

Gosh, it's now been two years since I started this blog. Kinda disappointing that I kinda limped through this milestone instead of charging past it at full steam ahead. But at least I'm still going and still intend to do so. Plus, I told my economics professor about the blog last week, and he said he liked it, asking me if I was considering a career as a politician (um, no — but maybe policy analyst). That's pretty cool. And yes, I'm getting A's in both of my night classes so far (the other reason I haven't been updating).

Anyhow, I am working on a substantive post that should be up this weekend (or maybe not — I have an unusually packed social schedule). Posting frequency after that will still be erratic as always, though. As I always suggest, you can be notified of updates automatically via my RSS feed or my Atom feed. If you don't know what RSS is, here's a good quickstart guide.

Assuming I still have any regular readers left, thanks for bearing with me for the last two years (or however long it's been for you). Hopefully I'll be able to build up some more steam next year when I should have some more free time.

Switching to WordPress

You might have noticed that the site was down last Friday. Looks like a flood of trackback ping spam caused Movable Type to bring down the server. This is the second time that my blog has brought down the server, and my cousin (who runs it) can't afford this to happen again. I'd already been thinking about moving to WordPress, as I know Courtney, Jon, and Jonas have all recently switched and are pretty happy with it (the alternative would be to upgrade to MT 3.0, but most of the commenting systems look screwed up on the 3.0 blogs that I've seen). And since my Poli Sci class is over, I guess now would be a good time.

So bear with me in the next week or two as I figure out how to transition everything over. The site URL will stay the same, so there'll be no need to update your bookmarks or anything. However, do note that trackback pings here will be disabled until everything's done, to avoid any further server mishaps. Since I've already throttled comments, I'll leave them enabled for now (most of my spam lately has been trackback spam anyway).

Hopefully, this will all be seamless to you, but I just figured I'd letcha know.

Punchbowl Poetry

Well, look at that. It's May 5th, 2005, and you know what that means!

Yes, that's right! There's only TWO MORE WEEKS until Natalie Portman's new film opens. Incidentally, that's also when my term paper is due, so here's yet another meme to tide you over. Yeah, I'm such a hypocrite (Update 6/9/05: Yeah, not only did I watch Episode III on opening day, I also watched it again on opening weekend. And I also watched Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy twice on opening weekend. Maybe that list of things wasn't so much about things I didn't get but about things that I was in denial about getting?).

While you're waiting for Natalie's new film me to get back to political commentary, check out Will Wilkerson taking on the recent liberal meme of Social Security as insurance, making many points that I had planned to make myself (via Julian Sanchez). And for something a bit shorter and simpler, check out my comments on Social Security at sQurl's newly remade blog, Mythos of a Sorority Geek.

I should take this opportunity to mention that sQurl has been on a roll ever since she renamed her blog and began focusing on her perspective of gender issues. Of particular note is her critique of the notion of equality, and her observations on how different genders present information.

But to get back to the meme, Donna B. tags me with Ellison's Punchbowl Meme:

Simply compose a four-line poem and post it on your blog. The first and third verses of the poem should read “Turd in a punchbowl.” Verses two and four may be about any subject (including turds!) but they must rhyme with each other.

Okay, that's simple enough. No rules about meter, so I can sprawl a bit. Here goes nothing…

Gender Balance

I noticed that my Audioscrobbler chart of my most frequently listened-to musical artists is remarkably gender-balanced. Six of the top twelve are women (Tori Amos, Shawn Colvin, Alanis Morissette, Dar Williams, Aimee Mann, and Sarah McLachlan), as are ten of the top twenty and fourteen of the top thirty. The ratio drops a bit after that to twenty of the top fifty, but still, I thought this was pretty good.

Well, as you might imagine, it was no accident. No, I didn't carefully make sure I played a female artist every other track (I'm not that anal). But about ten years ago, I read a piece in the Los Angeles Times about the underrepresentation of female artists in the music industry (this was before Lilith Fair), highlighting a few artists worth sampling, like Ani DiFranco and Sleater Kinney. As I realized my own music collection was heavily male-dominated (Rush, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin), I started looking specifically for female artists. It took a while, but after a few years, I realized my collection was more-or-less even and stopped consciously trying to balance it. This was a few years ago, and I guess it's stayed pretty even.

Isn't this a form of Affirmative Action? Sure, but I believe there are situations when you need to consciously fight irrational psychological tendencies, like the tendency to filter and exclude information. Bias is just another one of those things, and I was reminded of this recently in this post by danah boyd on SXSW, where Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink) appeared:

I'm a troll!

I like to think of myself as being one of the more patient and reasonable people you'll run into in the blogosphere, but I guess I was wrong. On a post by Oldman (a blogger I used to look up to) at The Blogging of the President (BOP), I wrote the following comment, which has now been deleted (thankfully, I am in the habit of writing comments and blog posts in an external editor):

Al: “…the…framework laid out by BOP is market crash, dollar crash, rich bastards on Wall Street steal our retirement money and the rest of us start hitting each other with sticks. … Are they based on deep understanding of how things work, or more of a superficial received knowledge base?”

My guess is groupthink. Similar opinions shared by a bunch of people (even intelligent and knowledgeable people) can tend to distort their perception of things, and they will act as less of a check on each other's mistakes and inaccuracies because they still agree with the overall conclusion.

You'll see this to some extent on all group blogs, but my impression is that it seems to be a bit more of an issue for this one. But on the upside, they have open comments and are obviously a lot more reactive to them than on most blogs. So I think the BOP readers (and writers) would be well served listening to the dissenting comments, as they serve a more important purpose on this blog than many others.

Note that first part is a quote of Al, a commenter who was in a heated debate with Oldman. I left the quote unitalicized to keep it exactly the way it was at BoP, which has HTML disabled in the comments. And this was my first comment in that thread.

Anyway, my comment is definitely quite critical of the blog, but I think it was an honest and fair assessment, and I still stand by it. Indeed, I think I presented it as constructively as you can, and it was definitely a much more charitable assessment than Al's “superficial received knowledge base” and put a lot more delicately than other commenters who have sometimes accused BoP writers of “drinking the Kool-Aid,” which I don't really agree with.

Well, the immediate response from Stirling Newberry indicates that I failed miserably:

Light Posting Ahead

Well, when I said, “But I’ll try to keep it light for at least a little while to give everyone (esp. myself) a breather,” I did mean light in tone, not quantity. Oops. Unfortunately, post frequency is probably going to stay light for a while due to my night class.

My “Principles of Macroeconomics” course at Mission College is over, and I got an A (yay me!). Actually not that big a deal, given that it's a community college, and I came into it already knowing a thing or two about the subject (although I still learned a lot). Plus, the workload wasn't as bad as I expected, given that there wasn't too much reading (I could get through a chapter in one or two nights, and we generally took 2-3 weeks per chapter), and the homework problems were easy if you understood the material.

Well, this semester, I'm taking a Political Science course, “Comparative Governments.” Political Science is another subject in which I've never ever taken a class (my wife keeps remarking on her shock at how Berkeley's College of Engineering doesn't require you to have the same core that most other colleges do). Unlike economics, however, I don't have much background knowledge. Unless you count being a news and political junkie and bit of a voting theory geek (although this class won't cover that). And if the first two chapters are any indication, this class'll be harder going for me.

Of course, I could be wrong again, as I warned about lighter posting for my economics class, and it didn't really happen. But I'd thought I'd give y'all a heads-up.

CommentBlogging Ahead of My Time?

For about six months, I've been doing something on the bleeding edge without realizing it, and in fact, it never even occurred to me that others might find the idea useful. Now it seems to be catching on (no thanks to me), so I guess I might as well bring some more attention it now.

As I mentioned earlier, I do write quite a few comments on other blogs (although I'm nowhere near as prolific or knowledgeable or insightful as that ubiquitous uber-commenter, Praktike). Now, blog comment systems are ridiculously primitive compared to message board technology in that most blogs don't notify you when there are replies to your comments, so you need to check back yourself. If you have quite a few comments on active threads, it's pretty hard to remember them all.

I also find that some of my comments are great jumping off points for full-blown blog posts. For example, my lengthy On Marriage essay started off as a short comment at Winds of Change. My helluva long piece about Bush included some material that I first articulated in a comment thread about Richard Clarke at Sebastian Holsclaw's blog (you might be surprised to know that Clarke was also the impetus behind my The Message, Not the Messenger post). And of course I even recently blatantly reposted pieces of a comment thread I participated in at Djerejian's The Belgravia Dispatch.

Anyway, suffice to say that it's pretty handy for me to keep track of my comments for future reference. Intially, I used a text file into which I copied and pasted the URLs of all the blogposts on which I'd commented. Well, about six months ago, it occurred to me to use del.icio.us instead.

Still Here

Sorry for the long hiatus. I had actually planned to blog over the holidays, but technical issues and a nagging nasty cold conspired against it. Mostly over the cold now, but I'm a bit disappointed, as it kept me from enjoying the time off and caused me to miss a couple of parties I was looking forward to. :( I hope everyone had a happier holidays.

Also, my condolences to anybody who lost a loved one in that terrible tsunami. If you haven't yet, I urge you to donate to one of the relief agencies. I myself donated to the International Response Fund of the American Red Cross, but there are a host of other places to donate as well. Here's a list of organizations via The Washington Post. You can also find more info at The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog. If you followed my Christmas suggestion (well, Robert Fulghum's suggestion, really), any of these would, of course, make great choices for charities.

My usual semi-irregular blogging schedule will resume shortly.

Comments Disabled

The comment spam problem has gotten drastically worse over the past few weeks (yes, I already have MT-Blacklist installed). Comments will be disabled for now until further notice.

Update

Okay, they're back on again. One of these days I'll probably dump the easily-exploited Movable Type for WordPress or something, but for now I've implemented a somewhat better throttling mechanism via Phil Ringnalda. The one built-in to Movable Type 2.661 only throttles comments from the same IP address, and intelligent spammers and immature script-kiddies can easily get around that. Now the site will disallow more than one comment every five minutes. I'm not exactly heavily-trafficked, so I figure that should do for now, but apologies for any inconvenience!

I've also closed comments on any entries older than one month. I disliked having to do that, as I like to think several of my posts are of a timeless nature (then again, I'm rather prone to delusions of grandeur).

Update 12/4/04

Okay, Geoffrey and Laura have pointed out that the spam problem is just as bad or worse for WordPress. The reason I mentioned WP was that the actual problem wasn't so much the spam itself, but a spike in server load from having to rebuild the individual archive page after each comment. A system which allows dynamic individual archive pages (using PHP or whatnot) would not require a rebuild. But if there's no comment-spam protection for WordPress, maybe I should just upgrade to Movable Type 3.0. Well, maybe when Blacklist 2.0 improves enough. Throttling seems to work well enough so far, so I can afford to wait some more.

Technical Difficulties

The main page of the site was down most of today. Apologies for any inconvenience. Everything should be working again now, but let me know if you spot something askew.

The MySQL comment database somehow got corrupted, probably due to overzealous comment spammers. Since I had a blog backup from yesterday, as luck would have it, I tried to restore it. Those familiar with Movable Type will, of course, realize that this resulted in a bunch of duplicates. Argh! After trying to fix this for a while, I decided it was easiest to just manually go into MySQL and blow away everything (comments, entries, and trackback pings) and then restore the blog from the backup. Since the permanent links of each blog post is based on the title and not the entry ID number, this shouldn't impact any of your bookmarks or links.

However, this is not true of the permalinks for comments, whose anchors were unfortunately based on the comment ID. I've now fixed them to be based on the comment's “order number” within the post, which should remain the same the next time I have to restore. But if, for some reason, you had linked to or bookmarked a comment on the blog, you will have to update it. My apologies!

Let this be a reminder to any bloggers out there to back up your blog regularly! And try to design your templates to not rely on any internal database numbers like entry and comment IDs!

In other news, I've decided to make use of my LiveJournal account for personal crap (and where I now have an entry bitching about this incident). There's an option to keep the Google spider and other robots out from LJ pages, so I figure it's a more appropriate place to put stuff that nobody would ever care about except people who know me. Plus a place to do less edited and less organized — and hopefully more spontaneous — writing.

Has It Been That Long?

Whoa. While caught up in NaNoWriMo, I completely missed the fact that it's now been one year since I started blogging. Note that the Happy Birthday to Winona Ryder post wasn't really the first post, as I back-dated it (oh, the horror!) to test out my monthly archives (and that was, honestly, the only time I've done that), and my next two posts were basically just repostings of some of my message board writings. Meaning that my rather unremarkable PoMoSexuality post back on November 7th of 2003 was really my first blog post.

Such a milestone warrants a bigger post than the one I wrote for my sixth month blogiversary, but unfortunately I don't really have the time to do it justice. However, while updating my Blogger Code at my About Me page, I realized that the Biography section wasn't really all that biographical, so I've updated it quite a bit. And the more astute among you will have already noticed a couple of weeks ago that I updated my “Favorite Blogs” list again (on the sidebar of the main page, in case you're reading this from the post's individual page or from the RSS feed).

As for the novel, well I've got 19,000 words, which is about 8,000 words behind pace. I'm otherwise pretty pleased with how it's going, although I know I have to seriously rework some of the earlier chapters. Besides, I've long figured I should just forget about the wordcount and concentrate on finishing the novel before the end of the year. More on that later.

Open Source Journalism

I know I've already said a lot about blogging and journalism, but in light of Ra^thergate (the spectacular implosion of Dan Rather and CBS over the forged memos regarding Dubya's National Guard service) and an interesting discussion at Asymmetrical Information, I had one more quick thought to add, albeit not the most original one in the world: blogging as “Open Source Journalism.”

Meming for a Free Signed Comic Book!

Yes, this is a meme, but wait! You can get a free comic book and raise your Google PageRank, all without leaving the comfort of your own home! So read on to find out more!

I generally don't like posting memes because they feel like a cheat. You don't really write much of anything, but just pass on something that you found on someone else's blog. Yet a couple of memes have gotten me a surprising amount of traffic. The first one was Rain Songs, where I just listed my favorite songs about rain. That silly post has persistently been one of my most visited posts in the past several months. I have no idea why, but I'm grateful to David for starting it.

The other one was the meme propagation experiment by Nova Spivack. Indeed, I didn't write anything in that post, merely reproducing the original meme content. That kinda bothered me, but from the instructions it sounded like he want the original text untouched (although I later found out that it was okay to add intro text). I normally wouldn't have bothered participating, but it sounded like an interesting experiment (plus Spivack was the one who wrote the excellent piece on the blogosphere becoming a global brain, that I linked to earlier). And despite not including any original content, the meme post got a lot of hits.

Do You Want to Feel My Pain (such as it is)?

I originally started this blog to share my thoughts with the world, partially in the hopes of influencing it, but mostly because I figured my thoughts were interesting enough to be worth sharing. Over time, I realized it was also a handy way to organize my thoughts and ideas. And since I have a tendency to try and research things before I post them (so that I don't ever embarrass myself), it's also served as a useful tool to help remind me to not jump to conclusions.

I'd decided to refrain from posting too many personal snippets of my life (indeed, as I look back, it seems this blog has been getting less personal over time) because I figured the main reason some people hate blogs is because a lot of them are little more than self-indulgent personal diaries (and yes, many done by teenage girls), which opens the medium up to the derision and dismissal from mainstream traditional media, as I previously discussed. And I also figured most of my readers probably couldn't care less what goes on in my life, since (as you might have noticed from my blogroll) I really don't read any personal blogs myself except from people I've personally met. And I figured my life is currently a picture of domestic tranquility most of the time, which'd bore most of you to death.

However, I'm beginning to reconsider this decision after reading an absolutely heart wrenching post by getupgrrl at Chez Miscarriage (just go read the whole thing), and Allison Kaplan's reaction to it:

Blogging vs. Journalism

With bloggers (that are not me) invited to the Democratic Convention and Technorati working with CNN to cover political blogs, the field of journalism seems to be getting awful nervous about the whole blogging revolution (and they have been for some time). Not surprisingly, when traditional print media has covered blogging, they've been rather dismissive.

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

Update 8/27/04: This experiment is now finished. I didn't add my own explanation to the original post because I didn't know you could add intro text without distorting the experiment. So this whole post was pretty much copied from Nova Spivack's original meme post. Apologies if that confused anybody. If you're interested in seeing the results of the meme experiment, check out here and here. Also, I now have a more interesting meme involving a free signed comic book.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet — results and commentary will appear there in the future.

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Vanity Blogging

I often find myself going through my own old blog posts and re-reading them. Occasionally, I find mistakes to fix, or think of a better way to word something, or realize I now have additional insights to add. After all, I do use this blog partially as a way to organize my thoughts (as I mentioned earlier), so it needs to be a living document. And indeed, sometimes it does remind me of something I'd forgotten, or re-clarifies a thought that had become hazy.

But generally, I don't think this is the real reason I read my own stuff (and this is not the reason it's been almost a whole week since my last post — I'll explain that some other time). While I'll occasionally cringe at something I wrote (and quickly fix whatever's wrong with it), most of the time I'm generally pretty satisfied with what I'd written, if not outright proud. So I generally get a good amount of enjoyment from the experience.

This is not to say that I spend a lot of time reading my own stuff, especially since I'm a lot more likely to gain insights from reading other people's stuff. But I wonder if this is a common practice among other bloggers, or whether I'm just unusually vain?

Well if I am, so be it.

On a side note, I've made some significant revisions/enhancements to my post, The Message, Not the Messenger. I consider it one of my better works, so I think it's worth checking out, if my vain self does say so myself.

A Culture That Rewards Inaccuracy

I know it's been slow lately. A big reason is that I am very loathe to post anything until I've researched it well enough to know there aren't any obvious weaknesses or holes in my argument and that I'm covering all the bases (and this post is no exception). This means it takes a long time for me to organize and write a post, so I always end up with several partially-completed blog posts stacked up.

This has a double-whammy effect on my traffic because: 1) my posts are much less frequent (if you want a lot of blog traffic, posting at least daily is a huge plus), and 2) a completely argued post is less likely to provoke responses in the form of comments and links from other bloggers.

Comment Spam and MT-Blacklist

Comment spam seems to have gotten even more rampant lately — twice last week I've found 20-50 new comments, all spam. And I'm also seeing more and more comment spam on other blogs (plus Brayden King's been griping about spam recently).

Certainly, it can be a nice boost for a blogger's self-esteem to read through comments like “Nice site!” and “You are doing a great service to the web!” and “Excellent, that was really well explained and helpful!” But after a while it gets about as old as those generic feedbacks you get from eBay, like “Great transaction, would do business again, A+++++++!!” And there's just only so many porn links a blog can take before it starts to look a little sleazy.

Well, I hope most of you Movable Type bloggers already know about this plug-in, but in case not (and it seems Dan Drezner only found out about it last month), let me direct your attention to Jay Allen's indispensable spam-fighting plug-in, MT-Blacklist.

Hi. My name's fling93. And I'm NOT a blogoholic. Honest!

Seems like everybody from Dan Drezner to Brayden King to Jonas Luster to my brother (who IM'ed me about it) is talking about the New York Times article on how blogging is highly addictive and is the leading cause of car accidents and lung cancer and baby killing.

So when I don't update for several days in a row, that's actually a good thing. It proves I'm not addicted, but just a social blogger. And just to prove it even further, I will not blog at all today!

Oh, wait a second.

Milestones

I've had a pretty good day.

My Fantasy Baseball team, which had been mired near the bottom of the pack most of the year, is now up to 2nd place! I'll post a more detailed update later. Of course, I think the team has been overachieving the past few weeks, so I fully expect to settle back around 3rd-4th place soon. But it's nice to be up here (of course, at least one day in first would be nice—my team had a pretty decent day, so who knows? Update 5/21/04: Well, I dropped to 3rd yesterday, but then today, the Cute Smiley Fishies are indeed in first place. w00t!).

I also checked my stats and was quite pleasantly surprised that my site visits hit an all-time high, almost triple my daily average for the past few weeks and more than twice my previous high. It turns out it was mostly due to referrals from MacSurfer to my post about the G-Force visualization plugin for iTunes. So I know it'll just be a one-day spike, but I'll take what I can get.

But I've also hit a couple of milestones that won't be reversed (short of Calvin and Hobbes hopping through their time machine to prevent this blog from ever being created).

Atom Feed

Well, those who are interested probably already noticed this already, but I finally added an Atom feed (you can also get it from the sidebar). I don't know anything about Atom, and I'm not sure if the feed works correctly or not (it doesn't validate properly, but it looks okay in Bloglines). I just noticed it was showing up a lot in my 404 stats, so I grabbed Movable Type's default Atom template.

Seemed to make a lot of people happy, so this announcement was probably unnecessary, but I figured maybe there were some interested people out there who weren't keeping an active lookout for it. Anyway, if there are problems with the feed (or the other ones, which probably don't validate either), drop me an e-mail (check my About Page for how to do that) or write a comment here.

Not that I'd know what to do about it, but at least I'd then be motivated to figure out what's going on.

Update

Well, now that I've also finally upgraded to Movable Type 2.661, it turns out the feed now validates just fine. Apparently, it was using a few recently added Movable Type tags. So if it doesn't work, it's probably something on your end! :)

Various Site Changes

Yep, I'm still here. Apologies for the lack of updates in the past week. As I've mentioned earlier, I've been a bit sidetracked by a few real-world distractions, like my Fantasy Baseball team (which is doing even worse than the Giants) and my new set of Great Courses from the Teaching Company, as well as a bunch of new CDs and keeping up with Angel and The Sopranos. Realistically, I think I'll have to cut down my updates from 3-4 times a week to 1-2 times, but we'll see.

I have been working on a couple of substantive posts, but in the meantime, I've made a few subtle changes here and there in the past couple of weeks I'd like to call your attention to.

My cousin's doing a triathlon!

First of all, one notable addition to the blog roll is my cousin, Rich (yes, the same guy from my “What others are saying” section on the sidebar), who's created a training log for the Wildflower Triathlon. He is, like me, a typical computer nerd who figured these things were for athletes until a coworker convinced him that there was really no reason he couldn't do it with some training. Check out the full story, and please help sponsor him. Proceeds go towards the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The Triathlon is on May 2nd (a week from Sunday), so there's no time to spare!

MT-Textile and SmartyPants

Here's a little peek under the hood, which hopefully might be a helpful tip to other bloggers. In case those of you on my RSS feed were wondering why there were so many modified entries, it's because I finally upgraded to Brad Choate's MT-Textile 2.0.

For those of you who blog using Movable Type, this plugin is absolutely indispensable (a similar alternative is Jon Gruber's Markdown, but I've not tried that myself, so I don't know how it compares). It saves me a lot of typing, and more importantly, it lets me concentrate on writing instead of worrying about proper HTML syntax. Of course, it has its own syntax rules, but they're much simpler, and they don't take too long to learn. Here are a few examples:

Short and Sweet? Not Me.

For those of you tired of reading Cinequest movie reviews, I'll hold off on reviewing a couple of very excellent movies I saw on Saturday, Slim Susie and Dorian Blues. I may get to them later this week, but suffice to say that I highly recommend them if you ever get a chance to see them.

Anyway, according to Halley Suitt:

I think brevity is the soul of blog wit more than ever. Look at my archives and see some of my first year's worth of posts — too too long and ponderous I think.

Short and sweet — the best blog is a fresh blog full of lots of little posts. Ask him and him and her and him and him.

Well, that's a matter of what you're looking for. Certainly, I think the majority of Americans will generally prefer this format, what with their infamous short attention spans and need for constant entertainment to stave off boredom. If all a blogger wants is a lot of traffic, it's certainly a good way to go.

But personally, I don't go for short and sweet (preferring blogs and women the way I like my coffee: tall and bitter… oh wait…). So I don't read any of his example blogs. I've actually never heard of many of them, but I also don't read what seem to me to be the two frequent short-post writers and also two of the most widely-read bloggers on the right and left, Instapundit and Atrios. Why? Well, partially because they update too often for me to keep up with (I stay on top of my blogs using their RSS feeds and getting a new item every few minutes would be too much to wade through). But what few times I have read them, they didn't really have anything interesting to say. Most of their posts are typically just a link to something else without comment, or a partisan spin on a news event. I suppose this is very appealing to people who need a constant stream of entertainment and news and/or want to have their own world view reinforced (or want ammunition in their political debates with friends).

But this is of little value to me.