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In case you didn’t see it over on the Minter For House website, I was profiled in the Tuesday, September 28th edition of the Raleigh News & Observer, under the headline Minter Challenges Stam.
It was a decent article, though it focused more on my opponent than on my positions. Still, it’s fun to see my name in lights.
I guess I can call myself an “official Perl developer” now – I registered for an account on PAUSE and uploaded my first module – Net::ISCABBS. It’s a Perl implementation of the new developer’s interface at ISCABBS.
So now I have my own directory on CPAN, just like the cool kids.
Mr. Voice 2.0 is out. Go download it an use it in your improv club. Especially since you don’t have to screw with MySQL any more.
Ross offered me an invitation to join Destroy All Monsters on stage tomorrow at the
Everyone lately has been coming up to me saying “Hey, I like your sideburns.” They’re not that zany, are they?
I mean, they’ve been gradually getting more, er, “prominent” over the past few months, but I don’t know if they’ve crossed some sort of threshold or not.
This is the kind of thing I do to be wierd. I’ll probably get tired of them at some point and get rid of them. Or, as she’s threatened, Holly may “accidentally” clip them next time she’s cutting my hair.
As expected, the NHL has ushered in the 2004-05 hockey season with a lockout. The finger-pointing and press releases will now continue through possibly January, possibly the rest of the season. Also as expected, both sides are saying “We’re offering everything but the kitchen sink, but the other side is refusing to negotiate.”
In a general sense, I’m on the side of the owners in this dispute. The NHL is the weakest of the four “major” sports. Its television contract is next to worthless. Its overall revenue is small. But the players are demanding salaries on par with the NFL or the NBA. Granted, equal blame can be laid at the owners’ feet for preaching fiscal responsibility and then turning around and offering $5 million a year to a 3rd-line defenseman, which drives up salaries. But it’s the player’s union that needs to ask themselves if they want their average player to “only” make a mil a year or so, or if they want the league to fold.
The biggest black mark on the player’s side is their union’s refusal to entertain a salary cap. Tying salaries to revenues has been very successful for the NBA and the NFL – it’s allowed those leagues to thrive, leveled out the playing field to enable small-market teams to compete, and provided stability between the league and the union. The players’ stubborn refusal to consider the good a salary cap could do for the volitale finances of the NHL is foolish and counterproductive.
But the fans now have to face a season without hockey. For newer fans in newer markets, like those in Raleigh, it could undo a lot of what the NHL has built in the area. The Hurricanes have built a strong following here, even in spite of the crappy product that was put on the ice for the past two seasons. But if you cancel the season, you run the risk of the fans getting into another routine that doesn’t involve heading to the RBC a few nights a week, or watching John Forslund on Fox Sports Net. Even a sport as entrenched in the American culture as baseball had to fight and claw its way back from the ill will generated by its labor troubles a few years back. The NHL doesn’t have that luxury.
My white Hurricanes jersey, with the “ESA First Game” patch and the player signatures, hangs in the closet. Who knows when I’ll get to put it on again?
In this story about Al Jazeera responding to Donald Rumsfeld, the content of the story isn’t important. It’s the name of Al Jazeera’s “media spokesman”.
Wow. It may mean something different in Arabic, but it sounds like a guy in America having the name “Homicide Testosterone.”
I’ve seen a big uptick in referral spam to my website logs over the past few days, and a good 90% of it has been coming through Anonymizer, which in theory is a service that allows people to protect their privacy while online, but is apparently open to abuse by spammers.
I’ve found myself having to firewall off entire class C’s of their netblocks (of which they appear to have several, through Verio) just to stem the tide.
After decades of being a football powerhouse, it looks like my high school finally has a player in the NFL – Anthony Davis of Tampa Bay. Pretty cool to see “Central-Lunenburg” listed there.
I decided to take the plunge this weekend and upgrade to Movabletype 3.11. Yeah, I know, I had some pretty harsh words for the MT crew after their licensing debacle, so I stuck with what I had and thought about where I wanted to go.
I decided, at least for now, to stick with MT. Upon further observation, I think that, while Six Apart screwed the pooch when they announced 3.0, they took steps to rectify the situation. The quality of the software was never a problem, the way the licensing switch was handled was. But the big problems appear to be smoothed out now. The new Blacklist plugin seems pretty sweet, too.
Plus, inertia is a powerful thing. I’ve already got two years worth of stuff on my oldest MT blog, I’ve got the templates set up (mostly) how I’d like, I know how the software works. I don’t have the time or energy right now to learn a new package.
So we’ll see how this “new generation” of MT software works, all the while keeping a wary eye on any more surprises coming from the corporate side of things.