All posts by rbowen

My first million

Thanks mostly to a large gift that *someone* gave me early on, I have just cleared my first million in the blogshares game. And, in the spirit of his generosity, I’ve been spreading the wealth a little bit also. It is indeed a lot more fun to play the game when you have a ton of cash to sling around. But, then, I suppose that’s true in the real world also. 😉

Strawberry fields

We went strawberry picking today. The farm is out on Handy’s Bend, but the signs for strawberry picking started over at Frankfort Road, over by R.J.Corman. From there, you go all the way to Figg’s Lane, and the whole length of Figg’s Lane, until you get to Handy’s Bend, and then another mile to the farm. If I had known to start with where the strawberry field was, I would have cut about 6 miles off of the trip, but then we would have missed a beautiful drive through the back roads of Jessamine County. This area that used to be all cow farms and tobacco now has some lovely new homes – not the ugly rows and rows of cracker boxes, but some gorgeous wood farm houses and log cabins.

We picked about 4 pounds of strawberries – me, and my mom, and Sarah – and paid just $4 for the lot. Actually, it was a lot closer to 5 pounds, but the farmer rounded down, as they have a tendency to do. He said that they lost a lot of the first crop in the hail and rain last week, but that the second crop was coming up nicely. Hopefully there will still be some left when Zanna gets here next week.

More about trackback vs pingback

So, if I understand Chris correctly, the main complaint with Trackback, compared to Pingback, is a complaint with a particular implementation of it, not necessarily with the concept itself. As far as I can tell, MT does the two things that Chris says that Trackback does not do. Viz, ping URLs which are just mentioned (linked to) in the body of the article, and be able to ping more than one URL with a single article. At least, that’s certainly the way that I understood it when I was setting configuration variables.

What I find irritating is that there are two incompatible ways to do this VERY simple thing, ensuring that no matter which one I choose, I can never be sure that my pings will be acknowledged.

Then again, that’s the nice thing about standards …

Wine blogs

Because the BlogShares thing has become rather fun of late (now that I suddenly made $100K over the last 24 hours!) I started looking for wine blogs too. There’s not very many of them, but some of them are *really* good.

Here’s a few:

TiZWine Daily Tipple
Meg’s Food and Wine Page
Dandelion Wine (not actually about wine, but the title of one of my favorite books, so worth mentioning
Alien Wine Connoisseur (also seems not to be actually wine-related)
Wine Blog
New wine for new wineskins (OK, not wine-related at all)
A pure haze of wine and cocaine (huh?)
Ken’s Wine Blog
Wine, Women, and Song
Wine Trends

And, finally, as I mentioned before, Alec Saunders appears to make occasional wine-based posts.

So, having done all that, perhaps I should actually add the wine-based ones to some kind of blogroll so that I can actually read them occasionally.

Somehow, I feel like I’m avoiding work …

Taking the Lamborghini for a spin

This evening I had a Lamborghini with dinner. A Lamborghini 2000 “Trescone” Umbria Rosso ($12.99).

WineLoversPage.com describes it better than I could. I had it with warmed-over pizza that was too hot, and which burned the roof of my mouth, so, to me, it tasted like a full-bodied, earthy red, but I didn’t get all the nuances which those notes suggest. Roquefort cheese in a barnyard? Sheesh

MT software license

So it turns out that, as people have been telling me, the MT software license is in fact pretty not-open. Among other things, it says

You may not redistribute the Software without Licensor’s prior
written consent. Although you may modify or create derivative copies
of the Software for your own use, you may not distribute modified or
derivative copies of the Software.

I suppose that’s pretty normal for software, but does not mesh with the way that I view the world, and, I suppose, it’s pretty clear that I’ve already violated it, having distributed modified versions of various parts of the software. So I suppose I’ll have to find some other package to migrate to. I’m leaning towards Ken Coar’s software, if he lets me use it. I expect he’ll have a somewhat more open license,

Piglet?

Mr Hibbity Gibbity thinks that Piglet is gay. My daughter, on the other hand, seems to think that Piglet is a girl, and I suppose that there is very little evidence to the contrary, except for the whole moving in with Pooh thing, which would thus be rendered somewhat inappropriate for a kids story.