Geek on Two Wheels

I do not like online social networking.

When it comes to interpersonal interaction, I have always preferred mine to be in meat-space, conducted over a few cold beers, some hearty food, and generally with more vocalization and eye contact than TCP and text rendering.

That said, in this day and age, especially for one with my occupational slant, having a positive online presence is generally recommended, if not expected.  And, whether I like it or not, these new-fangled social networks are a good way to keep in touch with old friends and new acquaintances alike, not to mention being fairly effective for organizing relatively larger scale gatherings.

So, for my own sake, I’ve gotta put some effort into  this whole shebang. That means blogging on this here blog, photoing on flickr, linking-in on LinkedIn, denting on identi.ca, and at least being aware of what “Facebooking” even means for the month.  That’s a lot of nouns to verb, and I’m a very lazy man.

Luckily, integration tools exist. After some futzing, my Facebook status is now updated via identi.ca (without the annoying “dented: ” prefix) via XMPP via Pidgin and the blog is being aggregated to both LinkedIn and Facebook.  With the latest redesign of the latter, I would rather have my blog entries show up in News Feeds as links instead of Notes posts, but that’s something I will have to investigate for later.  As for Flickr, Facebook does a decent job scraping thumbnails when posting Flickr links, so doing it manually will have to do for now; in fact, I think I prefer the extra control over having it happen automagically.

And, finally, updating my main page to contain all the appropriate links.  The only things left to do is to create a good profile photo of myself, and put up a resume.

Now if only they would all become OpenID consumers, I wouldn’t have to log in to them separately…

Whether you’re just learning git or want to learn a new trick or two, git ready is a pretty good place to go.  The listing of articles by task goal instead of command explanation should be especially helpful to the newbies.

I want to have this man’s falsetto babies.

Spring is here. Here is a Hot Girl Jumping on a Trampoline:

For those more inclined to admire the male form, here is a Hot Guy Jumping on Trampoline:

(In the interest of full disclosure, EQO is a previous employer of yours-truly.)

My good friend Allen over at antipode has recently decided to say a few words about the new Firefox 3 address bar.

I, for one, agree with him. I love it, and have gone to relatively great lengths to keep it.

An obvious rebuttal to the nay-sayers is that URLs don’t always share the same prefix as what is actually available at the address. And, although I’ve become trained to memorize the former instead of the latter, it always annoyed me that I had to.

gianttip? cad-c? apfo? No, what I want are “Order of the Stick“, “Ctrl-Alt-Del Comic“, and “One Piece Manga“.

In this day and age, I don’t want to care that the URL is moofs.com instead of moof.com, or .net, or actually baz.co.tv/content/random/moof—what I want is “Clarus the Dogcow“, and it’s about time computers started doing what we mean instead of what we say.

Old habits are hard to break, but there are some habits worth breaking. Should we all go back to driving flywheel-less manual transmission cars with no power steering, too? (Me, I prefer paddle shifters)

Grace can has internets fame? Yes she can.

I may or may not have had something to do with its creation, depending on how violent she’s feeling.

If you’ve been following any of the major user-contributed blogs/news sites in the last few days, you’ll most likely be aware of a certain “16-digit hexadecimal number” that has been the center of some pretty interesting happenings.

Now, here’s the problem: for anyone that’s passed counting-without-your-fingers, there are clearly 32 alphanumerical characters in the sequence. Folks, that’s a 16-byte hexadecimal number, not 16-digits.

Getting the units correct, as always, is important.

Adventure time!

Every exam period, without exception, I end up finding something new and interesting, usually from the Intertubes, that consumes most of my precious studying time.

This semester is no exception: enjoy.