I turned on Eurotrip as background while completing some mandatory online training this morning.

This movie is an absolute riot. One of the funniest I’ve seen in quite a while.

Funny to me, anyway. There’s no accounting for taste.

Prior to seeing it I’d never even heard of this movie. It’s either a hidden gem or further proof I’m out of the entertainment loop.

Not much of an enhancement today. Basically I got yesterday’s
enhancement working and put some automation in place.

Kinda busy this week. I also ran 12 miles over the last two days.

I’m planning to work on the UI this weekend.

I can now post via email.

It’s not visible, but it makes things a little easier for me.

The site is still in progress. It’s the workweek now, so the basic enhancements won’t come as quickly. I’ll try to do one enhancement a day the rest of this week.

Today’s addition is the “Add to” links for Google, My Yahoo!, and Bloglines. (I also removed the Comments link; let me know if you actually miss it.) Click on any of them to add them to Google’s feed reader (Personalized Home Page or Google Reader), My Yahoo!, or Bloglines, respectively. I was going to add a My AOL link, but it didn’t work, and then I remembered I’m not really an AOL fan anyway.

There are plenty of other Web-based feed readers, of course, but the ones at the right are the most recognizable and over time I expect they’ll be the most popular. If you’re a user of any of the others you probably already know what to do with the RSS 2.0 link.

If you’re offended by the omission of your favorite feed reader link, leave a comment and I’ll consider adding it.

Business Week (subscription required) has a good article on the problems caused by excessive patent litigation.

Here’s a good quote from it I’ve never heard previously:

A man “has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject?” — Thomas Jefferson 

My friend Celeb Sighter 1 (she’s also known as Amy) ran into Lisa Gastineau of The Gastineau Girls at the New Year’s gathering we attended at Jean-Luc. I hadn’t heard of them, but I’m not really in the loop on reality television, so I’m probably in the minority. Apparently Lisa is very nice (she even shared her maki).

The cameras weren’t with them, but apparently they were going to be in tow for a party elsewhere later in the evening.

Here’s the picture proof.

I’m working to get photos on the site. Check back in the next couple days.

I’m in the process of posting pics on Flickr. The photos will be visible on this site via the FAlbum plugin.

FAlbum was easy to install except for the “friendly URL” configuration, which was a bit of a pain. It appears to be a WordPress 2.0-related issue. The key thing is to make sure the FAlbum instructions in the .htaccess file are listed before the WordPress instructions. Friendly URLs are working for me; the contents of my .htaccess file can be downloaded below for reference. (Special thanks to the person who posted a summary of this solution.)

Example .htaccess file

The friendly URL directory is /blog/photos (/blog is the WordPress installation directory). This file should be used for reference purposes only. It contains configuration information that may not be applicable to your installation.

My buddies at Innersync got a mention on this MailChimp blog posting for their cool Holiday E-Card.

It’s always good to see these guys getting props.

Quite a few fixes since last night. Permalinks are working now, date formatting is mostly consistent, and the comments layout is a bit cleaner, among other things. I really like working with WordPress so far.

After several days of off-and-on development this blog is finally live. I set my deadline as New Year’s Day and this post will hit the site at about 11:45 ET January 1, 2006. I’m cutting it close, but I made my deadline.

In a larger sense, after 10 years in of doing off-and-on Web development I’ve finally invested myself in a non-work related Web site. I think the motivation has come partly from my recent move to New York, which has stimulated me into action, and partly from the renewed developments in technology. There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening and I’m tired of feeling like I’m on the sidelines.

I’m proud to say this site uses the newly-released WordPress 2.0. I installed 1.5.2 on my Web host’s servers a couple weeks back and installed onto my PowerBook at about the same time. 2.0 came out in the last few days and I was able to upgrade both my PowerBook and the host’s server with no drama at all. The WordPress team deserves a medal.

There’s more work to be done. If something doesn’t work rest assured I will catch the issue and fix it within the next couple days.