DanRochman.com

In Hallandale, safe and sound. Mom’s cooking (mmm, STEAK), Em is sleeping (yes, Emy schlapt again), Ariel (the nephew) is hanging out with a friend, and *I* just discovered that there’s an unprotected wireless access point within range of my mom’s condo. W00t!! I was assuming I’d have to (pretty much) tolerate dialup (and/or GPRS via my mobile phone) while we were down here, but it turns out I’ve got BROADBAND, BABY! And a pretty decent signal, to boot.

We haven’t done much of anything since we got here - just chillin’ and getting caught up and such. (Plus, I’m still sick, and Em and I are both totally lagged out. There’s no jai-alai tonight anyhow (closed for Christmas Eve), but we may do that tomorrow night. Not sure what we’re gonna do tonight, other than eat some yummy-looking steaks. (And watch Em eat her turkey burger. Poor Em. She won’t eat steak. How weird is that? And you vegetarians in the readership just put your hands back down.) Maybe we’ll just go for a drive around South Beach and take in some sites. I need to take it easy…

It’s good to be spending some relaxing time with my mom again. And it’s really great to see Ariel - I’m looking forward to really spending a lot of quality time with him. Probably (and sadly) a first for us. Living as far apart as we do, I don’t really get to spend much quality time with any of my nieces and nephews… I can’t believe I’m using (repeatedly, yet) the term “quality time”. I have to go now, before I make myself sicker.

Emy Schlapt (at SFO)

Emmy’s spaghetti shack

Em and I saw Closer last night with Karie and Donovan (aka DoFo). I hadn’t read much about it, other than a San Francisco Chronicle review (warning - contains some plot spoilers) that generally praises the film, but just TRASHES Julia Roberts. I mean… HATCHET JOB on Julia. Ouch.

Anyhow, I thought the film was really quite good. Clive Owen, in particular, was superb. And Julia Roberts - well, it turns out she was filling in for Cate Blanchett, who was originally signed to that part but had to drop out due to being pregnant. And maybe (probably?) Cate Blanchett would have been a better casting choice, but that’s hard to say. In any case, while I agreed with the reviewer about the good points of the film, I (fortunately?) didn’t really see how Julia Roberts’ presence “nearly tanked it”. It’s a little arty, having come from a stage play, but I like that sort of thing when it’s done well enough. There are certainly flaws, but there are also quite a few clever bits.

The Filthy Critic (SO not safe for work - not safe for many homes, either… not safe for anyone capable of being offended, in fact, so you’ve been warned), on the other hand, gave Closer a scathing “one-finger” (out of five) review. But while I almost always *enjoy* reading his reviews, I’m not as likely to *agree* with them. He has (as usual) some very valid criticism, but ultimately it boils down to some people (like Filthy) hate this kind of movie, and some (like me) don’t. But I still enjoyed his review. And I *love* that each review also has a “Quote Whore of the Week” sidebar. If you like your reviews, filthy, funny, filthy, observant, filthy, and honest (and VERY filthy), and not full of quote-bait from quote-whores, you may want to check out Filthy’s archives. But not at work. Unless you work at some place so unbelievably cool that they’re just totally down with that, in which case - are they hiring?

Time to get back to the grind. Gotta tie up all the loose ends at work, double-check that I’m all packed, and otherwise get ready to head to Florida very late tonight. Well, technically, it’ll be very early tomorrow morning when we fly out. Ouch. And connecting in Houston. Double ouch. Safe holiday travels, everyone.

DoFo

A jar of loose tea, in Point Reyes (taken some days ago).

Over dinner last night (hey, Judy - remember Lotus Garden?), Emylene told me I’d better liven this blog up a bit. The technical posts (updated PHP to 4.3.10, and WP to 1.2.2 - wowee!) just aren’t too exciting, I’ll admit. Those are more like little sticky notes I’m leaving for myself, since I know that a few years from now (when I look back over the development of the site?) I’ll want to see that sort of stuff. Guaranteed to bore ordinary humans to snores, though. So who needs ambien?

So let’s see, what’s new and exciting. I have a cold - it’s new, but not that exciting. It’s 9:45 AM here, so I’ve been up for a few hours, which means my nose and throat are pretty much just starting to function. The first hour or so of the morning is just the worst when you have a head cold. Shout-outs to Judy and Arnon, who are also (according to their respective blogs) under the weather. Let us raise a toast to each other, and to all those who sniffle and croak along with us - wassail!

The more exciting news is that Em and I are going to Florida! We’re catching the red-eye (well, that’s hardly new - sigh) on Thursday night. We’ll be there for about a week visiting my mom (and one of my nephews, who is also visiting my mom), and we’ll be back (just) in time for New Year’s Eve here in San Francisco. Which we don’t have any plans for, but whatever. We do have lots of plans (thanks, Em!) for the week in Florida. We’re just hoping the weather holds out well enough that we don’t have to fall back onto “Plan B” too often. Either way, it should be a whirlwind week. We’ve got the Everglades National Park on our list, even though we were there on our last trip, because it’s so amazing and unique that I can’t wait to go back. Plus, this time around we’re going down to the Florida Keys and Key West - Em’s never been, and I’ve only been once (and so long ago I barely remember it). The highlights are an overnight stop in Key Largo (where Em and I will be scuba diving, my nephew will be snorkeling, and my mom will be chilling in town), and a couple of nights in Key West. From Key West, we’ll be doing a day trip to the Dry Tortugas National Park - none of us have ever been, and I’ve always really wanted to go. Back on the mainland (closer to where my mom lives), the big attractions on our list are jai-alai, Calle Ocho (again - I wanted to spend more time there last time, plus my mom and nephew haven’t been there yet), and the ginormous pool at The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. From the spas.about.com photo page:

In the 1940s, swimming sensation Esther Williams performed there. Now some 60 years later, The Biltmore’s pool is still a record holder. At 700,000 crystalline gallons, the pool ranks as the largest hotel pool in the continental United States. Frequently used as a backdrop for movies, fashion spreads and video shoots, it has become a favorite “photo stop.”

Other than that, the plans include some beach and swimming pool time (weather permitting), some shopping, and (if it rains enough) a couple of mainstream movies. I’m itching to see the new Blade Trinity, even though it’s surely trash - you know it’s gotta be SLICK trash.

The good news is that I have my “t-moblog” all ready to go, so I’ll be able to post pics (of truly pathetic size and image quality, but what the hell) right from my phone as we go. And I’ll try to be better this time about having some real pics in the gallery soon after we get back.

If you can read this, then posting from my camera phone is working! Ain’t she pretty?

Just updated this site to WordPress version 1.22. Now I’m eagerly awaiting w.bloggar v4.00 on the client side. Much more to report, but it’s midnight, and I have a cold, and am late for bed (again). More tomorrow morning.

I’m a few days late with this, but what the heck - I took the weekend off. Anyhow, the online photo gallery allows anyone to comment on any photo, which is neat. The only trouble is that there’s no (built-in) provision for viewing the most recent comments. Out of the box, you’d need to go back and look at every photo in order to see what (if any) new comments had been posted to it. That might not suck too badly for visitors, but it sucked for me as the host…

Fortunately, a fix was out there waiting to be found, and I found it. [A big THANK YOU to Brian Park for creating and sharing it.] And I even managed to install it. So now, if you visit the Most Recent Photo Comments page, you can see the result. The good news is this script has allowed me to find comments that were posted months ago, but which I’d never stumbled across before. The bad news is that there hasn’t been a new comment in months - mostly my bad, since I haven’t really uploaded many (any?) new pics. Now that some of the underlying pieces of the web site are coming together, uploading new pics is moving back up my list of things of to do. [Someday, I will post a blog entry that consists of my List of Things To Do. Ironically, that means I now must add this TO my List of Things To Do. Shades of Russell's Paradox. But not really.]

Mercifully, I haven’t been getting much comment spam on the blog lately, and have never seen *any* comment spam in the photo gallery - I’m hoping that application’s commenting mechanism stays under the spammers’ collective radar.

I used to use AWStats to analyze my web server logs. Since migrating to this new server, I hadn’t gotten around to installing a log analyzer. I was going to finally re-install AWStats the other night, but figured that while I was starting over I’d make the switch to Analog (supplemented by Report Magic) instead. The results can be found at the new “stats” page. Cool, no? Well, cool for me. I never had the stats in a publicly accessible part of the site before, since it’s unlikely anyone else would be interested, but you never know. There’s not much there yet, since I didn’t bring over the logs from the old server, and I only enabled logging on the new server just last night, but the general idea comes through. I’ll be tweaking it for a while (getting rid of referer spam, doing DNS lookups, et cetera). And yes, it should be “referrer” spam, but somehow a typo got codified into the HTTP standard. Slackers.

Speaking of typos, Arnon mentioned that the comment form asks you for a URI (as opposed to a URL) when you post a comment. Note that this is NOT a typo. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and is certainly a far more widely used term. But a URI (as the acronym tag on that text points out) is a Universal Resource Identifier, and some might argue that it’s the more appropriate term to use. More information can be had at the W3C page on Naming and Addressing, as well as the infamous “URI Clarification” document of September 2001 (I’m sure we all remember THAT one with a chuckle). The short version (from RFC 2396) is:

A URI can be further classified as a locator, a name, or both. The term “Uniform Resource Locator” (URL) refers to the subset of URI that identify resources via a representation of their primary access mechanism (e.g., their network “location”), rather than identifying the resource by name or by some other attribute(s) of that resource. The term “Uniform Resource Name” (URN) refers to the subset of URI that are required to remain globally unique and persistent even when the resource ceases to exist or becomes unavailable.

Now has everyone got that whole URI vs. URL vs. URN distinction all clear in their minds? Groovy. Let’s move on.
I’ve also got a cool little hack I found for the online photo gallery, but it’s late and Em’s already gone to bed. I’ll turn that loose (and post about it) tomorrow.

Oh, and the image of the pen at the top of the home page has to go, and will go eventually. It simply came with the style sheet that I ripped off, and I didn’t want a broken image link, and I was too lazy to take it out, and… I’ll get around to it.

Via BoingBoing, I just found out that Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2004 was “Blog”. Personally, “defenestration” (which came it at number 10) has been one of my favorite words for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was honestly thrilled to find out that words like that actually existed. And back in those days, the word “blog” did *not* yet exist, so it wasn’t even in the running.
Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to write about Bloglines for quite a while. It’s basically a free, web-based news aggregator. It’s also a blog search engine, and it lets you create and share blogs of your own. There are a couple of nifty Bloglines extensions for Firefox, too. While there are many services like this, it seems that as of today, Bloglines is the clear leader in this space. The only thing that worries is me is that I *don’t* see any ads on their site, which makes me wonder if/how they make any money. I generally prefer to keep this sort of thing on my own machine(s), rather than using a web-based service (even a free one), but for people who are often away from their own machine(s) or who are daunted by installing and setting up a news aggregator, this seems like a killer web app. If you want to subscribe to this blog via Bloglines, just click on the “Sub Bloglines” button below:

If you end up trying Bloglines (or if you’re already a user), drop a comment and let me know if/how you like it.

I finally got fed up with the out-of-the-box WordPress style. Aesthetics aside, it was just too hard the read - the font choice sucked, and there was a lot of light-grey text over a white background. There’s supposed to be support for themes in the next version of WordPress, but the interim solution I opted for was to simply steal a better stylesheet. Being lazy, I did a quick sampling of Alex King’s library of WordPress styles, and stole a decent (and more legible) style called “Rubric”. Let me know what you think, and how the site looks in your browser.