Super Bowl cooking

Up late backing up. Many fine GB flying through the air.

Next Sunday is the Super Bowl, which means hosting Hans’s pals for Madden playing and watching the game. I’ll be cooking, trying to accomplish my TGI Friday’s Three-for-All replication, with buffalo wings, mozzarella sticks, and potato skins. Which will mean some prep on Saturday.

Dinner party the next Saturday, the 12th. Denyse and I going out of town the 13th and 14th for Valentine’s. End of the month will be our 9th “Being Together” anniversary (which means our 8th wedding anniversary will be this June).

PHP Security Consortium

The PHP Security Consortium website launched today, and I can see myself catching up on some essential reading there in the near future. One of their first projects is the aptly named “PHP Security Guide” (available in HTML and DocBook formats as of this writing, but coming in PDF), an in-depth work-in-progress based on Chris Shiflett’s “PHP Security Workbook.” Monthly projects spotlights and on-going article series make this the newest must-have bookmark for anyone serious about PHP development.

If you’re like me, getting a software project prototyped usually takes precedence over making it secure (or secure enough as the case may be). I’m looking forward to finding out the best techniques on how to secure existing projects, as well as planning for new ones.

“Blogosphere” (and the corrupted “blogsphere”) is a word that needs to be taken out back and shot.

A coincidental dog show

Strangely and coincidentally there is a dog show going on this weekend one town over. I say coincidentally because we’ve been talking about getting a dog recently, but also because we were watching the AKC nationals on Animal Planet this past week and were saying, “We should go to a dog show sometime.” Weird.

Unfortunately, I have a lot to do today, but I’m going to see if I can kick Denyse and Hans out to go have some fun. :)

Poodles

Well, I had a chance to go after all with Denyse (left Hans at home) after getting a lot done today, so that was cool. Had a fun time seeing all the different kinds of dogs. Saw a couple of the poodles Denyse is interested in. We weren’t really able to interact with any of the dogs, of course, since everyone there is really there to show, not have fun. That part was a little peculiar, not being able to reach out and pet all the cool dogs. :)

Although I’m a bit apprehensive about the responsibility and expense of getting a dog, not to mention how the cats will handle it, I’m also very excited. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a dog in the family. My smile was pretty big today, though, walking around seeing all the dogs and dog-related stuff.

“New” design

Put up a new design for celsius1414.com earlier this evening, homepage only, getting rid of everything else and consolidating necessary info there. If I go back online with a journal or jourki or whatever, I’ll re-expand it.

The design is actually an old one from 2003 that I never finished playing with past the dramatic homepage in Photoshop. And since a dramatic homepage is all I need at the moment, voila! :)

The NeXTSTEP look-and-feel

Up late poking around on the web about various topics and ideas. Surfing. Still obsessed on the NeXTSTEP look-and-feel. Gotta love the old-school minimalism; obsession was even more intensely ramped up by a video posted online of Steve Jobs demoing a NeXTSTEP system. Very cool stuff. Downloaded a bunch of screenshots too.

Firecrackers

Earlier tonight, firecrackers sounded out somewhere in the neighborhood. Thought it was gunfire at first, but it eventually became clearer what was going on. After midnight, even. Weird. Denyse slept through it though.

Why a wiki?

I’m interested in the idea of using a wiki setup in a journaling method, rather like what Rui Carmo uses over on Tao of Mac. He answers ‘Why a Wiki?’ with this:

Because it’s better than a traditional weblog. It has built-in versioning, allows for easier hyperlinking, makes it easier to jot down down notes on interrelated concepts and (with a few enhancements like the SeeAlso plugin I wrote) makes it easier to find related items even if you don’t know all the relationships.

Other obsessions

What else was I obsessing on tonight?

• AKC/Eukanuba dog show on Animal Planet.
• iDevGames Vectorized games contest entries
• NUMB3RS

Of course, now the thought re-occurs to me about somehow combining journaling, wiki, and outliners software….

Must resist urge to obsess on Notanda right now. :)

Anyway, time to log off — at least as soon as iTunes finishes playing Anosmia’s ‘Tron Rock Opera.’

The chimes are freaking outside at the moment.

Coincidentally, Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ came on next. :)

Guidelines

Rui uses these guidelines for publishing stuff on his site:

• It’s publicly available info (i.e., I never publish anything people can’t find on the Net by themselves.)
• It’s useful to me (now and in the near future) as reference.
• It has some bearing on my work, hobbies (which tend to be work-related) or the broad areas of tech I happen to be involved in.
• It’s not directly related to work — I never post anything directly related to my work, projects, company or suppliers, except if it’s public domain and with at least one external reference (I’m also into information security and have drafted several NDAs alongside legal counsel, so I’m probably more responsible than most people in this regard).
• Also, photos are often published three to six months after they are taken (esp. devices and on-site photos), to avoid providing hints as to what I’m involved in.

Some interesting directions to consider.

Saturday proper

I realize I’ve been missing writing, journal and otherwise. I’m interested to see if a VoodooPad Jourki (Journal+Wiki) is a good way to go. It will become I believe more valuable with time as the intralinking expands.

Reading at the moment Rui’s notes on migrating his site to a new wiki system.

He has some of the same issues as I do, although he is more concerned with system resources and the programming side of things — which of course interest me, naturally, but only as a means to an end. Writing, not writing code, is the primary reason for re-programming everything.

If VoodooPad becomes a more integrated (in a quotidian sense) piece of software, I might consider upgrade to the full version, if only for the additional publishing capabilities. Interestingly, it is scriptable (via AppleScript), so I could easily roll my own jourki publishing system with it as a front end, say.

archive.org treasure trove

About a year ago I visited archive.org and downloaded a bunch of old-time music, mostly blues and jazz from the 1920s. Awesome stuff, just wonderful. More recently I thought it would be a good idea to go back and see if there were any new tracks from the days of the 78RPM record.

And there are. I’m in the midst of downloading all kinds of tracks: blues, jazz, ragtime, folk, etc. Also as I’ve come across previously downloaded tracks, I’ve updated the years so it’s better organized. Some of these new songs are from the 1910s, and even earlier!

Some days I just love the Intarweb. :)

Sixty-nine songs, ranging from 1901 to 1936. Bliss.

I do so love music. It should be playing, constantly. Every song ever written, sung, played, or programmed: on infinite random repeat until the final song ends, and in so doing, ends time itself.