Robert Orben. “Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that’s not true. Some smalleer countries are neutral.” [Quotes of the Day]

It’s been a bit since I posted on the progress of ripping CDs. That’s because I haven’t been. Today I finally got around to it again. I don’t have too many left and should just finish it up.

• Duran Duran
• Duran Duran – Rio
• Duran Duran – Decade
• Echo & the Bunnymen – Porcupine
• Electronic
• Electric Skychurch – Together
• Thomas Dolby – Astronauts & Heretics
• EMF – Schubert Dip

Posted without any extra comments.

When Hubert, 85, Met Mildred, 73. Love stories may be a dime a dozen, but odes to love affairs like this one, begun on the borders of life’s end, are rare. By N. R. Kleinfield. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

I’m watching a pretty freaking old anime, Maison Ikkoku. I used to be such an Orange Roadie, I never bothered to watch MI before. I had it in my head at the time you either liked one or the other.

I think I like MI more.

So I’ve been reading up on TrackBack a bit this morning and found a standalone implimentation of it. And I think I’ve got it integrated into my web site. Pretty cool. I’m still thinking of bundling up a set of generic tools for people who use Radio and are hosting their blog on a linux box. There’s a version of rcs done in Python, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. I just want something that is fairly easy to snap into a unix box that will handle things like comments and trackback (and make them easily configurable).

So if you’re a trackback user, try giving this a ping so that I know it all works well.

Tangled Up in Spam. Those unwanted messages have become the bane of the Internet. Why we can’t just say no. By James Gleick. [New York Times: Technology]

Just the other day I was saying “Bah, Spam”. So, I was most interesting in hearing what James Glieak had to say about it in the NY Times today. I just didn’t realize some of it was this bad:

The harvesting of e-mail addresses by spammers is relentless and swift. Investigators for the Federal Trade Commission recently posted some freshly minted e-mail addresses in chat rooms and news groups to see what would happen; in one case, the first spam came in nine minutes.

I guess I should be happy that I lasted a year without getting any spam at my primary email address.

Isaac Newton. “Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.” [Quotes of the Day]

Dave Hyatt has has a post titled A Night Away From the Opera. He points to John Gruber as having “an excellent blog up about Opera’s potential withdrawal from the Mac platform”. I have to agree with lots of Gruber’s points. Opera’s comments about Apple and Safari sound to me like an excuse. An excuse for taking forever to come up with a stable (Is the current release stable? I think they have a non beta release out) version of Opera for OS X. And one that hasn’t been able to compete much with any of the other browsers.

On a somewhat related note, I found the last paragraph of Gruber’s post interesting.

And thus there is a difference between when Apple steps on the toes of cross-platform developers like Opera and Netscape, and when they do it to Mac-only developers like Karelia. Watson is exactly the sort of third-party software Apple needs for the Mac: original, useful, fun, and only for the Mac. Opera is exactly what Apple doesnât need: exactly like the Windows version, but six months behind.

This is related to my post of a day or so ago about an interview with the CEO of “The Omni Group”, Ken Case. I actually think people that say Apple is stifling other developers could learn something from this interview. Let’s look at the case of Watson. yes, Apple released the updated Sherlock that had much of the functionality of Watson. But how much have you heard about it since? There’s an SDK kit out, I think that’s all the news I’ve heard since it was released. I just pulled up the home page for Watson and you get the feeling that there’s a lot of stuff going on there. The Sherlock page doesn’t look like it’s been updated since it was released.

Today I did something I never do, I parked in a handicapped space. I don’t have my placard yet either. I figured I’d been good for over two years about it and I’d mailed in the application and why not just park there real quick while I ran into a store in Harvard Square. Of course, upon coming out 5 minutes later there was a ticket. I should have know that you just don’t do that kind of thing in Harvard Square.

Beyond being irked at myself for doing it, I just found myself generally annoyed at the world. I always tend to look and see if someone parking in a handicapped spot has a placard or license plate for it. You may or may not be amazed to know that at least half of the time the person parking in one of those spots doesn’t. And many times they park in such spaces and never get a ticket. It just annoys me to no end that I just had bad timing, am actually someone who will be getting a card and I’m the one who gets a ticket (and it isn’t a cheap one either). Fuck.

Okay, whining over. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

“Adam” is talking about BitTorrent again. This time about using it with RSS. This would definitely be a cool way to do things. I’d love to have a small little app that I could use to subscribe to an RSS feed of announcements of new anime digisubs. I could then even have it set up to automaticly download certain things. Maybe based on a search string or a number of different criteria.

The anime digisub world has really grabbed onto the whole BitTorrent thing like mad in the last few weeks. There are numerous sites tracking new downloads as they become available. It’s nice, you have things like BitTorrent for the brand new stuff, and then you have things like Direct Connect for anything that’s been out for over a week. They each have their strengths in that sense.

One place I’d love to see BitTorrent in place is with software downloads. Wouldn’t it be cool if it was an option for downloading large software updates from places like Apple? The download for iPhoto and iMovie took way too long IMHO, maybe I’m just spoiled. But I could see using it for large demos of game software especially, since usually once those come out they are being downloaded like crazy.