Anti complaint – Page 18

Put the full text in your blog feed and Ill read it

Techdirt: Why Full Text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views (The Freakonomics Explanation)

Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

I hate partial text feeds. It’s very true that I am much less likely to read an article if I have to click through. And with so much content on the internet, much of it pretty decent, there’s a good chance that I can find something else just as good as what you wrote.

I ‘m looking through my RSS reader, and there are hardly any feeds that I read regularly that don’t do full text. Uniwatch doesn’t, and I frequently forget to read it. The Hardball Times doesn’t, and I only read articles there where the subject line is intriguing. Almost every site I read every day, including the above-linked Techdirt, has a full feed.

And look – here I am, blogging about something that they wrote at Techdirt, proving their point.

New construction on Harvard Street

There are two buildings on our street that have been abandoned since we moved in last February, and it looks like renovation has started on both. Work on the abandoned row house will begin this Monday, according to the developer. And there is a work permit hanging on the side of the apartment building, although I didn’t really read it because it was starting to rain.

I’m curious how the housing market is going to look in a year or so when these places are finished (hopefully). DC USA should be open by then, but so should the surrounding apartments and condos.

Still, it’s exciting that the eyesores will be going away. The first thing I would do with the row house, were I the developer, is paint over the profanity that someone has spray-painted on the front steps. I think that would go a long way towards making the place look a little nicer.

I’m going to take some pictures of the buildings this weekend so I can compare them to the finished product when construction is complete.

New depths of nerd

Or maybe it’s new heights. I guess that depends on your point of view. I’ve been doing a little fooling around with some C++ with GCC. I’m doing a little baseball simulating, and it’s going well. If it continues to go well, I’ll eventually have a little executable that generates pages and pages of wonderful statistics that I can do all sorts of wonderful things with.

I realize I’m in a very small minority with my obsession with baseball statistics, but those of us here (And by ‘here’, I mean ‘In the crazy minority’) are really into it. The wife doesn’t really understand, but as long as I don’t sit here writing code and ignoring her while she’s talking, I think she’ll humor me.

I’m a little disappointed with Eclipse, however. It was slow, error messages were unhelpful, and code completion was iffy. And since code completion is one of the greatest things about an IDE, its absence is kind of a deal breaker. It may be partly a function of my crappy computer, though.

So I’m currently coding in Gedit and doing command-line compiling. It’s fine so far, but I haven’t done anything really complicated.

Anyway, it’s fun.

Hippies? I love hippies.

HIDE YOUR ARMS » Teetonic are a bunch of hippies

Teetonic is a t-shirt design competition website that has decided to go organic cotton. Not sure if they’re using the omnipresent American Apparel organic cotton shirts, but they’re using something. I like the American Apparel shirts because they’re cut skinny, and if I want to wear some of my favorite shirts, I have keep my weight down.

Im on a roll with the sports stuff

The Soul of Baseball: First Base: Albert Pujols

For instance, a scout friend of mine called a couple of days ago and said that Manny Ramirez is an “underrated defensive outfielder.” Now, first of all, this may be true, in that MannyBeingManny is rated as “Putrid” defensively, and he’s actually “Rancid,” and “Rancid” is better than “Putrid,” so that would make him underrated.

I have to admit that anyone making fun of Manny Ramirez playing the outfield is likely to get on my good side, like people making fun of Condi Rice or Nickelback. But this is funny, and it gets better from the quote above.

You should go to Fleet Feet

If you need any sort of running gear, go to Fleet Feet. However, unless you really have to (And I know I linked to it), don’t go to their website. It resized my browser window, which is absolutely unacceptable.

However, the service at the store is fantastic. At the end of May I bought a new pair of running shoes. I’ve since put probably 40 miles on them. There is now a hole worn in the heel on the inside of the left shoe. This seems a little ridiculous.

So, I went to Fleet Feet, where they promptly exchanged the pair of shoes for a new one. I hope it was just a defective pair, because I really like the shoes. And I have weird, skinny, flat, bony feet. It’s really hard to find shoes that fit me.

Anyway, I have been very happy with my experience at Fleet Feet. I’ll definitely go back next time I need something. Just hopefully not for these shoes again.

Welcome to Web 2.0, WMATA.

Metroblogging DC: Metro Unveils New Online Station Maps Powered By Google

Metro’s unveiled new online maps for their stations, which include local business listings, all powered by Google Maps.

Well, not exactly. I mean, they still have all their vowels, and I don’t think they have an AJAX “search as you type” function. But they’ve finally gotten a decent map. The next step would be to integrate local public transportation search into Google Maps. That would be cool. You could choose driving or walking or riding public transportation when you tried to get directions. They’re probably working on it.

Computers, baseball, and a lot of free time

Uni Watch » Pete, Julie, and Linc

It’s safe to say that I spend more time creating uniforms for MVP 2005 than I do actually playing it.

If you aren’t reading UniWatch, you should be.

This particular post is by a reader who painstakingly recreates all sorts of historical baseball uniforms for MVP 2005, a really nice baseball video game.

I’ve never been that interested in uniforms, but I have definitely spent unreasonable amounts of time on introducing realism to video games and whatnot, so I can identify his obsession. It started with Tomy Pocket Baseball, a little handheld game. I had a league that went on for about ten seasons (A good chunk of my childhood). I still have all the stats, and periodically I get nostalgic for the game, and I’m tempted to go find it and play another season. I used to spend hours in my room with that game. And it was really more the stats that drew me in than the game.

Then there was penny soccer, invented by a friend. I played at his house for a while, then created my own league. There weren’t so many stats to go along with that, but we did NCAA football-style rankings, which was fun. I always loved watching the unranked no-name upset the undefeated powerhouse.

I wonder what the wife would say if I pulled out the old Tomy Pocket Baseball. She’d probably prefer it to me playing on the computer, but not to me cleaning the house or something.

I win! Im a big winner!

Some of you may remember that I contested a ridiculous parking ticket last month. I left the response letter at home, so I can’t post it now, but I can summarize.

Dear Sir, Your relentless powers of persuasion are too much for us. We have tried to formulate a response, a scenario where you might possibly be in the wrong, even a little bit, but we have failed. As such, please do not pay us any money. We’re sorry. Sincerely, DC Adjudication Services

I’m pretty sure that’s almost word for word. I may have taken a few liberties and substituted a word here and there to get down to what they really meant, without the posturing and bureaucracy. We’re still waiting on a response for the big ticket, the $100 ticket. The wife wrote that letter. She’s a lawyer, so she should be better at convincing them, but we had a much stronger case on the one that I contested. So we’ll see.

Ubuntu, Wubi, and other funny words

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop last night using Wubi, and I’m not sure why I didn’t do this sooner. Wubi is a Windows installer that lets you run Ubuntu sort of like running a Windows program.

My initial reactions are limited, because the install finished sometime after I went to bed last night, and I only had a few minutes to play this morning. But I was surprised that Ubuntu recognized the volume buttons on my Dell (I accidentally uninstalled the Windows driver for them and have never bothered to find it again), although I was a little disappointed that it seems to like to turn the volume on when I’m not logged in, which drives me nuts.

Also, I couldn’t get onto my wireless network. But I’m not positive I have the right password. I’ll have to play with it tonight. Of course, the wife comes home tonight, so I should probably do a bit of cleaning. I did some yesterday, but not everything.

In any event, I would much rather be at home playing with Ubuntu than sitting at work, checking for Section 508 compliance in our web application. Although at least this gives me an excuse to get rid of some of the awful, awful code generated by Visual Studio. If you ever hear anyone try to sing the praises of Microsoft’s .NET environment, I want you to kick them in the teeth.