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The timing of the holidays this year and my various work responsibilities makes the ending of the decade align with a week where I’ve been able to set aside time to step away from work and catch my breath. It’s inspired me to, in addition to just resting and catching up on reading and maybe even getting some fresh air, spend the next week reflecting a bit on the past decade. Not from any deep philosophical stance. But I’ve been reading through the various “decade in review” posts and articles that are cropping up and a few ideas caught my … Continue reading 2010s in Review

Ten years ago today, back in 1998, I decided to legitimize my procrastinary websurfing with a “web journal” chronicling the interesting things that I came across online. At the time I’d never heard the term weblog and to the degree that I was aware of any community, it was the online journaling community. Since then, I’ve enjoyed getting to know and be part of an exploding weblogging (or, I guess I can finally, begrudgingly, give in and call it blogging) community. While sadly a combination of work and personal commitments have caused my posting to be sporadic, I’ve never seriously … Continue reading Happy Blogiversary to Me!

There’s a meme going around, most recently seen by me over at 50 Books in which you share your first time orderiing at Amazon. I looked it up and my first order was from June 1997 – back when you got free mugs from them at Christmas and free bookmarks in your orders – for a set of five books: 60 Crocheted Snowflakes, which I still use every year to make new thread snowflakes for the tree The Harmony Guide to Crocheting, the absolute best guide to crochet and its various stitches and techniques I’ve found Audubon Birds in Cross … Continue reading Classic Orders

Nothing – nothing! – that I could have to post tonight could trump how proud I am of my students right now. I’ve been teaching an electronic design and robotics course, and they have been building line-following robots working up from resistors and transistors and comparators and motors, and with the big competition tomorrow, they look amazing. I was thrilled when the prototyped circuits worked as designed, but these guys have been pusing to get their prototypes actually on the ground and following paths. Today I’ve seen them tackle figure-eights, divergent paths, and complicated looping patterns. I can’t wait for … Continue reading So proud!

So very, very busy right now, so I will just leave you with the following – a classic from Usenet that has particular appeal to me this week: MAKE.TENURE.FAST

This afternoon I did some behind the scenes tidying around Screenshot-ville. I upgraded from Movable Type 3.2 to 3.3 – amazingly, while I backed things up, it went entirely smoothly and I don’t appear to have lost any functionality (let me know if it appears otherwise to you!!!). I had been getting between 100 and 200 spam comments a day, and while they were mostly getting marked as junk, about 50-60 were coming through as either needing moderation or getting posted outright. I was going to try to install a Captcha plugin, but I noticed that all but a half-dozen … Continue reading Behind the Scenes Tidying

Most years I forget to make note until too long after the fact, but today is the eighth anniversary of my first post to Screenshot. I asked a couple of friends what I should do to mark the occasion, and one interesting suggestion was to comment on what weblogs I’m currently reading on a regular basis. It’s an interesting question, because looking back over my years of weblogging (1) I used to read a lot more weblogs than i do now, and (2) I used to maintain a list of favorites, whereas now I keep my bookmarks private. The first … Continue reading Bronze Today

I’ve decided at long last that this whole weblog-publishing software thing probably isn’t a fad and got myself a software tool to manage Screenshot. I decided to go with Moveable Type, because if I can’t use vi anymore to write my entries, at least I can have crazy CSS style sheets and perl scripts to wrangle on my own server. For now, only the past three months worth of archives are imported, but I’ll be continuing to suck them in over the coming days and weeks (or months, depending on how quickly the semester catches up with me and how … Continue reading Joining the 21st Century