Screenshot: A Weblog

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 considered stopping Screenshot. For those of you who have been reading along, either from the beginning or starting more recently - thank you! I'm planning to be here another decade and I hope you'll stick around with me for it.

Posted by Amanda at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There are a ton of memes like this, but I'm thinking of keeping my weblogging juices flowing by taking part in these Weekend Assignment weblogging prompts. It is contrived, but looking back the questions seem pretty good.

This week we are asked:

Weekend Assignment #201: To promote a new cooking show, a TV station is going to pay you $500 to eat the same basic meal every day for a week, prepared with only minor variations by their on-screen host. What's on the menu?
Extra credit: Do you tend to eat the same thing all the time anyway?

For me, the answer to the extra credit pretty much answers the first question. I definitely get in food ruts where I eat the same thing for a week or two straight. I made a huge batch of Susie's Green-Curry Shrimp last week and have been eating it basically every night since then, making up fresh rice in my microwave rice cooker as needed. I do that with stew and chili a lot also - I can eat either every night for a week easily, especially if it is within the "rules" (or, my own inclination to bake or go to the store) to have fresh bread or biscuits with it.

So, really, this doesn't sound like a challenge at all so long as it is something I like okay. But, I've never understood people who didn't like leftovers. There is a show on the Food Network right now that seems to be all about how to get three different meals out of the same ingredients and preparation processes - it just seems easier and no less appealing to make three times as much of the first dish and be done with it.

Posted by Amanda at 8:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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 Stitch, a purchase born out of excessive optimism in my then-budding interest in cross stitch
• The Difference: Discovering the Hidden Ways We Silence Girls, a good discussion of the topic, if a bit of a retread of Mary Pipher's themes
• Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, which is a nice blend of the scholarly and the personal anecdote, though I'm sure on re-reading it I would find it somewhat dated at this point

I appreciate that Amazon bothers to keep a list of all previous orders available on their site so you can look up stuff like this.....

Posted by Amanda at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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 the official competition tomorrow - I think it's going to be incredibly exciting.

Wish you could be building robots with us? Wish you were building a killer ninja robot? Play around with Robot Rage, where you build yourself a virtual "battlebot" and steer it through battles. You won't have as much fun as we are, but it's still pretty cool....

Posted by Amanda at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Amanda at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 of the spam were going to two specific old entries of mine. So, I turned off comments for those entries a couple of days ago and am pretty confident looking at the logs today that, for now at least, this has solved the problem. I'll go the Captcha route if necessary, but I'd rather leave things as open as possible for as long as possible.

I also finally set up an RSS feed reader for myself; I went with the Sage extension for Firefox. I just went through all of my bookmarks that I usually open up in separate tabs at the start of each day and browse through one by one. Now, the ones with feeds are filtered off to a subdirectory and I'm going to try reading them just through the feeds. It's another experiment in more efficient browsing that I'll give a week and then let you know what I think.

The next thing I want to tackle around here is continuing to go back and pull my old archives into the new database....

Posted by Amanda at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 change is almost entirely due to no longer being a grad student. The second is due to bad memories of the explosion of the weblog "community" and some of the drawing up of sides that came out of who linked to whom. But it has been a while since I've made up a list of favorites, and there are some good sites that I've been enjoying recently.

Looking at the weblogs I visit on a regular basis, there are a few categories - I'll offer you one from each set.

The huge ones that everyone reads - they don't need plugs from me, but I will say that Boing Boing probably has the best staying power for me.

The old ones I've been reading since the 90s - a lot of them are gone, or have morphed into something other than what they were, but Bifurcated Rivets has been keeping on with the old-school Robot Wisdom style snippets and Ghost in the Machine continues to be an interesting mix of, well, everything.

Education themed - I found a whole bunch of these about a year ago, and the best are a good combination of useful insights and cathartic venting. Favorites include Learning Curves and New Kid on the Hallway. Not surprisingly, the summer is a bit of a downtime for these weblogs.

Feminist themed - my favorite in this catagory, Bitch Ph.D. actually overlaps a bit with the preceding catagory as well.

Craft themed - not martha seems to consistently find the coolest projects out on the web.

Pop culture themed - I've been reading Pop Culture Junk Mail forever and it's a lot of fun. More recently, I've been laughing at (and not with) the comics over at The Comics Curmudgeon.

This isn't everything by any means, but it's a pretty good snapshot of the types of things I look at - this month at least!

Posted by Amanda at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 far back I decide to go in the archives).

Please, click around, check things out, and let me know if anything is broken or ugly. I'm still playing around at this point. I expect things will continue to change for a while.

Posted by Amanda at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I really intended to weblog more this summer, but the open blocks of time have been calling to me for more focused projects, and my websurfing has been pretty listless. So, I'll punt and send you over to the ACM's US Public Policy site. Their Tech Policy Weblog has been very interesting the past week or two, discussing the impact of the several recent data breaches, and the status and potential good and ill of various laws being proposed in response. Certainly, it has to be treated as negligence for a company like CardSystems to store data in unencrypted form.

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Breaking news at CNN: People can hold collaborate online using Wiki's, Weblogs, and RSS!

Am I the last holdout in refusing to adopt the word "blog"? I keep waiting for it to fade back out of existence, and I fear I missed the transition point where everyone gave up and decided to go along with it. Weblog is descriptive; blog means nothing, sounds unattractive, and smacks, to me, of an attempt to brand what is a generic communication medium. You don't see journalers running around saying "I jaled our conversation in my jal this morning."

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm back, and you may now call me Dr. Screenshot, if you like. Or Professor Screenshot. Your choice!

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Many exciting real-world beginnings and endings going on here, leading to next to no online-world time for me, but in a good way. Thank goodness it's summer with the longer days and wonderful sunshine. There really is nothing quite like a summer day in upstate New York. Hopefully I've hit a bit of a lull for the next few weeks. I've been neglecting all of my web projects horribly over the past months. It's good to be back!

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A little bit of maxsroom.org spring cleaning has been going on. First, I finally registered a URL for my index of free crochet patterns; you can find Chained Links now at the highly mnemonic chainedlinks.com. A nice side effect was that it made it trivially easy for me to plug in Google search over the index pages. I also trimmed out the dead links, updated my backlog of new links, and it's now cataloging over 2000 patterns.

On the less upbeat side, I've been tracking the number of spam messages I get on the e-mail account associated with this page every day for the past year now. I went back and looked at some of the stats, and it's staggering. April 2003, I averaged 3.04 spams a day. So far, April 2004 is averaging at 31.89 messages a day, and even if you want to discount for the month just starting, March 2004 had an average of 19.74 per day. The high mark was August 2003 when I averaged 34.64 due to a two day streak of 226 and then 267 spams. Since then, the average hasn't dropped back under 10 a day, and has hoovered closer to 20 a day.

In other words, the spam problem is measurably worse than this time last year, and there's a steady upwards trend.

Still, this is not as bad as the story a friend just told me of having to go into her office every morning and throw out the spams that have been faxed to her office overnight. What's worse, while they do have to include a number to call to be taken off their list, if you read the fine print most of them state that if you call you will be charged $5 a minute. In other words, it's cheaper to just let them waste your paper and ink.

Posted by Amanda at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wheeee - a new year, and it's going to be a busy and exciting one. And the holidays brought me a new digital camera, so new photos will be showing up here again -- I'm planning on restarting Photo Friday. I also got some good books, including Kilbourne's semi-recent Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, which was very good, and I would recommend it even if you've already heard her speak or seen her film.

With the frigid temperatures up here (high of 0 - woooooo!), I'll probably be spending most of the weekend on the sofa with my laptop in my lap and educational access's round-the-clock Nasa Mars rover coverage on the television, and hopefully I'll send some fun links this way.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it's good to see that someone's working to give weblogs stature and intellectual respectability. Clearly, what the weblog community was missing was bloggers from Ivy League schools. Yup.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're reading this, I've successfully switched my web host service and updated my DNS listing. Of course, I would make the switch right during a blackout period for changing .org listings... Let me know if you see any problems.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It has become very clear that I cannot afford to devote significant writing time to this website over the coming months. Thus, a slight redesign to put less pressure on having "enough" content to warrant an entry. Yes, it's also a bit messier, but hopefully in a cozy, home-like manner. Or something like that....

Posted by Amanda at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been a working-vacation here, with traveling and writing and keeping up on the fight against graduate student unionization and many other stresses. For those who know why I was out of town - things have gone great. As an upshot, I actually spent two entire weeks without doing a spot of websurfing and I didn't even miss it. This is doing great things for my productivity. And over a week of 7AM mornings has totally reset my sleep schedule. I've come back a whole new me. Unfortunately for you, it's a me that wants to get work done, but I'm sure that won't last long. And of course, through cleaning out my inbox I've come across a couple of items worth mentioning...

Posted by Amanda at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I missed the actual anniversary, but Screenshot is now four years old, my first entry having been July 24, 1998. On the list of "one of these days" projects is to go through my archives and post at least a selection of my old pre-site relocation entries. My weblogging style has certainly changed over the years - something I think reflects both an evolution of my purposes in weblogging, and changes in myself and my "real life". To give you a taste, I dredged up my first Screenshot entry, with odd grey background and lack of awareness of other weblogs and all. Once I found the weblogging, as compared to web journalling, community, I stopped having to invent the wheel on my own quite so much.

While it's been a slow period here in Screenshot land, I'm still enjoying weblogging and don't plan to stop any time soon. As I said way back then, "This could be fun. I can't wait to see how it all turns out."

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In more weblog clique-age Fairvue has updated Blog.Elements, the periodic table of weblogs, to eliminate expired weblogs and eliminate the nonexistant element 118. I'm proud to maintain my place as Chromium, the shiny fender of the weblog community.

Posted by Amanda at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not much else today since I spent my surfing time cleaning up my portal. All of the dead links are now gone and I worked a few of my bookmarks in. I also noticed that Google finally has my new domain name crawled and I'm back to getting hits through them.

Posted by Amanda at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)