[Update: If you're coming here for information about darla1972 and/or hiddenmatch.com, the best of what I know is in this later post.]
I was checking Tom's blog today and it occurred to me again how much I like his design, especially how his publishing scripts handle links (the arrow and the spacing work really well). In point of fact, both Tom and Beth have nicer site designs than I do. It is, of course, a function of them being better at web design than I am. Oh well. One lives and learns -- my website designs are typically better now than they were five years ago.
Which reminds me, I have to get a blogroll going.
Aquarium fish are interesting creatures. To all human appearance, most of them are only slightly more intelligent than the decorative plants in their tank. (There are a few species, like oscars, which are more intelligent and can be taught to do a variety of tricks.) In fairness, we don't have any good ways of measuring fish intelligence, but so far no one has proposed a metric against which fish have scored well. On the other hand, fish can get used to a routine very quickly. It takes only a few repetitions at the same time of day to get fish to anticipate their feeding. I have a pair of (small) gold gouramis in a planted 10 gallon tank. When I lift the cover, they rush to the top and start eating before I even put food in. It's really cute to watch their mouths open and close at the surface (the best way to eat the floating flake which they get) with nothing there. (I don't make them wait long before being satisfied.)
As I write my rss aggregator, I've come to the conclusion that rss is so poorly implemented as to be nearly useless. Maybe enough people will publish rss feeds (including date information) that it will make sense to use an rss aggregator to manage one's reading. Oh well. Maybe I can make it work now. Still, the underwhelming minority of bloggers seem to publish rss feeds.
Oh, I love spam. Here is a particularly creative one:
I think you answered my ad longtime ago if it was not you I am sorry. If it was I could not answer you because my Eudora died and I could not get it to work but my friend got the emails address out for me ..:) I hope it was you and you are still interested, as I realize lots of time has past. I really don't know where to start .... Maybe you can tell me little more about yourself since I lost your first email ,what you look like,age,and are you still looking ? If you are interested learning more about me, I have a profile at : http://www.hiddenmatch.com I am NOT a Porn Chick ..:-) I just chose it because you don't have to pay, And they allow any pictures I want .:). Oh yea , My username is darla1972 . Don't really know what else to say for now I hope this is the right address . Let me know if you are interested, And I hope you don't run when you see my picture :-) Bye ..... D
Just for fun, I went and took a look at what hiddenmatch.com really is. It turns out that while it's "completely free", they need your credit card information "to verify who you are". Aren't porn people great? And just to prove how much of a geek I am, let's look at the path this message took according to the headers:
- Received: from smtp0472.mail.yahoo.com (www.hepha.org.tw [210.58.98.12]) by granpapa.fsk-brain.co.jp with SMTP (Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.2653.13) id D1W7XVKN; Sat, 18 Jan 2003 13:40:28 +0900
- Received: from unknown (HELO granpapa.fsk-brain.co.jp) (210.175.205.100) by [my mail host] with SMTP; 18 Jan 2003 05:28:34 -0000
But it also has the line:
From: "Trelira"<girliedarla4zvrk0@freenet.de>Am I to believe that someone from Germany is sending me a message via granpapa.fsk-brain.co.jp? Just how gullible do these spammers think that I am?
I've been trying to think of a way to get date information for Den Beste's posts (for my rss aggregator), but unfortunately while he does give the year and month in the url, that's it. So far as I can figure, I would have to actually get the first few hundred bytes of his post and parse it for the "stardate". This is clearly unworkable, so I don't know what I'm going to do.
Maybe I have to completely abandon the idea of using the rss date for sorting. Perhaps what I need to do is build a database of posts and then use that to figure out what's new. It at least has the virtue of being reliable, if more of a PITA.
Contest of the day: come up with a perl program in which the &&= operator is used non-trivially.