BlogShares = Holy Crap!

The site just officially went live, and it's crazy! I thought I totally screwed up this morning and bought some available shares of Movable Type because I thought the game had already switched over. But then it hadn't! Ack! Thinking I was going to be stuck with shares that I couldn't unload (and only being left with a pitiful $1k-odd cash balance), I started poking around on the forums. I saw a post there that if there was an outstanding buy order for a stock, you didn't have to wait for the 6 hours! So, I dumped most of everything I had picked up (down to $14k cash from $19k last night, not horrible), and sat tight.

When the site came back up, I saw that I had around $29k cash?!?!? WTF? I guess they sold the stock for me at the going rate when the beta site went down. I tried to grab some of the better-performing (at least, they were in the beta test) stocks out there, and I think I did pretty well. I snagged some slashdot (already up 25%), some Blogdex (flat so far), and the best one, BlogShares itself (already almost doubled).

Various Media

* I ordered tickets for the _Preview_ showing of The Matrix Reloaded, which is happening at 10 p.m. on Wednesday the 14th. With the release date being the 15th, I thought I was going to have to go to a midnight showing on the 14th, but now I can get an early start. Thanks, Fandango! * Watched Scotland, PA last night while in my hazy, NyQuil-addled state. It's a cute, funny movie, with some nice stylistic touches. Everyone drives old Camaros, for example. Not nearly as gorgeous as another Shakespeare "re-imagining", but it was still entertaining. And, of course, Christopher Walken rocks.

* I am officially making a killing on BlogShares. About a week ago the site owner announced that when the site goes live (which should be happening today) all cash you have will be carried over, but your holdings will be gone. To keep the bottom from completely falling out when everyone makes a run for the exit at the same time, he put a large buy order out for every stock. But sometimes after he issued the buy order (say, for $1.50 per share, which is around what the stock is valued at the time he issued the order), if the price _drops_ (say, to like $1 per share), then you can buy a ton of shares for a buck, and turn around 6 hours later and sell them for a tidy 50% profit. I also noticed that when you buy large quantites (say 25% of all outstanding shares), just from the purchase alone you can "move the market" and instantly make your purchase more valuable. Plus, my site is now listed on diveintomark, so hopefully everything will be re-indexed in time for all the new shares to be issued, and watch the price soar!

jwz In Print

Seems as though CSS detractor jwz is at it again (at least he was listening to good music while writing his missive). This time his main complaint is with printer stylesheets. I wonder what would happen if you put jwz and Dave Winer in a room together. Would they get along? Or would they kill each other?

SARS

I was pretty convinced yesterday that I was going to die. I started feeling poopy Monday night (sore throat, a bit of a headache), and then I proceded to sleep like crap all night and woke up feeling like death. My _skin_ hurt... you know how it does when you're getting the flu, right? So, I gamely came into work to pick up a laptop so I could at least attempt to work from home^1^. That would up being a 2-hour epic, with problems with network connectivity and the domain server taking a dump.

I get home with the laptop, get set up on the couch with the kitties all around me, and then proceed to more or less pass out.

Today I feel a little bit better. Still have a sore throat, and still feel a bit peaked, but at least I was able to make it in to work today.

^1^ Of course, on the drive in there was a 10 minute report on NPR about the SARS outbreak in Canada, and how communicable it was, so I was having visions of either being Patient Zero for the USA, or going to the hospital for whatever malady I actually had, and picking up a nice case along the way.

Weekend Update

Completely did not go to NYC for Throwing Muses this weekend. Too much going on here; Ryan's last weekend, etc. Friday night I helped a friend of mine move into a nice place on the South Side. 3 flights of steps down to move out, and 3 flights of steps up to move in. Ugh. After moving there was a housewarming dealie at Dave and Casey's new apartment (I swear, my moving karma is so high it's not even funny).

Saturday was sort of a bum-around day for the first half, then dinner at Pino's with Dave and Casey again, and then off to do some serious drinkin' at Dawn's place with Ryan.

Sunday morning. Ow. Ow. Owowow. Back to sleep. After lunch and some serious amounts of water, I decided to go for a ride to sweat out all the red wine in my system. 20 miles later, and I felt a lot better. Helped Ryan pack up his car and clean up his apartment, and then went to dinner at Regina Margherita with Paul/April and Brian/Jen, who is just about ready to pop.

I also had a little time last night after dinner to bring back a few entries from my log that had gotten me in a small bit o' trouble with my former employer. I'm no longer working for said employer, so now they're back.

Ryan's Sendoff

Last night was a little wing-ding for Ryan's "moving to Philly" party. We first had dinner at Alla Famiglia:  

as well as drinks:

Then everyone was off to Holiday, where much merriment and drinking ensued:

  

The rest of the photos can be seen here. Enjoy!

Life, the Universe, and Everything Feral

Saw this nifty site this morning which uses's Google's Related Sites feature to create a dynamic map in Java of a site's relationship to others. Here's mine:

Seems like most of the related-ness for my site comes from the music section, which is sorely out of date. I was tossing around the idea this weekend of creating another MT(Movable Type) log for the music stuff. It would probably greatly increase the chances of me updating it.

MetaFilter → GoogleBrowser

I also saw this story, which made me laugh out loud. It will probably make you do the same.

Good Deed Done

While looking around for info on how to capture onclick events for a CheckBoxList nested inside a Repeater control (don't even ask...) I came across a site that was throwing an error. The error looked something like this: Microsoft VBScript compilation error '800a0401'

Expected end of statement

/search/dsn.asp, line 4

sprovider=""server=216.xxx.xxx.xxx;Database=xxx;UID=xxxxx;Password=w0nd3rful;applicationName={default}"

Notice how the full IP address, username, and password are exposed because of the error in the pag? This is A Bad Thing(tm). So, being the concerned Netzien that I am, I fired off an email to the webmaster of the site concerned. This morning I see the site's error has been fixed, and all is well. I didn't get any sort of email reply tho. (shrug) Maybe someone else emailed him first.

Semantics

My sister being in town this weekend has highlighted another interesting example of differences in dialect between my current locale and my former: In NJ, if you go into a restaurant and order "seltzer", you will get a glass of non-flavored fizzy water. If you try this in Pittsburgh, you will get one of three things:

# A blank stare. # A double-take, and then a return trip after a conversation with the bartender to clarify. "Now, did you want tonic, or soda water?" # A funny look, and then the correct beverage.

I know that Pittsburgh is a very different place than NJ, and don't even get me started about the whole "pop vs soda" debate (Pittsburgh is a very "pop"-centric town), but I wouldn't think that a word like "seltzer" is so foreign that you couldn't figure out what it was. Then again, the English language gets so mangled here that I really shouldn't have any sort of expectations, anyway.

We are legion.

I'm sure there's a logical explaination for it (like I'm a total idiot or something), but it sure seems like for right now Anil and Jason are the same person: From Anil:

bq. I'm off to SF for O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on Tuesday. I'm going against the grain this year by taking my laptop along, "blogging" in "realtime", and taking digital photos of people. If there's a box, I am out of it. If you're attending as well, stop by and say hello...I'll be the guy with the laptop and digital camera.

and from Jason:

bq. I'm off to SF for O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference on Tuesday. I'm going against the grain this year by taking my iBook along, "blogging" in "realtime", and taking digital photos of people. If there's a box, I am out of it. If you're attending as well, stop by and say hello...I'll be the guy with the iBook and digital camera.

I think that if I was going to Etech I'd see two identical guys sitting there with identical laptops and digital cameras.

Springtime in the city

My sister is in town this weekend, so while in search of entertainment we went to Phipps Conservatory. They're just finishing up the spring flower show, so we walked over after a lunch at Mad Mex and had a good time checking out all the lovely flowers.  

You can see the rest of the pictures here. Warning: the thumbnails page is quite large.

A Special Easter Message

I couldn't resist. This was on the way back from my job, and I had to pull over and take a picture of it.

I'm nearly rich. Plus, more site changes.

As of this moment, my portfolio is worth a whopping $1419.81!!! That's up a staggering _41.981%_ from when I started! It can only get better when Mark starts peddling my ass on the corner. By popular demand, the secondary title of this page is now being randomly pulled from a database. Reload a few times and see what happens. I still need to move the code to get the dynamic title on the archive pages, and I also want to make a public-facing form where people can submit their ideas and I can approve/reject them. Update: To get the ball rolling a bit more, I pulled a few good slogans from the Advertising Slogan Generator. Enjoy.

The newest version of SharpReader is out. I'm glad he fixed the bug that was keeping Windows from shutting down, because that was a little annoying. Other than that, it still continues to be one of the coolest apps I've seen in a long time.

Close call (or, You've Got... Nothing)

Our Internet connection was down at work this morning for about 2 hours when I came in, and I felt like I was suffocating. Maybe it's because I'm so reliant on the Net for work-and-entertainment-related info that I really don't have anything to do here when it's not working. Anyway, it's back up again now, and just in time for me to order 2 tickets for the Throwing Muses show at Irving Plaza next weekend! I have to make sure I can work out all the logistics of getting out there, places to stay, etc., but it shouldn't be that much of a problem. Let me just state for the record just how much I loathe TicketBastard. There were no more tickets available through Virtuous, so I had to go through TM. $13.60 in "Convienience" charges and $3.90 in "Order Processing" fees later, and I'm coughing up $54.50 for *two* tickets! This is not Lollapalooza! It's just a show! Gah!

I'm gonna try and get in nice and close and take some cool pictures.

Site Tweaks

Couple of minor changes to the site. * As further proof of my slavish devotion to keeping track of my BlogShares status, I've put a "BlogShares" item in the side navigation, which pulls data from the BlogShares site using David Reynes's nifty MTBlogShares plugin. Right now it's showing my weblog's current value, P/E ratio, and my portfolio value.

* I put the Nice Titles enhancement on my page (in my mind I keep hearing Sean Connery from Celebrity Jeopardy saying "Nice Titties!"), which gives the fancy popup highlight over links with titles if you're using a "good" browser.

* I added a description for the weblog under the title. It's lame. Any suggestions as far as what i should change it to?

Matt sells his virtual soul.

I've been too busy to really be paying a ton of attention to it, but this whole BlogShares thing has taken off faster than an oversized Cheeto. Basically your weblog is valued based on who you link to, who links to you, and how well-linked all _those_ people are. Just for fun I listed my site. Actually, it was already listed; i just had to claim it. You'll notice that because of Tantek's link, and because of my plethora out outgoing links, I've managed to move my stock off the pink sheets. And look! Someone actually bought shares! 3900 of them, to be exact. Foolish Intrepid Italian-speaking investor, I salute thee!

To help out this foolish intrepid investor, I sold a little bit of my self-esteem last night. It was time to admit my stock needed help, and the Gordon Gecko of my dreams came in the form of of bespeckled Mark Pilgrim. His offer to link to your weblog in exchange for 100 shares of said weblog sounded too good to miss. I missed the first cut to get pimped by Mark, but I should be in the next one. I actually gave him 200 shares because I'm just so damn nice.

What's happening, hot stuff?

* I've been un-slashdotted! Oops. I saw too late that SharpReader allows you to set different refresh times for different feeds. So, I've got them down to "Daily" until I get restored. * Comprehensive CSS support charts. Hotness.

* I'm starting to learn a little bit about using unmanaged COM dlls in ASP.NET. Looks fairly icky; even creating the proxy wrapper you still need to get in there with the dissasembler and figure out what's going on with your functions/methods/etc.

* Having some friends over next weekend for a Jackass party. That should be a lot of fun.

* Mark Pilgrim → Tim Bray on Semantic Markup. Interesting stuff.

* Leaving right after work to drive with the SLF(Special Lady Friend) down to Stone Harbor, NJ for a quick weekend with friends of hers. I'll be bringing the new camera along, and maybe I'll actually be able to read the manual and figure out what the heck it does.

Information Overload

My adventures with SharpReader continue. First off, my sister has created a LiveJournal feed out of my own site's RSS(Rich Site Summary) feed. It almost looks like I have an LJ(LiveJournal) account and everything. I've added a few more feeds of interest, and now I feel like I'm in control of a huge flow of information. It's nearly overwhelming, it's so huge. I sort of feel like Joey Pants in The Matrix, "I don't even see the code anymore; all I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead..." The auto-refresh goes off every 1/2 hour, the little systray icon goes yellow, and I have new items to look through. It's sort of like TiVo for the 'Net.

I've also been trying, over the last few days, to bring some of my music collection into work. It's a decent amount of work; running through existing mp3 folders with Tag&Rename, making sure the folder/file names are short enough to fit on a cd, and getting them burned and in. (As an aside, my next car stereo head unit will definitely have to be able to play burned mp3s.) I also downloaded and (ahem) _liberated_ a copy of Forte Agent newsreader, so I could start plucking "backup" copies of tunes from A.B.S.M.*.

I see Mark Pilgrim has released his site's MT(Movable Type) templates. Some of them definitely look worth copying, especially the one for the full-page calendar.

I would also like to state why my new job rocks so far:

* I don't have to do timesheets. * I don't even have a phone on my desk (well, it's not really a desk, it's a door balanced on two low filing cabinets). Keeps the interruptions way, way down when people can't call you and disturb you. Heck, I didn't even get my email set up until about a week after I started.

RSSexy

After seeing everyone gushing about SharpReader I thought I should give it a go. It is _extremely_ suave; I read a bunch of different news sites and blogs during the day, and now I don't have to open up a bunch of different web pages to see who's updated; it's all just in an email-like interface. Click a message, see a summary, and (optionally) click through to the full article. This inspired me to also convert my own RSS(Rich Site Summary) file to have the full post (instead of an excerpt). One thing that's annoying so far is that because posts come from all the place, some have different time stamps. Some blogs must be a lot closer to the dateline, because there's already posts from tomorrow. I see in my own MT(Movable Type) template it specifies what timezone I'm in, so I suspect that some feeds are just not playing nice. I want my date-ordered view to date-ordered by GMT(Greenwich Mean Time) (with perhaps an option to change the display so it shows up as EST(Eastern Standard Time).

Open up and say "ow!"

Went with a large group of peeps on Friday night to try out a new sushi place, Nagoya, which is near Fox Chapel. The food was actually quite good, and very reasonably priced, but by far the highlight of the evening was watching JR eat two very large blobs of wasabi, straight up. Here's a picture of JR right after eating the first blob:

And here is a QuickTime movie of JR eating the second blob. The lighting is kinda low, but you can definitely see how big that chunk o' wasabi is.