I’ve just got back from my three hour walk. Very refreshing. On my walk, I was entertained and informed by Ragan Fox of Fox and the City, the chaps at Guardian Unlimited’s “Mediatalk” podcast, some clips from Newsnight, Paul Nicholls of podcastpaul.com and Alice Taylor reading the first part of Cory Doctorow’s MMORPG-themed short story “Anda’s Game” (from Craphound). RSS is everywhere I go, even out in the middle of the countryside where the phones don’t get signal.
Bring on the miracle
Sven-Goran Eriksson today admitted Wayne Rooney has more than one broken bone in his foot and could need a “miracle” to be fit for the World Cup, but he still intends to select the striker in his finals squad… [Eriksson:] “Miracles happen in life now and then, but I don’t really know.”
Dear old God better get his arse in gear and give young Mr. Rooney a miracle! He didn’t lift a finger with Katrina or 9/11 or the tsunami (except to snuff out some Swedish fags), but let’s all pray he heals Rooney’s foot.
Perhaps Mr Eriksson could try astrology or numerology in order to work out which formation to use, or contact the spirit of George Best. Of course, win or lose, I don’t think I’ll notice, let alone care.
Unproductive yet productive
So I’m not getting the stuff I need to get done anywhere near completed, but I am getting the pointless stuff completed.
And this is especially pointless for me, since I’ve only been blogging for a short while on OPML blogs.
It’s also only beta, since there is functionality I would love to see added, but I haven’t got enough time to hack it up yet.
It’s a replica of the “On this day in” feature from Dave’s blog - or rather, a partial replica because it lacks the ability to detect whether there actually was an entry for a particular day in a year. That would be quite easy to craft in - it would be simply an if function to see if a file matching the description exists.
It also breaks if you’ve done silly things like added your birthday to your blog - it is simply working out how many years you have been blogging for by counting up folders in ~/OPML/blog than actually doing anything clever with them.
If you seriously want to use this tool, it requires a fair bit more hacking. If you’ve got any ideas of how to improve this, or you actually produce this functionality some other way, just drop me a line.
Think of this as a starting point to build on, a learning exercise, sample code or a waste of time. Since I actually produced something useful yesterday, I think I’m entitled to some pointlessness.
The code is here in OPML format. If you really want to use it, I’d recommend putting it either in your right-click menu or switch your custom menu on and put it in user.menu.customMenu.
From the Geek Dinner with Marc Canter the other day, I found him to be refreshingly angry and ever so slightly insane. This confirms it, ladies and gents.
Video Podcast #1
Here’s my first video podcast.
It’s some video I shot on my phone of part of my dogwalk. It’s a little look at the countryside, my pets and a little chatter about stuff in general.
Silicon Beat pointed towards the new service Skypecasts, which is very, very cool.
