A diamond is forever, but a cubic zirconia can be paid off in six months.

The "runaway bride" that cost taxpayers who knows how much money has sold the rights to her story for $500,000. Is she going to have to pay for all the efforts that went into searching for her? I would be in favor of laws that allowed the government to increase fines charged to people who...
[read more]

While listening to a podcast about how RSS feed readership is measured, an idea for improving measurement of readership of feed and also web pages occurred to me. One of the things that makes it difficult to accurately measure traffic to any internet resource is that there may be proxy servers between the resource and...
[read more]

For those who don't read Japanese, this entry's title means "iMovie: loveMovie? hateMovie! But not really." I had a bad experience with iMovie the other day. But I still love it.

What happened was this: last Christmas, my dad gave my wife and I a digital camera. Since then, we've amassed a small collection of...
[read more]

David Megginson posted today about The case against easier feed subscriptions, noting that if it's too easy to subscribe to a feed, it will also be too easy to sneak a subscription into someone's feed reader and use it for illegitimate purposes. The response I posted was as follows:

"Good point! The approach I'd favor...
[read more]

I just finished a redesign on the homepage for my RSS parser, CaRP. While I liked the general aesthetics of the old design just fine, the page suffered from having too much information crammed into it without sufficient organization. The new design contains almost all of the same information, but is organized in a way...
[read more]

People have always tended to see the world in their own image. However advanced our powers of empathy may become, our own opinions and perceptions remain more prominent in our consciousness than those of others. Lately, I've noticed that the illusions in my world seem to be growing stronger--more completely crowding out the part of...
[read more]

Kenny Graham submitted the first design not created by me to the CSS Trappist Monastery. His design is titled Purity, for reasons you'll understand from the comments at the top of his stylesheet. The first thing he does in the stylesheet is to override all the default CSS settings that a browser might apply to...
[read more]

In thoery, eBay is a place where shoppers enter their maximum bids for items, and then the system sells them to the highest bidder for the lowest amount necessary to beat all other bidders. In practice, there's more to the game than that.

I haven't done any studies, but I've purchased a few items on...
[read more]

A long time ago in an IETF working group not so far away, there was a big discussion over whether an Atom feed is really just an Atom entry that contains other entries. At the time, I wrote a long email on the subject, but kept putting off sending it, so it's been languishing in...
[read more]