It increasingly seems like people enjoy bashing Dreamhost these days, but I haven’t experienced any real problem with them and actually rather enjoy the power of their extremely advanced control panel without the responsibility of having to admin the day-to-day junk of a co-located box. I’ve been using them since 2003 and current host 18 domains there (although that number has been higher in the past.) Having an off-site shell account is invaluable. My bandwidth and disk space caps are well beyond what I foresee myself needing anytime soon (12TB and 600GB, respectively.)

At any rate, they gave me five “invite codes” to give to people who want to sign up. Of course, you don’t need an invite code, but if you use one, you’ll get four times the normal disk space and bandwidth of whatever plan you choose. And in the spirit of open disclosure, they’ll give me a credit toward my hosting for any codes that get used.

So if you’re considering hosting a new website (or migrating an existing one) and want an invite code, let me know in a comment or through email, and I’ll get you one.

BrianEnigma: Oregon has crappy butter geometry.

I tweeted that earlier tonight and expect some amount of confusion. Sticks of butter across the country all have the same volume. You go to the store, you buy 16oz of butter, and you get four sticks of 4oz. In the rest of the country, the sticks are long and skinny. Here, it seems that some sort of legislation is in place to enforce the maximum annoyance factor possible because the sticks are short and stubby.

“Well, what does it matter? You’re still getting the same amount of butter, right?”

It matters because all butter dishes seem to be specifically engineered for the long, skinny sticks. Case in point: tonight (although it has happened a half-dozen times in the past), I lifted the cover of the butter dish to get at the buttery goodness contained within–but it was gone! All used up? The buttery equivalent of the hamburgular? Though… why was the cover more heavy than usual? *splat* The butter, which being taller than “regular” sticks, had melted itself to the cover and lifting it at an angle had provided just enough jostling for it to become free. And so it hit the counter.

Damn our butter geometry. And damn the lack of butter dishes to accommodate our fat, stubby butter sticks.

So I picked up Little Brother and Cathy’s Key last week. I guess this is where I get to be a Young Adult for a little while. I have to admit to being a little sheepish at shopping in the Young Adult section of the store. I started reading Little Brother, and even at my glacially slow reading rate, am about halfway through.

The book itself is quite scary in a psychological what-if way. If I had to use one word to describe it so far, it would be “claustrophobic.” It starts with some teenage friends living in San Francisco when a terrorist attack occurs. The Department of Fatherland Homeland Security swoops in and pretty much turns the city into a military state indefinitely, constantly chiseling away at people’s liberties–and not in an exaggerated way, either, but in a realistic step-by-step frog-in-boiling-water fashion. The teen and friends start doing things to subvert the system. The most scary thing about the book is that it is all quite possible. The DHS stuff is totally believable. The stuff the kids do is perfectly accurate given current technology (heck, the character even has an Instructables account with the projects.) Well, technically accurate (from what I’ve read so far), except for the remote writing of RFID chips. The fictitious version of Linux described in the book is becoming reality (ParanoidLinux.) The whole thing just solidifies more and more in my mind how much of a genius and luminary Cory Doctorow is.

Today was a lovely day. In fact, the wonderful weather stretched well into the evening. I pulled out a camp chair, and made myself a not-mint-julip [more information further down], and finished off another few chapters in the front lawn. I have to say that I have a love/hate relationship with the neighbor Siamese cat. He’s cute and friendly and lovable. He’s chatty. He’s also pushy and prissy and selfish. He thinks he owns you. He’s actually scared off some of the other neighborhood cats, in an attempt to horde the attention. (Fortunately, they’re starting to take a stand and fight back.) He jumped up on my lap and constantly fought the book for attention.

Oh, the not-a-mint-julip? I invented it over the weekend when I wanted a mint julip, but did not want the hammered-ness that comes with the four shots that typically comprise one. I swapped out three of the shots for about an equal amount of filler:

* Put 8-10 mint leaves in the bottom of a lowball/old-fashioned glass
* Add 1 tsp simple syrup[1] (or 2-3 tsp, if you’re Kim)
* Muddle it
* Add 3-4 ice cubes
* Add 1oz Maker’s Mark
* Add ~3oz of club soda
* Garnish with a mint sprig
* Enjoy

[1] Simple syrup, in case you do not already know: boil 1 cup water, remove from heat, add 2 cups sugar, stir until dissolved, let cool completely. Can be refrigerated in a clean glass jar.

How come there have been a ton of articles on Digg throughout the day that are all “ZOMG! Congress is preparing to impeach Bush!!!!1!” yet the NPR site still has nothing about it? Is this “impeachment” hearing/proposal/whatever really of any substance?

I can’t believe that I forgot to blog about Ignite Portland 3. It is being held on June 18th at the Bagdad Theater again. The lineup looks something like this:

5:30 Doors Open

6:00 Registration & Networking

7:00 Presentations Wave 1

* What is Ignite?
* How to buy a car for under $1,000 - Kevin Fox
* Making Sense of Carbon Offsets - Ewan O’Leary
* The Evolution of our Social Brains - Jenny Andrews
* Make Cranes, Not War - Nedra Rezinas
* Boiling Water in Five Easy Steps - Vanessa Holfeltz
* Cup Noodle: Innovation, Inspiration and Manga - Jason Grigsby

7:45 Break and Networking

8:10 Door Prizes

8:15 Presentations Wave 2

* Dare to Go Where You Fear - Liz Kimmerly
* Fracking robots, dude! - Sharon Greenfield
* The Consumer and the Egg: Negotiating Ecolabels - Michele Knaus
* How To Run a Startup and Not Lose Your Mind - Eva Schweber
* Talking Trash - Meredith Sorensen
* A Short Course On How to Ride Freight Trains - Gerry Van Zandt
* Don’t get mad, make a video! - Phillip Kerman

8:50 Networking

9:30 Go Home! (or adjourn to the bar for further networking)

I believe that the “presale” tickets (admission is free, but there was a way to reserve a seat) are gone, but general admission is still available on a first-come-first-served basis.

I’ll be getting out of work an hour or two early that day, then walking or taking the #14, depending on the weather.

I picked up a book called The Affected Provincial’s Companion a few weeks ago. This was a book that was indirectly recommended on some steampunk-something-or-other. While not directly ‘punk, it does a great job of capturing the more formal and stuffy neo-Victorian attitude. It is a guidebook of attire and behavior that is written tongue-in-cheek and greatly exaggerates a few things, but actually does have some good information at its core. The silliness makes it more accessible. While poking fun at itself, it even does a good job of making fun of hipsters, dudebros, and backward-hat-and-sportswear gangstas.

Obviously, the book is not for everyone, but if it sounds like the sort of thing you would be in to, you will undoubtedly enjoy it. There are a great many diagrams (some more silly than others.) The one that I have gotten the biggest kick out of is the Bohemian-Dandy Continuum. One of the quotes leading up to it is:

Bohemianism ignores rules that mainstream society cannot afford to disregard, whereas Dandyism obeys rules that mainstream society cannot afford to observe.

The continuum itself can be thought of as a cylinder. The left and right sides are joined together (so that the dotted line forms an angled oval.) The rich are at the top, the poor are at the bottom, and the intersecting relationship between bohemians and dandys becomes visible.

Yes, it is an entirely silly diagram, but the attention to detail! Therein lies the humor!

Dear LazyWeb,

Do any of you fine Mac folks know how to get the Command-Left-Arrow and Command-Right-Arrow keyboard shortcuts working when editing a message in Gmail? In every other application, and in fact in every other website under Firefox, they do the regular system “beginning of line” and “end of line” positioning. For some reason, with Gmail’s email editor, they do nothing at all. I assume it has something to do with it being a RichText editing box. Google searches for help don’t turn up much of anything useful.

The keyboard inconsistency is one of those things that isn’t a total deal-breaker because I can use the happy Unix ctrl-a and ctrl-e keystrokes to do the same thing, but it’s been bugging me for months.

Every morning, the grind-n-brew coffee maker greets me with warm, delicious coffee. It has the sort of grinder with blades that makes a loud noise. (And yes, I would have gone with a burr grinder had they been available in a consumer grind-n-brew ten years ago when I got it.) Through a freak of timing, the grinder starts up about 30 seconds before the alarm clock starts beeping. Through a freak of turn-of-last-century ductwork, the sound carries up to the bedroom quite well.

As a result of all of this, I am typically half-roused from sleep by the grinder, then fully awake when the alarm beeps. The very same thing happened this morning–only the coffee maker was not set up and all of its parts were still in the drying rack. This leads me to wonder what the heck it was that woke me up before the alarm.

vpisteve: sadtrombone.com has now been banned from the office
BrianEnigma: @vpisteve I decompiled the Flash and loaded the MP3 into my iPhone for instant sadtrombone action! also: rimshot
vpisteve: @BrianEnigma you are my hero

Last week, I discovered a flaw in this particular plan. Let me paint you a picture to illustrate. It is nearing the end of a bright and sunny, warm day. The long, yet productive, day of work has concluded and it is time to drive home. The situation calls for–nay, screams for–the convertible’s top to be down with some nice, loud singable (or yellable) music. This leads to a very cathartic drive home. The Cure’s weird and energetic cover of Purple Haze plays, followed by Nine Inch Nail’s Echoplex. The song starts to spin down, but is still a little loud from when it was compensating for the freeway wind, as the car exits the freeway and pulls up to a red light, alongside other cars and trucks. To the right is downtown’s popular, large waterfront park. Several people are waiting at the crosswalk. You’re bopping along to the trailing chords, with cool shades and windswept hair. And because the iPhone is on shuffle, you then get an extremely loud and embarrassing rimshot that no one can ignore.

LiveJournal really confuses me sometimes. I read and comment on people’s journals using my netninja.com OpenID account. My actual blog gets syndicated there by the brianenigma_rss pseudo-account. It seems that LiveJournal, even though it is acting like an RSS reader, allows people to comment on its local copies of RSS articles. This morning, Kim pointed out to me that people have been responding to my posts on LiveJournal and I have had no clue that this has been occurring because nobody really “owns” brianenigma_rss so “you have new comments” notification emails do not get sent. That’s a bit annoying, but I guess I can deal with it.

So I want to respond to some of these comments. But it turns out that when I go to do this, I am told that OpenID users are not authorized to reply to RSS entries and am prevented from doing so. Does this seem messed up to anyone else, or is it just me? My OpenID blog feeds LiveJournal content and I am able to use OpenID to reply to the journal entries of LiveJournal users, but am unable to use OpenID to reply to my own blog’s RSS entries on LJ?

So anyway, this all came up because I tried to respond to TheBruce’s comment. And because I can’t respond to it within LJ, I guess I’ll just have to post it:

Thanks for the heads-up! I tracked down a copy if IE7 on someone’s machine at work today and fixed the CSS and image glitch. I guess that’s why I stopped being a professional web developer 8-ish years ago. Well, that and the dot-bomb.

For future reference, I rarely check comments on LiveJornal’s RSS copy of my blog posts. I only saw this (and a previous comment from Krystyn) today because Kim pointed them out to me. I’m not sure how many others I may have missed. Truth be told, I’m actually a little confused as to why LJ even lets folks write responses to RSS. The “(n comments)” image is a link that takes you to the blog’s actual comment page. Maybe I should tweak my template to make that a little less ambiguous.