Funny, in this month’s Wired, there’s a story about a programmer who’s building a house. He says something like “building a house is just as much an act of creation as programming.” Wow. For most people, that wouldn’t have been a surprise, but I know how it can be. Nontech people simply don’t have any idea what it’s like to spend most of your day in the matrix, and they have a hard time understanding just how creative it is. On the other hand, I left the software business for urban design because it wasn’t (ahem) concrete enough.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while… Paid up my $90.30 for a KEXP membership. Since they’re a nonprofit affiliated with the University of Washington, it’s tax deductible — and I get a cool hat. Yes, I know it will not make me look any younger. Internet radio (and secondarily, easynews, thanks Veen) has changed my music listening habits entirely. That is, I actually listen to new music now, because I can tune into incredible stations like KEXP, smoothbeats, and Radio Tango no matter where they (or I) happen to be, and find out about all sorts of new, cool music. Sure, free things are great, but I think that people are ready and willing to pay for things they get real value from, and I’m happy to sling these sites a few bucks for all the work they do. I also support tinyapps.org.

Great: a review of a review of a review of an academic text. And now I’ve added fuel to the fire. Burn some books today!

“In Language Log a few days ago, Mark Liberman recommended Peter Culicover’s review of Huddleston & Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL). I’ve just read the review, and I agree.” (from Fresh Tracks, via Language Log)

Gee whiz, Fernando, we’re glad you do.

I wanted easier access to my delicious links inside Opera, so I hacked up a “panel” that shows my *perm links in a DHTML drop down menu. My php grabs my links via the API, does what I want in terms of finding *perm tagged links and grouping them by tag, and then feeds them into a DTML menu setup that I grabbed from DHTMLCentral. Here’s the result, one hour later. Pretty slick, if you ask me
Got my CD’s from theory 8 reconds today, listening to Apollo Up — these guys crank! The guitar tone is along the lines of No Means No / Fugazi, and they’ve got a bit of the Mermen in there too.

Last night I went to see Tim Kent, who just completed the Around Alone singlehanded round-the-world race on his second-hand open 50, Everest Horizontal. Great stories. Sunday night was the Banff Mountain Film Festival — also some great stuff!

In anticipation of my new camera phone, I spent the morning hacking in moblog support to my Mail::Audit setup. Using pop2blog as a starting point, I hacked out the bits that spin through a POP mailbox (since Mail::Audit sits directly on my inbound IMAP feed). Now, thanks to Mail::Audit and Net::Blogger, I can post to MT directly from email (and therefore, from a phone). Attached images get stored off and fed back as img src into the post. I know everyone else is doing this with moblog services, etc, but I wanted to do it myself, and integrate with Mail::Audit. Others have done this as well.
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