Yeah, it’s another article about blogs. Woo woo. The most interesting thing in the whole article: the strange reaction I had to seeing professional, well-lit photographs of Meg and Ev. It’s roughly equivalent to turning on the news one day to see you high school English teacher all dolled up and reading from a teleprompter. Weird.

Um.. thanks and thanks, guys! (”articulate” and “whip-smart” my ass.)

I owe two big ol’ kisses: Mwah, mwah. I’m too tired for anything more than that, boys. (And the scenario no doubt playing out in both their demented little minds is surely thanks enough… :)

I had one of those “why didn’t I know this” moments when my sis told me where my gifts came from: JCPenney’s click-and-mortar venture. This allows you to find something you like in the store, and then go and order it in whatever weird size fits you (like “MT/ML” or “505 33×32″ which I didn’t even know existed).

There have been 105 links and 1013 comments posted since your last visit. Whimper.

This situation is kind of interfering with my catching up on my reading from over the weekend. One little hiccup in this amazing global network, and no less than 20% of the sites I peruse on a regular basis are silenced. Reality is a house guest around here, and he’s ignoring the three day rule.

This is just begging for a “me too,” so ‘ere it is. I have a disturbingly strong need to know when this is going to be available, and what of the various nifty new features we’ve seen will be available to paying members, and which will be added to the free version, if any. It’s not the kind of curiosity (”buzz”) they’re hoping for, either. It’s more like “Just tell me already, dammit! Why must we play these games? Don’t you still love me?” It’s not pretty, I know, but they do have a rather unique relationship to their users, and I hope they’re accounting for it in all this.

Major restructuring of site. The gist: update your bookmarks, update your links. Pretty much everyone who links here reads this, so I’m hoping to save myself some work. :)

I learned something today, also, that I thought I should share: I will never, ever again use anything but relative URLs within my pages. Well, at least for a month or two.

He almost managed to steal the words from my conflicted brain, again, but then he had to go and take it with the seriousness it deserves. I just can’t help but see conflicts between intelligent people as failures of communication, always at least a little bit tragic. Damn tenacious idealism.

A reminder and a suggestion: scan something for Firda.

Boring Saturday == ‘hoblog version 4.0. It’s the second complete rewrite, even though the look of the page has actually changed less than ever before. Non-cosmetic changes: folded back in a revised (no javascript) version of the Bloghop select-box, and the new window thing works for forms too now. Woo woo.

Y’know, the power situation in California really is a global issue in these wired days, which is why I’ve taken an interest in it. That, and the sheer car-wreck watchability of yet another large business interest (in this case the entire power-generation industry in the western US, from government on down) shoot itself in the foot. In all of the press releases, warnings to the public to turn off their Christmas lights, and heavy-handed threats of more blackouts, has a single representative of the industry once said “We screwed up. We’re sorry. We are endeavoring to make sure it never, ever happens again?”

No.

Making sure the entire process of getting a customer’s front porch light to shine remains completely transparent to the customer hirself is their job. It’s their entire job. It’s all they do. They haven’t done it.

Ahem. Rant mode off.

The Christmas Test actually gave me one pretty good idea, which places its good idea/really bad idea ratio at about 1/4. (Unfortunately, the people who I can’t simply go up to and say “What do you want?” all fall into the bad-ideas column.)

It’s just birthday week, I guess. Go pinch Chris’s adorable little cheeks.

Further musings:

1) I wonder if those pictures which are definitely not Kottke get an automatic zero, or if instead users assign a degree of “Kottkeness,” however they define that, to the person photographed. Was that what was intended? Is it what people will do? Nevertheless, it might be interesting to see where other web-celebs fall on the scale. I, for instance, would give some people 11’s and above, seeing as my definition of “Kottkeness”* is roughly analagous to “person who has done something[s] cool for the web that you would also like to [bleep].”

2) My, but he’s a quick one. One can just imagine a script tied into the Blogger backend that scans the bodies of blog posts and sends an alert to his pager when it encounters “Kottke.” Hell, I would do it, if I could. (Or, just maybe, Neale might have done the polite thing and run it by him first. Stranger things have happened.)

* I tried, but I just can’t force myself to remove those quote marks.