Hot, fresh widgets: Bloglines Notify Widget for Konfabulator. Rather obviously, it displays the number of unread items in your Bloglines account. Clicking on the number will open your browser, pointed at your feeds panel. You can configure the amount of time to wait between updates (default 1 minute), and of course the widget needs to know your Bloglines login (email address) before it will do its magic.

I used a feed reader for about a week before I decided it wasn’t for me and went back to regular web-based Bloglines, but I missed having instant notification of new feed items. Bloglines does have their own notifier, but why not use a widget if you’re already running Konfabulator?

I’m beginning to see just how powerful and simple widgets can be. Total time from idea to completion was less than an hour, and most of that was spent deciding what the widget should look like.

My first Konfabulator widget: XPCalReplace. What it does is pretty well illustrated in the image at right. Once you place the widget on the screen correctly, it should blend in seamlessly with Win XP, replacing the windows clock in the system tray. You’ll first have to go into the widget preferences and set ‘window level’ to Topmost. If you notice it disappearing behind the standard windows clock at times, you also may have to go into the taskbar properties and uncheck “keep the taskbar on top of other windows.”

Pretty simple, really, but one thing I’ve learned is that all this is not as easy as it looks. I’m hoping to make improvements as I learn more. By the by, I mainly wrote this as a replacement for the handy utility TClockEx after upgrading to XP. TClockEx is much more configurable, and will run under XP, but doesn’t exactly blend in (can be read as: it’s dog-ugly).

Update 28 August: I fixed a fairly major bug regarding AM vs PM. Don’t know how I didn’t catch that before now. Oh, look over there! Shiny things!
29 August: Now comes loaded with several themes for XP and XP Media Center, as well as clear backgrounds if you want to use it somewhere else on your desktop. If you still don’t see something that matches the look of your taskbar, drop me a line.

Greasemonkey 0.5.1 has officially been marked safe for public consumption. I suppose this is a good a time as any to point out that all of my scripts will work with the new Greasemonkey under Firefox 1.0.x. If yours stop working when you upgrade, get the latest version, as adjustments had to be made to some scripts. As far as Deer Park (which will be Firefox 1.5 or thereabouts, once it’s deemed complete), mostly they will not work. If experience is any teacher, the scripts will probably not be fixed for Deer Park until it becomes a day-to-day issue for me. If there’s a script you can’t live without in the meantime and you’re running Deer Park, don’t be afraid to let me know.

Don’t really have much to say about Google Talk so far, as apparently nobody I know is bleeding edge enough to be using it yet. One thing that I immediately disliked: clicking the close button should close the program, not minimize it to the system tray. This is a simple concept people: the close button closes. Exit. End. Just. Fucking. Stop. I know everybody else does it, but everybody else is wrong and evil and must be destroyed. Actually, ‘dislike’ may be too mild a term. Hate hate hate hate hate.

Update: I think the main reason I never really got on the instant messaging bandwagon was the clients themselves. For the most part, they are what I call cringeware, in that they do something useful, but they also do something(s) really stupid such that you cringe every time you use them. This goes back to AIM and the really obnoxious sounds it made every time anything happened in the program. Sure, you could turn them off, but there was no alternative method of user notification. From then on, all IM clients I’ve tried have had some stupid detail that irritates me inordinately.

One thing I have to say about Google Talk is that the interface is pretty close to perfect. I’ve heard it called ugly, but that’s just Google. It’s simple and uncluttered, and that is very, very Google.

So I upgraded to Windows XP, in order to play with cool new things like Konfabulator and Yahoo Music Engine. I’m excited about the possibilities of Konfabulator, but most of what I’ve seen is too complicated to learn from in my preferred way — which is reverse engineering something that already works to figure out why it works. I know this isn’t the best way to learn, really, but it’s what works for me. What doesn’t work for me, and also a trend which needs to die: documentation only available in PDF.

I’m a bit miffed, as well, that the Picture Frame widget appears to do exactly what I want to do, displaying a random picture from my Flickr favorites, and yet I can’t use it because the Flickr API was just updated and the widget hasn’t been. I recently abandoned an obscenely complicated project to do this same thing as an Active Desktop channel, and to have the functionality right there, yet broken, is crazy frustrating.

Being a Launchcast Plus subscriber, I’m mostly looking for Yahoo Music Engine to be a better client for accessing my radio station. That it does, and it even allows plugins, so that the 60-90% of my music listening that I do via Launchcast can show up in my last.fm via this plugin (more plugins). I’m not thrilled that YME only takes music ratings on a four-star scale, particularly since all of my previous ratings are on the 100-point scale offered as an alternate by every other Launchcast client.

I didn’t expect to be impressed with Windows XP. As I mentioned, I only updated due to new applications which aren’t compatible with older versions of windows. I have to say, though, the sheer number of really annoying misfeatures is amazing. I can only imagine what Vista is going to be like.

At 4 pm today, I’ll be 24 years old. At age 24:

• Lord Byron was already a world-renowned poet and philanderer.
• 89% of all people who will ever earn a college degree have already done so.
• The majority of the people currently alive on this world have exhausted nearly half of their life expectancy.
• 1 in 3 sexually active people have contracted an STD.

So, I’m in the good column on that last one!

My skills and accomplishments, at age 24, include:

• The ability to talk on a telephone.
• A passable understanding of HTML, javascript, CSS, PHP, and the things you can do with them.
• A five year relationship that, while not always perfect, has been better than anything I statistically could have expected as a young gay man who is a child of divorce.
• A close group of friends who put up with damn near everything I do.
• Nearly 18 years experience in advanced navelgazing.
• Fellatio, a much-underrated skill.
• A ten year tobacco addiction, or a waste of about $12,000.
• The ability to ‘name that tune’ in three bars.
• Zero chance of turning any of these, save the first, into a career. Or at least, zero chance without a degree or much more inventiveness and/or luck than I have displayed so far.

Okay, that’s enough introspection. I’m going to go get drunk now!

This is my 1000th post to this blog. Including the time I coded this by hand, when I kept a journal intended for no one or anyone to read. I discovered blogging, so I kept a journal and a blog. I found Blogger. My now-husband and I had our very first fight over the contents of my journal. I stopped keeping a journal. Eventually I fled from Blogger, I fled back to Blogger, I gave up on blogging and started again, twice.

Even I can’t remember all of the different URLs I’ve had over the last five years. I remember only the first and the last; I suppose URLs are like phone numbers in that way. Everything written here, the blog and the journal, has been rescued with a combination of backups and the Internet Archive. In pure text, it’s about one megabyte, or around 9 thousand punch cards. That one megabyte covers the range from thousand-word essays on how much it sucks to be a gay teenager to one-word posts with a link. A lot of it is really horrible, and a lot of it is better than anything I ever thought I’d be capable of writing.

I’ve learned something about writing, a lot about this weird and mercurial new medium, and more about myself than I believed there was to know. At times, this has been the only thing that kept me connected to other human beings on a day-to-day basis, and at times is has fallen to the side in this great whirlwind that my life has become. Perhaps some day I’ll figure out how to have an interesting life and an interesting blog at the same time. Until then, here’s hoping the next 1000 posts are better than the last, and with fewer pauses in between.

So my birthday is coming up. My mom and sisters will arrive on Friday for a celebratory weekend. I like how once you reach a certain age, your birthday tends to migrate to other days of the week for convenience. It kind of like Presidents’ Day: there’s the real one, and then there’s Presidents’ Day (celebrated). I wonder, at what age does it become acceptable to randomly rearrange the day of your birth? (I have a theory that it corresponds to the age at which it is legal to drink. And, while we’re getting parenthetical, why doesn’t this apply to other things, like anniversaries?)

My family, as I’m sure most families do, has a few traditions surrounding birthdays. Though in our case, they really shouldn’t be called “traditions” as they’re more like the sacred rites of our people. One such is that we always, always eat out at the place of our choosing on our birthday, and the birthday boy or girl never, never pays a cent. This is basically an extension of the fact that the star of the show isn’t allowed to pay for anything at all during the celebrations. I quite like this tradition. (This is what I’ve chosen for my birthday dinner this year.)

Another of our rites is the entire way we celebrate birthdays, as if they were a holiday of great import. It’s come to my attention that we’re fairly unique in this, as in many other ways. I know, like the movements of the tides and the changing of the seasons, that I will see my entire immediate family at least six times a year, no matter how far apart we may live. Those are Christmas, Thanksgiving, and each of our birthdays. The idea of just sending a gift in the mail, or a card, is something so alien to my family as to seem incomprehensible.

I remember when this particular eccentricity was first pointed out to me. The year after we met, Dan and I were cuddled up the night after his birthday celebrations had drawn to a close. It had been relatively low-key, only a few friends and family over for dinner and laughter one night and then a day out on the town doing all of the things we “should get around to.” He contemplatively informed me that no one had made that much fuss about his birthday since his age was in the single digits. I was startled by his laughter. He swears he saw “does not compute” blinking in the air above my head.

Another, personal tradition of mine is to have no idea what the hell I want whenever someone asks me. Usually, the first person to ask is greeted with a blank stare and “Oh, my birthday is coming up, isn’t it?” (It’s usually my sister Heather. As the most anal of us, she plans everything ahead in an admirable, if almost pathological, way.) Thankfully, my family is sneaky, and has learned to anticipate this. I’m always presented with a gift I may have mentioned in passing eight months prior. They work in collusion, as well; it matters not whose company in which I mention wanting something, they will soon all know of it.

This year will be no different. Other than an amazon wishlist populated with fiction that my local library does not have in its collection, no guidance has been given. And I will be startled and delighted by gifts I’ve forgotten I wanted. This only after gorging myself on the cuisine of my choosing, and having me every whim indulged, while surrounded by the people I love most. This is the only way to do a birthday.

I’ve decided that, seeing how I already use google to provide a search box for my site, I might as well do it in a way that was actually endorsed and condoned by google. And then I figured out I could make money off of the ads that are gonna show up anyway in the search results. Say what, now? In the last hour I have made three cents. That’s enough to host rhyley.org for three days. (Yes, really.) Now, I’m finding it hard to resist slathering ads all over everything. Gwahaha! (No, not really.)

In reality, I won’t see a cent until I meet a certain threshold in earnings, which is either $50 or $100, there’s conflicting information out there. Though, considering that I’ve made more from AdSense in an hour than I did in the entire year of 1999 as an Amazon Associate, who knows?

A new neighbor moved in downstairs this week. His 4½ foot tall great dane moved in as well. His 4½ foot tall great dane that does not stop barking, howling, and generally being unbelievably loud, even for such a prodigious animal, from the time the guy leaves in the morning until he returns at night. Understandably, the dog is quiet in the evenings. He has to be absolutely exhausted from trying singlehandedly (or -pawedly) to bring about the apocalypse all day.

It’s true that I could simply have a chat with the guy, but then again, this is 2005. Nobody talks to their neighbors anymore. What if he thinks I’m weird? Or worse yet, what if he’s weird and thinks I want to be his new best friend and starts stalking me? No, that is not the way.

I also could complain to the rental office, but that scene does not play out well in my head. I’m afraid once the floodgates were opened, I’d be unable to stop going on about how it would be nice if the laundry room wasn’t out of service more often than in service. How the creepy maintenance people mysteriously seem to never actually be doing anything. How the light bulbs in the “subdivision lighting” (that I pay a monthly fee on my electricity bill for—hello, don’t I already pay rent, bitch?) haven’t been replaced since I moved in. A year and a half ago. In my mind it always ends with me being forcibly ejected from the office, having had my fingers pried from around the leasing agent’s scrawny, chipper neck.

Update: Music, oddly enough, seems to make the beastie shut up. Who knew?

Jason: [in reaction to tonight’s Big Brother] Whiskey tango foxtrot?

Jason: [pause] Because I have to be different and unique, like a precious rare flower.

Dan: [rolls eyes] You’re watching Big Brother. How different and unique does that make you?

Update: what I should have said at this point (thought of later, as always) Stuffoo!