A Simple Satisfaction

I've been a bit behind in reading my rss subscriptions via Bloglines, but it's really satisfying when my address bar says "Bloglines | My Feeds (0)" to indicate that I'm all caught up. I'll admit that I've cheated a bit and there's a (XX) behind that (0), but I've actually read those articles too. They're just items that I mean to follow up on, but don't want to save permanently. I'll have those items caught up on soon as well, and I'll be completely satisfied knowing that I'm completely caught up on my blogging again.

Philo

Back in 2000, I took a job with a local ISP called Green Apple. I've since moved on (which is an entirely different post), but I met many interesting and talented people during my time managing their support department. One such person was a young gentleman that we had hired as a full-time tech support specialist by the name of Corbin.

Corbin is the type of guy who is just... genuine. At the time, he played guitar in a band called False Image with three other young, talented musicians (Joe - Bass, Scott - Vocals, and Nick - Drums) and invited my wife and I to their concerts as well as to the studio (Moo Pigface, if I recall correctly) to watch them record. That was a great experience, and my wife got some great photos!

At any rate, False Image eventually broke up and Corbin joined a band called Mahoney as their bassist. I don't recall if it was before this or later that Corbin left Green Apple. Mohoney's style wasn't quite up my alley, so I didn't get a chance to see Corbin play.

Eventually, Corbin moved back to guitar with a band called Cringe. Their music was very much up my alley, and their CD, "Animation," was one of the few CDs I had in rotation in my car. Unfortunately, time was at a premium for me, and Cringe broke up before I had a chance to hear them play.

After that, I sort of lost track of Corbin. I knew that two bands had emerged from the breakup of Cringe, Noise Auction and Philo. Both bands have a lot of talent, but I really wasn't paying much attention. I guess it's because I know Corbin by a different name, but I didn't realize that Philo was the band that he currently sings and plays guitar for. Now that I do, I'd like to do as much as I can to support them, hence the banner at the top of the page. I urge everyone to check 'em out. If you ever meet the band, tell Corbin that Rod says "Hi!" :)

A little change

One of the first changes that I'm made to the blog, in my attempt to overhaul it, was made yesterday. It's such a tiny change, yet has made the biggest visual impact that a single change could make: I changed the default theme background image to an image of binary 1's and 0's. I've done a bunch of customization to the Folio theme to try to make it my own, and though the binary is certainly not an original idea, I think it's that one thing that I needed to finally achieve that goal. What does everyone think? Did it make as big an impact as I think, or am I just imagining it?

State of The Blog...

Since Mr. Prez. gave his State of the Union address last night, I thought it might be a good time to post a State of the Blog address, especially since I haven't posted regularly in quite some time.

First, I'd like to say that this blog is far from dead. Trying to do three blogs for awhile, on top of my day job and everything else, caused a bit of burnout. Then Linux World Net shut down after I had left. Then I pretty much quit reading most of the blogs I've got set up in Bloglines. Now I have several thousand unread posts, and several hundred that I'm marked "Save as new" while skimming headlines so I can go back and read them eventually. But the burnout is over, and I'm ready to jump back into it :)

Second, since the new Blogger had been out of Beta for awhile now, I think it's time to do a redesign to take advantage of some new features and get rid of some of my ugly kludges. If there's anything that works that you think I should keep, let me know. Likewise if there's something that you think I should ditch. Finally, I have a lot of stuff going on in life, even with taking this quarter off from school (which was planned. I went last summer specifically to take this quarter off). I'm starting to get involved in some new interests and starting to enjoy some old ones again. I'll leave it at that for now, since I plan on blogging about them soon. But I make mention here because, while the intent is to blog daily again, time may not always permit. Since I'm blogging for myself anyhow, this shouldn't make much difference :)

BTW - Sorry for the flash in the header. I removed it because it annoyed me. I wanted to support a friend's band, Philo, but I'll look into a graphic banner instead ;)

Jefferson on Intellectual Property

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

- Thomas Jefferson

PGP is 15 years old

Happy Birthday, PGP!

Wow! 15 years! It seems like only yesterday that I discovered PGP and spent countless hours pouring over the documentation to learn all of the command-line options that were required to get things going. At the time, I was totally amazed at how few of my fellow computer geeks could get a handle on using PGP. After all, Windows wasn't really that popular until 95 came out. Almost everyone who used IBM-compatible PCs used DOS, or at least had to know how to use DOS in order to set up their menu program of choice.

One thing I remember doing, probably not in '91 but certainly not many years later, was setting up batch files to use with my mail reader of choice at the time, OLX, so that I could set it to use these batch files as an external editor in order to either sign or encrypt messages for posting on the local BBSs. I'm sure that if I dig around enough, I'll be able to find the 3 1/2 inch floppy that contains my original public and private keyrings. I even remember my original passphrase! Not only that, but I remember what I changed the passphrase to the first time I ever changed it.

Masi Oka

Even though I haven't blogged in quite some time, I have been keeping interesting articles in Bloglines to share with everyone later.

The first article that I'd like to share is a Wired piece on Masi Oka, who plays Hiro Nakamura on NBC's Heroes. So head on over and check it out, and I'll be posting more links that I think you might find interesting.