so, i've had this problem for a while now… i say problem but really… i've had this annoyance for a while now. y'know how people ask if you have a website, or you sign up for thousands of profiles on thousands of different sites online and they all have a place for you to put your web address, right? well, me, being the guy i am, i pretty much always fill that bit in… and i pretty much always use bipolar. that's fine, but it's always kind of bothered me. i mean obviously i like brian and all, but it's always just seemed a little weird that my go-to site, my site that is kind of the champion of my online identity, is one that i share with another guy.

i think originally the idea was sparked in my head by the inimitable merlin mann with a 43folders.com post about personal status pages. then a couple months ago, my daily web travels brought me to something that got me thinking about it again, in a slightly different light. here're some links in roughly chronological order:

• my social map is totally decentralized…
• FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability
• (De-)centralised me
• I want my blog to be the aggregator

obviously, these guys are talking about something much bigger than a personal status page, tossing around words like ownership and portability. still, this fueled the fire, and got me working.

i think it was about two weeks later (which is like superman speed for me), i'd thrown together a design and finished the page—matthewrasnake.com.

this is a one-page site, which is basically just an overview of my entire web-world. a centralized me. all the data still lives on my various decentralized profiles, so this doesn't address—or even consider, really—data portability, but instead relies on RSS feeds and APIs from and through which i can gather together my various bits.

so, if you're looking for me online, or wondering what i've been up to, now there's a quick easy place to go. also, probably more importantly, now i have something to enter in all those form fields without feeling weird about it.

here's a couple other links that are related, but didn't really fit in with those above…

• The Aggregated Me
• Social Graph Central

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don't have a lot to talk about today, so it seems like a great time to work in a mention of the puffin's latest blogging co-venture (now with his lovely wife, Allison), wherein he waxes poetic about the latest inspiring (and uninspiring) works in the comic book industry, she waxes poetic about high-falutin' sciency stuff, and they both entreat you with their occasional musings on the music scene and their own interesting undertakings.

appropriately enough, they've called it nerd [heart] geek.

oh, and in other news, i've just switched over from bloglines to our benevolent information overlords' "Reader" thingy. thanks to a conversation i was having with neil this afternoon where i was telling him about the two online feed readers, and where i convinced myself to go ahead and make the google plunge.

like my buddy Charlie has said… i wouldn't bow to our great and glorious overlords, except that they make such darned useful, usable stuff!

Technorati Tags: comics, comic books, puffin, rss, aggregator, friends

Popularity: 21% [?]

i have stripped the new laptop of the shackles of oppression, by installing the new ubuntu 7.04 beta release. thus far, the beta is performing admirably, though we did have to undo the stupid Firefox "use Linux backspace convention" (i.e. an intentionally added firefox bug where backspace does not equal browser "back" button) breakage. i haven't yet attempted a SMB connection to my desktop windows shares, and i haven't done much beyond launching open office and surfing the web. the only serious OS/driver problem i've run into is that it refuses to drive the laptop display at its native resolution (1280 x 800). there seems to be some chatter on some forums about ways to fix this, so hopefully i'll get this addressed in the near future.

bottom line is that i am now officially a linux geek—my primary machine at home is exclusively running linux… at least until i can get a chance to figure out how to install Mac OSX on there…

Technorati Tags: oppression, ubuntu, beta, firefox, linux, laptop

Popularity: 18% [?]

extended warranties on electronics and household whatchamacalits, y'know how people often say that they're not worth paying for? well, let me tell you, i just totally got my money's worth today.

a couple and a half years ago, i bought my shiny new lappy from Best Buy. it was an eMachines model—a company who'd fairly recently been purchased by Gateway—and it was the only thing Best Buy had (that was decent) that had the swanktacular new Athlon x64 mobile chip. and it was a decent computer for about a year, with hardly a problem except for the always janky trackpad and the crack prone hinges.

since i had purchased the 3 year super-duper warranty, i sent it in for service (hinges, trackpad). well, after that it was in a pretty much constant state of fucked-uppedness. it would work, but there were always little weird things going on with it. so i sent it back, picked it up, sent it back, picked it up, etc. at least six times in two years.

the beauty of it is, that the extended warranty comes with a "no lemon" policy, where after doing four hardware replacements, they'll give you a new laptop. rumor mill had it that they would do a dollar for dollar replacement, in other words, i could get a brand new lappy that cost up to the same price as my old one. this, understandably, had me a bit excited.

well, after heading out to the store to fact-check the rumors and see a) what they had, and b) what i needed to do/what the process entailed, i discovered that really they just do spec-for-spec replacements. so, i would get a replacement that was closest in features to the old one. of course, since 2.5 years have passed, there are no exactly feature-equivalent laptops available, so i would end up with at least a small upgrade.

resigned to this, i chose one of the lowest featured gateway lappys they had (online), and headed back in to pick it up. the guy i talked to this time was a bit more lenient with the spec-for-spec policy, reading it as a "functional equivalence" kind of thing. he pointed me to a couple laptops—one lesser than the one i'd picked out, and one slightly upgraded—and i of course said i'd take the upgrade.

so now i've got a brand new lappy running one of those fancy intel core 2 duo chips (yeah, i'm back in evil intel land), but now maybe i can get a little mac osx installed on the beast. if not, i'm probably going the ubuntu route (of some flavor), because i had barely gotten Vista booted up before it crashed. in the 45-75 minutes i've been running vista, i've already decided that it may be pretty, but it's slow. you can put a dress on a dog, but in the end, it's still a dog.

oh, and to cap off the good parts of the story, after doing the whole exchange thing and signing up for a new 3-year extended warranty, paris hilton handed me a store credit for the price difference between the old machine and the new one (minus the price of the new warranty). i didn't expect it, but i'm not complaining.

so, don't listen to those people who say the extended warranties aren't worth it. if you need 'em, they can be like gold.

Popularity: 19% [?]

so, i was in college, right? i'm sure some of you know what that's like. in college i had a job—a couple jobs, in fact—that involved me mostly sitting around on my ass watching people not know how to work simple devices. during my ample free time, bored off my nut, i would occasionally write stories or little anecdotes to humor myself. once we actually got campus "internet," i would occasionally write these stories for a buddy of mine to give us both a little amusement. i hired him into the computer lab i managed for a semester, and he stayed put after i moved on, so i wrote little parodies about life in the lab after I left, and i wrote them in the style of a screenplay (more or less). in the midst of one of these stories, i wrote a parody commercial-break, for a product I assumed would never exist. i have just found out today just how wrong i was.

but first, a word from our sponsors… (a parody commercial written in the heady year of 1994)

warning, the rest of this post is probably NSFW

And now, back to your irregularly scheduled blog.

so, yeah, that was weird. but it gets better. apparently, a company in Cologne, Germany is producing a fragrance called—oh yeah, i'm not even kidding—VULVA. this, people, is what we call not mincing words. it is a bit amusing to me that they use "flavour" instead of "scent" in a few places… especially since their FAQs specifically recommend against "drinking" Vulva.

perhaps more frightening is the fact that they have "other fragrances" in development, including "Vulva - Eighteen," and "Vulva - Exotic." the "Eighteen" version is inexplicably packaged in white, and I have to wonder what they mean by exotic… do the vulvas of different races or cultures have different scents, or are they just "spicing it up?"

and to take it one more step further into the absurd, they also mention that they're working on a scent for women (as obviously, with women already having vulvas, they won't need to carry around a vial of the scent of one). one might wonder just what masculine fragrance they might attempt to capture. perhaps their next product will be called "Balls," "Shaft," or something "edgy" like "Foreskin."

this icky-dirty-need-a-shower bipolar experience has been brought to you by the letters "V," "J," and, uh… "J."

Popularity: 8% [?]

not that bipolar was ever really a "link-blog," but I compiled this little list for my best gal earlier today, and thought it wouldn't be totally imprudent to post it here for you guys. i have a couple post ideas brewing, but really i just need to get off my ass and post my usual off-the-cuff b.s. like i used to.

anyway, here's the list o' links:

• If you continue to have to do presentations, perhaps this site can help spice things up for you and make the experience more meaningful:
  http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/08/from_design_to_.html
• The hybrid mini with motors in the wheels…
  http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/the_hybrid_mini.php
• The thing I was telling you about where these inventors think they've discovered a "free-energy" device:
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1858134,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1
• And as much as you hate it when I mention mortality, here's the coffin I'd like to be buried in:
  http://uono.com/english/home.html (click on the tab labeled "Cocoon")
• Finally, this bi-monthly magazine just released their first issue, and it looks to be really nice:
  http://www.goodmagazine.com/
  and the bonus is that 100% of Charter subscribers subscription fees go to the charity of their choice, one of which is the really cool:
  http://www.goodmagazine.com/choosegood/teachforamerica
  http://www.teachforamerica.org/

Popularity: 11% [?]

I spent a few minutes today working on the "invitation only" alterations to the movie night site, so I can now officially link to it in a public sphere. Currently, the only thing non-registered users can do is view the listed movies, and some stats for them. Feel free to drop by movie night and see our movie list. If I know you, feel free to drop me an email if you'd be interested in joining us for a movie night sometime. Casual is the rule of the day, as I can't really get more than 15 or so people (at an absolute max) in my living room to watch movies.

For the rest of you, some of the movies have a "Why Should I Watch This" blurb from the person who added the movie, so there's more than just pictures, links, and stats. In the future, i might make the comments on movies (and the as-yet-secret feature) available for viewing by non-registered users.

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this probably has limited intrinsic value, but it's something i've thought was neat for some time, and now that we've got wordpress, it was crazy easy to implement.

you know about avatars, right? as a limited example, they're the little images you choose to personalize your profile on bulletin boards (or forums as the young bucks like to call 'em). well, a guy had an idea that if you wanted, you should be able to use a single avatar, centrally controlled, from any site anywhere on the 'net. and, since we've all got unique email addresses, that could be the peg the hat hangs on. so now, if you login or post to a site that uses these "globally recognized avatars" and give them your email address, whamo-bamo, your personal little pic shows up on their site.

since I tended to use the same avatar (and username) on every site I visit anyway, this seemed like an obvious solution to a problem I hadn't realized I had. so, I signed up.

now, there's a plugin for Thunderbird so you can see gravatars in your address book, and, of course, there's a plugin for wordpress, so you guys can see your pictures when you post comments.

all you need to do to set up your free gravatar is go to http://www.gravatar.com and sign up. The gravatars have to be approved manually, and they are rated, so if you submit porn, someone will see it and rate it appropriately. because of the approval process and the 1-avatar, 1-email address limit of the free account, it could be a chore if you wanted to occasionally swap out your avatars.

i'd love to see all the regular characters set up a gravatar, just 'cause i think it's fun, and y'know, i went to all the trouble of installing the plugin.

oh, and btw, happy birthday to the amazing sharon—officially not a youngster anymore.

Popularity: 8% [?]

in the interests of complete and total procrastination on the novel-writing front (2640 words), i have undertaken a massive clean-up operation here on bipolar. at least, on my side of things. i've changed the permalinks to link to the individual post pages, rather than the monthly pages, and i've gone through every single one of my old posts to bring them in line with some of the better ways i've figured out to do things since we started. javascript new window links are now "accessible" (which just means they should work for people *without* javascript as well), all self-referential links point to individual post pages instead of monthlies with a hash anchor.

i've found quite a few dead links, and have started treating them in a standardized way (when i can't find a replacement or updated link)…

oh, and the big thing… all those posts in the "Old Posts" category from before we moved to movable type have now been gone through and assigned actual relevant categories. "Old Posts" (is/are) no more!

i also did a little jimmy'ing with the categories page, so now the categories are sized (and weighted) a little more sensibly.

the last thing i need to do is go through each post and hunt for linkrot. i've done a little already, but i've skipped around a bunch, so i'm sure there are more to be found.

all that stuff, and i've set up a new machine at home and installed SuSE linux on it. too many toys, too little time!

now, let's see if i can procrastinate on my procrastinating and get some work on on that novel…

Popularity: 6% [?]

i've finally broken 300 posts (this is the three-hundred-and-first) on bipolar, which is pretty sad, considering we've been doing this almost five full years. brian over there's killing me in the post-count department, despite my recent spate of activity and his recent absence.

which reminds me, brian's been at home ill quite a bit recently, so everybody .

which also leads me to another point. i managed to steal a few hours yesterday and today "cleaning up" the x13design family of websites to eliminate bare email addresses on all the pages. i've realized i'm getting a fuckload of spam mail, and it's probably all because i've had my address right out there for the spambots to collect at their leisure for years. i found a cool little tool online that encrypts the email address and generates javascript code to display the email link. so now, just about every instance of our various email addys has been cleaned up and obfuscated, so hopefully the torrent of spam will subside a bit. it's a vain hope, i know, but every little bit helps, i guess.

the other band wrapped up recording tonight, so next sunday we'll get seriously started on the mixing process. hopefully, we'll also get a few steps closer to picking a band name. rob actually provided a hefty list tonight, and we all picked five of our favorites from his list. here's the result of that:
3 threadbare taken
3 mammon (? possibly taken, found tabs online, a ref in bandreg.com, and a record label)
2 permafrost (dubliners, some reference to an indie band from '97/'98, and a record label)
2 psychosomatic (3 refs, all dead, maybe dead, 2 on bandreg)
2 nexus (here, here, here, here, & about 20 on bandreg)
2 housing project
2 trite (yup.)
2 kitsch (here, here, & about six on bandreg)
1 homogenize
1 midwife

brax and jim have both promised to provide their own lists on sunday, so i'll probably have some more for you then. after we vote on theirs, we'll repeat the process a few times, 'til we finally figure out what to call ourselves.

Popularity: 6% [?]