Author Archives: brad

Ah, yes. Welcome to Gateway

Ah, yes. Welcome to Gateway country. This story made me laugh out loud. My friends and I were outraged that the guy was arrested. My dad was really pissed about it.

Behind the Slashdot Phenomenon. Interesting interview with Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco, of Slashdot fame. Every time I read what Malda has to say, I marvel out how lucky the guy is. Not to say that the code behind Slashdot isn’t cool, but this guy was in the right place at the right time in a big way.

It’s been an interesting week since my last updates. Of course, I spent a good chunk of today implementing the Blogger API in REALbasic, which is why I have all those “Hey, it works!” posts from earlier today. XML-RPC is awesome technology.

Last Wednesday, Jen’s grandfather passed away. We saw him on Father’s Day, and he seemed quiet, but we had no idea how sick he really was. He went to work on Wednesday morning and at some point put his head down on his arms and fell asleep at his desk. He never woke up. The funeral was Saturday, but it took a while to get to that.

Today is my 8th anniversary with Jen, and we went away to the Inn of the Dove in Harrisburg on Thursday and Friday night. We had reservations we couldn’t cancel, but we didn’t want to miss the viewing on Friday night. Jen’s grandmother firmly told us not to cancel our plans, but to go ahead, so we did. But on Thursday afternoon, my lawn suddenly got covered with sewage. Jen’s dad said that he would take care of it, and not to cancel our plans.

So on Friday, which is also his birthday, Jen’s dad spent most of the day fixing my plumbing and dealing with his father’s death.

We had a really good time at the Inn of the Dove, though.

We finally got the finishing touches to the plumbing done Saturday night, but not before I grabbed a piece of VERY HOT copper and burned the crap out of my right hand.

Here’s hoping that my next post will be done with my new Blogger app. Next step after that: Manila RPC so that my teachers can upate their Manila sites really easily. Should be very cool.

Tonight I changed a preference

Tonight I changed a preference that I haven’t touched since 1999. I made Mozilla my default web browser and bumped Internet Explorer. I still like IE, but the news surrounding the 5.2 update for Mac OS X was pretty lukewarm. I don’t want it to set my homepage to MSN — I like a blank home page. I don’t want to have quit my running apps to install a browser — Mozilla was drag and drop. IE continues to clutter up my screen with popunders and popups — Mozilla can turn that off for me. Plus, Mozilla does tabbed browsing, which I’m really getting into (clean interface) and it will save groups of bookmarks to open together in a tab set. IE can’t do that. My only complaints about Mozilla:
1) The interface is not quite Aqua
2) It’s a bit slower than IE for casual browsing (but I hear that it’s faster for rendering large pages)
3) The icon is ugly (but this is easily fixed with a trip to Xicons.

Plus, it kind of feels good to be using a piece of open source software. Not that I have ethical issues with commercial, closed-source stuff (heck, I hope to one day be rich because of it). But Mozilla is a solid browser that’s stable and consistent across platforms. IE can’t make that claim.

But who knows? Maybe I’ll switch back in another three years.

Microsoft accidentally distributes the Nimda

Microsoft accidentally distributes the Nimda worm to Korea. According to the article: Microsoft accidentally sent the virulent Nimda worm to South Korean developers when it distributed Korean-language versions of Visual Studio .Net that carried the virus, the company acknowledged Friday.

I’m getting more and more into REALbasic. What an awesome program! After struggling several times to learn how to write even the most rudimentary programs, I’m starting to make sense of object orientation. And it’s really cool.

Just heard that a girl in Etown strangled her one year old baby and left it in a dumpster. I just don’t have the restraint not to point out the unfairness that my son is dead because of a pre-natal virus and this girl murders her own child.

As of yesterday (June 16,

As of yesterday (June 16, 2002), I am an elder of Westwood Community Church. Big responsibility, lousy pay (that’s a joke).

In all seriousness, it’s an honor to be chosen for something like this. It makes me think a lot more about the church and our direction.

I’m beta testing a product called ideaSpiral. It’s pretty cool. When it’s released, I’ll post a link here.