ragesoss

According to wordcount.org, Lizzie (Faith’s nickname from when her name was Elizabeth) and Sage are only four words apart among the 86,000 most-used English words. How weird is that?

That was the best comment I’ve heard out the mouth of a sports announcer all season. Our players in the Holiday Bowl keep getting hurt, but Stoops says there’s no injuries at half-time. We come out after the half, and that seems to be true. Sooner Magic, baby!

Faith and I watched Sideways today; I don’t recommend it. There is one great moment, and it’s in the previews (it’s line about Merlot). Other than that it’s sort of slow-moving, and none of the characters are interesting.

Pointing links at popular websites to attract Blogger Web Comments extension users brought moderate returns. Actually, just one link. For some reason, the only link where my post showed up through the new Firefox extension was the (personalized) Google homepage. I linked to a ton of other sites in that post, some of which I also mentioned by name, but only the first went into effect. Google seems to have put in safeguards to prevent just the kind of abuse I was attempting.

My post was the most recent listed for the Google homepage for about 8 hours (in the middle of the US night) and produced about 40 unique hits. Not overwhelming, but not insignificant. (I think I got about 25 cents in ad revenue, so it’s definitely something that could be exploited for evil). If all the links had worked, it would have been many times that. I may try a more controlled test, with short separate posts linking to popular (but probably not too blogged about) pages. Of course, the results were high partly because lots of people were testing out a new product and saw a blurb mentioning that very product, so the game would get old fast if spammers tried to take advantage of it.

However, other sites are reporting that just such abuse is occurring already, with a wide variety of spam. Fortunately, the most interesting and unknown a site, the more likely you are to check out the comments and the less likely it is to be spam-linked. But it still dilutes the value of the extension.

I just got to Dallas to spend a few days with Faith’s family, after a week in Yukon with mine. We did a lot of hanging out watching 24, and Melinda and I went to the annual Wasielewski/Adams Christmas party; always a great time. I think I’d like to have an N64 with 4 controllers, just to player Dr. Mario; it’s really the best party game ever. It’s a shame that Yale and Houston and Oklahoma aren’t all in Southern California… my friends are scattered across the whole country.

It’s been nice to be home and get a chance to relax (even though I still have a paper to write).

Santa was good to me this year. I got a slew of CDs, some pajama pants, the extended edition of Sin City (it’s awesome to read through the graphic novel while watching the movie; every scene is filmed exactly like a frame from the original and all the dialogue is verbatim), a couple books, and my mom is ordering me a set of equipment for home beer brewing!

Faith and I saw Chronicles of Narnia just before we left; it was pretty good but not great. The casting of the Pevensies was underwhelming, and Aslan wasn’t as impressive as he should have been.

Hopefully we’ll see King Kong soon.

My sister Melinda has now been accepted to the Dartmouth and OU med schools, and she’s still waiting to hear from UConn. We’re hoping she gets into UConn, because that way me might be able to get a house near Farmington and share it with her and her husband-to-be Zack.

Reading: Snow Crash, Ringworld

Watching: Chronicles of Narnia, 24 (season 4), Sin City

Listening: A New Found Glory – Catalyst, Brian Wilson – Smile

This is a test of the new Blogger Comments extension. If you see this through the extension, click on through.

Using the Google homepage with the Blogger Comments extension?

Anyone surfing eBay and using the Blogger Comments extension?

Any slashdotters see this with the Blogger Comments extension?

Could this Blogger Comments extension be a new way to generate traffic for splogs?

I’ll update later with the amount of traffic I get with this.

Faith and I will be in Oklahoma come Monday!

We’re not doing much in the way of Christmas presents this year; we’re trying to pay off credit cards instead. Hopefully my delightful presence will be an acceptable substitute for presents, at least for the half of my family that gets to see me.

I’m especially looking forward to the annual Wasielewski-Adams Christmas party.

Reading: nothing fun

Watching: Lost, House, The Island, Kicking and Screaming

Listening: Weakerthans, Jimmy Eat World (Aaron’s blog reminded me how much I like them), Pink Floyd, New Found Glory

A few weeks ago, my blogs finally achieved Google PageRank. They went from 0 to 3; quite nice. I also get hits pretty regularly from search engines now, mostly searching for information on running Daggerfall with DOSBox. And when I first found Reddit, I submitted a link to my entry that linked to the Katrina interview video; I got about 800 hits over the course of about two weeks, and I think a lot of people bookmarked it; that entry has PageRank 4. These days, Dogpile pulls up 75 hits on the major search engines, while Google has 151; most of the increase is from my posts on sundry other sites, particularly Slashdot (where I like to inject the history of science into everything I can; it’s nice when you can assume you know more than everyone else… I definitely wouldn’t push the historical arguments I use on Slashdot with real historians of science.)

I was at a conference in Minneapolis last weekend, which was tons of fun. I showed up without anywhere to stay, and luckily some fellow Yalies (Julia Irwin and Shae Trewin; thanks!) took me in for the first two nights.

It was nice getting to just hang out with people for long periods of time; that’s something there isn’t usually much time for in grad school.

It’s also been cool staying with people in New Haven when I have late class. I’ve stayed with Julia and Steve, Lloyd Ackert and his wife and daughter, and now with another grad student in my program, Todd Olszewski. I think sleepovers should be part of the normal social order; it’s a chance to get to know people that you might see all the time in another context but never know much about casually.

The dishes are piling up in the apartment. Faith and I are betting 2 weeks of dish duty on the outcome of OU/Texas, and neither of us wants to do any dishes before then. I have the moral high ground, but Faith has Las Vegas on her side by 2 touchdowns.

Faith gave blood today for the first time (and me for the 12th, I think). She was having second thoughts about being a doctor, being surrounded by all that blood. But once the needle was out, she felt much better. The first time I gave blood, I was pale and shaking and feeling faint… and that was before they stuck me.

Tesla managed to climb from our balcony to the plant-covered (seriously, totally covered) balcony two doors down. The neighbors in between helped get her, and we found out that they have a new kitten, too. After seeing Steve and Julia’s kittens and now our neighbor’s, it looks pretty likely that we’ll get a new animal soon (probably a kitten, possibly a puppy).

On Wednesday I left for Yale around noon. 5 minutes later, I spotted a stack of computer equipment by a tree near the road, in front of someone’s house. To make a medium story short, I got 3 broken computers and a scanner/printer. But wait, it gets better.

One of the computers had graphics card (in fine condition) that is significantly better than the one in our desktop; now I have a 256MB GeForce FX 5200, which costs around $70. I think this was new in 2003, and it has a DVI out.

As for the rest of the stuff, I mixed and matched parts from these 3 computers and the broken one I already had, and it looks like I have 2 working computers to show for it: Pentium III’s (900 MHz and 1.0 GHz) with 768MB RAM each, with 33 and 40 gig HDDs. Not that I have any use for them, aside from playing with Linux.