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I’m sitting here, waiting for our European offices to get back to me on an issue, and the only thing I could think of to do with my time was watch Season 2 of 30 Rock – and the only thing I can tell you about it is that someone has bottled pure ‘funny’ and unleashed it in concentrated, 20-minute doses.

Well, my share of the meta game has gone live. I have to say, I’m more anxious about this than I’ve EVER been before. Will people understand what I’m trying to say? Will it be as moving for them as it was for me? I don’t think I’ll handle it very well if they don’t like it, and it’s incredibly unusual for me to pin my own emotions that much on the reactions of other people. I’d guess it’s because writing the last few paragraphs of that story were so important to me that any rejection of it will feel like a rejection of me. Bleh, I’m starting to make myself sick…but if you don’t like it, do me a favor and keep it to yourself?

This week’s batch of ST:TNG episodes includes one titled ‘The Ensigns of Command’, which Memory Alpha cites as coming from this poem by John Quincy Adams, which I found to be…not horrible. For those not inclined to read the entire poem, here’s the relevant section.

No podcast, no php-bot, and no article on creativity vs. originality – spent the entire weekend debugging this:

For the ‘hardware impaired’, here’s what you should be looking for:

Yeah – hard drives aren’t supposed to look like that.

That first image is a link to a REALLY LARGE version, for those who want to fully revel in my pain – Radar, I’m looking at you.

Let’s be honest – there aren’t many of you reading this, and there’s just not that much of me to go around, so if you read blog.joeysmith.com, I’d like to hear from you regarding what sort of topics I should write about. Here are some ideas, but feel free to submit your own:

• Information Visualization – I have at least a half-dozen articles on the subject laying around in various states of (in-)completion.
• Parsing Expression Grammars – how to stop using regular expressions and use a parser instead
• PHP WTFs, tricks and anecdotes – a decade of participation in FreeNode’s ##PHP channel has given me some great material in the “WTF” category
• Data Structures and their Algorithms – this would probably consist of discussing a particular data structure, showing an implementation in a couple of different languages (Maybe “JS, PHP, Python…???”)
• Book reviews

Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation for my podcast reintroduced me to the poem “The Spell of the Yukon”, by Robert W. Service. This poem often makes me think of my childhood in Wyoming where I would spend hours and hours getting lost to the world in the alley behind our house…

It’s the great, big, broad land ‘way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

The rest of The Spell of the Yukon below the fold…

Our ISP has a planned maintenance outage for the UPS unit powering our machine on Mon Feb 02 17:00:00 MST 2009. It should last about 4 hours and may result in the site being unreachable for that period.

My friend Eric ‘tagged’ me, so I guess I’m supposed to write 7 things you may not know about me. I’ll give it a shot.

• I never graduated from High School, caused by a paralyzing fear of failure which prevents me from trying many things to do this.
• I am a published poet – in fact, my poetry has twice been selected as “Editor’s Choice” by the Internation Society of Poets.
• I have performed, at last count, 17 mercy killings for people with sick and/or dying pets. 9 dogs, 4 cats, 2 birds, and a lizard.
• I have written a number of “fanfic” episodes for Star Trek: The Next Generation
• I am ineligible for employment by the United States Government due to my involvement as a young man in a ring of programmers who turned out to be what the media today would probably call “cyber-terrorists”.
• I have, at some point in my life, read all 20 volumes of the OED (I want to say that at the time I read it, there were only 18 volumes).
• I am having incredible difficulty getting the Glasgow Haskell Compiler to build on SuSE Linux Desktop’s 64 bit distribution.

I feel like I’m cheating on that last one, but it was lig’s idea, and I really couldn’t think of a 7th interesting thing.

I’m also going to punt on “the rules”, which appear to be:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some wierd.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

I don’t care for the way that 3rd rule makes this game exclusive like an invitation-only party, but with the peer-pressure of a chain letter. So if you’re inclined to participate, consider yourself tagged by me and link back here. If you’re not so inclined, feel free to wipe your mind of this entire experience.

Had a 1 hour meeting today run 2 hours over – and result in a lot of extra work for me – but it could potentially result in a massive change to my career path, so I don’t feel bad.

In addition to spending another week or so in high-level meetings at work, forging what will hopefully be a new operating plan for my employer, I spent all of last week sick in bed – I didn’t blog, I didn’t work, I didn’t IRC, I didn’t even really READ – mostly just slept.

I’m still not back up to 100%, and now I’m another week behind at work – but I’ll be back writing this week some time.

This past week got out of control fast, so I’m posting the Linkblog on Friday instead:

My employer uses a lot of Java, so I’m trying to brush up on the available solutions in a couple of domains – here are some ‘project managmenet’ solutions
JTrac – Java version of Trac – see above
Posterity is a web-based email system. Unlike most open source webmail applications Posterity is not just a web interface for IMAP servers..[it] uses its own database. Projects which combine mail and databases are really interesting to me.
Andrei Zmievski is one of the brightest people working on the PHP source, this page contains links to a lot of the talks he’s given at different conferences.
Something I’m looking into for BlogProj: A .net RSS Reader
I visit this blog [database-programmer.blogspot.com] about once a week, there’s always something interesting here
Review of Wrike, an online project management tool, and part of their sales pitch
Embedding JavaScript in Ruby
Data visualization of 2008 US movie box office revenues – I think there could be some interesting ways to use this visualization technique
I used to play WoW, but I always found that I preferred the idea of writing one to playing one.
These are some tools that might make that possible
Flow-based_programming – “flow-based programming (FBP) is a programming paradigm that defines applications as networks of “black box“processes, which exchange data across predefined connections by message passing…”- just when you thought you knew it all…
Mozilla is really starting to gear up to move the web into the future – check out The Concept
You’ll eventually see a series of blog posts based on the 501 movies listed in this book
Generating an SSL Certificate – I’m constantly having to look this up for people, or maybe you’d prefer the Debian Way ?
PgSQL string function reference – remind me to tell you some time about how I used these to completely corrupt my PgSQL database!
xjconf – Never enough XML parsing
table.pde, part of the code backing the excellent Visualizing Data, which I’m using to prepare my presentation for our annual Management Off-site.

Stuff in my backlog from last week:

1. Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement – Thanks Matt
2. Dot – The Userguide – Watch this blog for an upcoming project related to dot/graphviz!
3. Arguing with Users – I was one of the many users disappointed enough by Pidgin to “migrate”
4. Learning Perl the Hard Way – Maybe PHP needs one of these?
5. Tamarin project @ Mozilla – I want to see how this compares to SquirrelFish – can I actually get my hands on WebKit nightlies somewhere?
6. Javascript 2 – A Perl 6 Disaster – I must be the only person left who likes where JS2 is headed?
7. Mozilla 2 Roadmap – Anyone know of a more up-to-date version?
8. Ada Programming Book – Well, it’s definitely not Java; guess it’s time to really knuckle down and learn some real Ada.
9. The Wannabe Developers Manifesto – ##PHP often leaves me feeling this way
10. Oink – C++ Static Analysis
11. Wikipedia – List of Revision Control Software – I need to make my own “Matrix” site, like cmsmatrix.org – but abstracted to accept lists such as these.
12. TIOBE Index – PHP holding strong at #5
13. Join-Fu Slides – A series of talks by a MySQL employee, I’d like to compare some of his speed claims against other engines, see how much is MySQL specific – am I the only one who prefers Theta syntax?
14. A PgSQL Blog: CONNECT BY in 8.3? – I use this feature quite often in Oracle 10g, glad to see it making its way to the OSS engines.

Question for readers: Do you know of a good ML book? O’Reilly and Associates doesn’t seem to have one, nor Prentice-Hall PTR, and I never know who I can trust from the other publishers – they’ve been far too spotty in my experience.

Note to self: Make Textile plugin open links in _blank

I’m writing this entry because some people have already “discovered” this blog by accident and are asking me why there aren’t any posts. I’m not quite ready to start this blog yet – I’m anticipating a kick off on 2008-AUG-01.