I figured it was about time to update to WordPress 2.0. Aside from having to update a few plugins along the way the upgrade went fine. To go along with the new version I thought it would be nice to try out a new look, a slightly modified version of WP-Andreas09.
WordPress 2.0 still has issues (preview is nice, but isn’t accurate), but overall is better than the previous versions.
Perhaps it was too much Dr. Demento when I was a kid, but I get a real kick out of the serious, but not, nature of things like the Young Chuck Norris from SNL. It also helps that the web has been fascinated with random Chuck Norris facts, even bringing him up to date for Chuck Norris 2.0 (think Web 2.0). So if you just can’t get enough check out Chuck Norris, 22 facts, all new Chuck Norris facts and of course, from the man himself, Chuck’s response to his facts.
If you liked the Lazy Sunday video from SNL then you should enjoy the Young Chuck Norris clip. This stuff reminds me a lot of the 80s music and rap. I’m thinking specifically of Will Smith’s Parents Just Don’t Understand and Run-D.M.C’s tracks It’s Tricky and My Adidas. These weren’t hard hitting, deep thoughts kind of music that was out to change the world, it was fun music. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I still listen to 80s music, most of it was just fun.
I hope that SNL is able to continue with their fun music videos. Although if they follow the trend of 80s stars, they’ll try to go hardcore to gain some gangland style street cred. Then they’ll realize that all of their fans left and try to go back to their original style. That will fail and in the mean time they will burn up all of their money and end up doing small concerts around the country for their original fans and barely getting by. Eventually someone over at VH1 will remember them and they’ll get featured on Bands Reunited or Behind The Music (or both if they are really lucky).
One can only hope that the SNL crew will learn from the mistakes of those who have gone and before them and keep producing original and fun music videos.
This morning (Saturday 21 January 2006) just before 11:00am Sarah gave birth to our second child, Rachel Marie Scott. At 8 pounds 3 ounces and 20.5 inches she is heavier and just a tad shorter that Alice when she was born. A big thank you to the folks at Sutter Memorial Hospital for doing a great job. We were happy with how things went when Alice was born there and we were happy to see them still doing a great job with Rachel.
We’ve been ramping Alice up for quite some time on the idea of being a big sister. She took to it really well, but you never really know how things will go until the new child actually shows up. To her credit Alice was excited and did very well when seeing Rachel for the first time. She was excited to hold the new baby and made sure to explain to anyone who would listen that this was her baby and that she was the big sister. Not bad for a 4 year old.
MythBusters is an awesome show. Now you can check out some of their lost videos. These are clips that were never aired.
This afternoon we were at Arden Fair Mall to pick up a couple of thing and I stopped by the Apple Store in the mall to see if they had any of the new MacBook Pros out to play with. They didn’t have any so I didn’t stay there very long. As we continued to another part of the mall we passed a group of three teenagers, one of whom was asking the others if they had seen the “cool iPod store on the second floor”. I realized immediately that he was talking about the Apple store. Although the Apple stores certainly carry other items besides iPod, that was obviously what he was most interested in. I guess this shouldn’t really come as a surprise given the iPod sales figures that Steve Jobs shared during his keynote last week.
Perhaps Apple should start opening smaller versions of the stores and put a big sign up front: “The iPod Store”.
It looks like Photo Matt has been busy with Automattic, Om just spilled the beans about Toni Schneider leaving Yahoo to become CEO of Automattic. Om mentions that will become a partner at True Ventures. The assumption is that Automattic is getting some VC money, or will be soon.
Congrats to Matt and the rest of the gang at Automattic.
No not this blog 
Jeremy Wright is indicating a MASSIVE Blog for Sale, to be announced soon. The details are very light, with hype substitued for substance. The minum bid is reported to be $40,000. It is really hard to comment on this until the name of the blog is revealed. In the mean time there are all sorts of numbers being thrown around, like a monthly revenue of $2,000 and:
As I said, this is a defining blog in its industry. It’s currently hitting just shy of 1M pages per month, has a PR of 7 and pushes massive traffic around with its links. It has more than 150,000 pages indexed in Yahoo/MSN and 60,000 in Google.
Of course none of this can be confirmed until we find which site this actually is. There are lots of good questions being asked in the comments.
If (and this is a huge, massive IF) the monthly revenue held at $2,000 per month it would still take you almost two years before you recouped the minimum purchase price of $40k. This seems like a huge risk, the first problem being that the goal of an auction is to push the price higher, so you’d likely end up paying more (perhaps much more) than $40k. From there one has to wonder if the monthly income will remain stable. Readers have been known to quickly revolt from sites when major changes happen, like a change in ownership.
Perhaps the biggest question out of all this was already brought up in the comments, what exactly do you get for your $40k? Staff? Servers? Writers?
Via Gadgetopia
Once again the faithful gathered to listen to Steve give the keynote address at MacWorld. The Apple Store is backup now, so you can check out the prices and specs for new items and updates.
Perhaps the most anticipated news was the move to Intel CPUs. Lots of speculation was going on about which systems would be the first to make use of these CPUs and would they be announced today. Two Apple systems are now available with Intel CPUs: an updated iMac and the new MacBook Pro. Both of these system sport the new Intel Core Duo, which by the way has to be one of the worst product names to come out of Intel.
The notebook line certainly was in need of an update, the MacBook Pro has a built in iSight camera and a much needed graphics card update to an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. One thing that was removed from the new notebook was the Firewire 800 connector. They still have a Firewire 400 jack, but that point you may as well use USB 2.0. The lack of a Firewire 800 port is real bummer, but not likely to be a deal breaker for most folks.
A fully loaded MacBook Pro will set you back about $3,350. That is with 2gig of RAM, a 7200 RPM 100gig hard drive, iWork 06 and the Apple Care Protection Program (ups the warranty to 3 years). When combined with the standard specs this seems like a well priced system. Because they are using recently announced CPUs we’ll have to wait until other vendors start shipping updated products to get a reasonable comparison. Until then I expect to see reports of people attempting to install Microsoft Windows as soon as the new MacBook Pros start shipping. I would very much like to see these things dual boot between Windows and Mac OS X without having to jump through too many hoops.
The Mac OS X shipping on these sytems is apparently all native for the Intel CPUs, down to the bundled applications. A new version, 10.4.4, is supposed to be available today, but I haven’t seen it show up in the Software Updates yet.
UPDATE 1:45pm 10 Jan 2006: Apple now has the keynote address on their website.
Ug, just when I was preparing to write something positive about Bloglines, they have messed up my sorting. There doesn’t appear to be any way to change it back either. I tried resorting my list, but it didn’t do anything. I’m hoping this gets fixed soon, as it stands now it is bad enough for me to look for another option.
UPDATE 6:17pm 9 Jan 2006: The ability to resort seems to have been fixed/restored.
After changing the page layout for Rhyll I added some additional features. First off, there is a new blog just for rhyll.com, where news and updates about the site will be posted. I don’t expect to post too much more about Rhyll here unless I add something that I think is really interesting.
In addition to the blog about Rhyll I’ve added two other specific blogs, for
FreeBSD and PHP. I want to explorer both of these topics in more detail. Additional topic blogs will be created if I feel the urge.