So, I’m on GrandCentral. (If you need an invite, let me know. I don’t know how many of them I have, but … )
The one problem? I really don’t have a use for most of its options, as I’ve had my telephone number for years and there’s no way I want to go through the hassle of changing my number in 500 different places.
However, I’ve just figured out how to do what I really wanted to be doing … which was using GrandCentral for my current cell phone number’s voice mail.
I stumbled across a feature called Conditional Call Forwarding. (Despite the “T-Mobile” prefix, I think this concept exists on pretty much any cell phone.)
Using this, I programmed it to redirect to my GrandCentral phone number
(**004*1[area code][my GrandCentral number]# and then the “call” key on my keypad); then, I went into GrandCentral and told it (a) not to call screen at all and (b) not to ring any numbers.
Now, when someone calls me and misses me, they get redirected into GrandCentral’s voice mail.
Why go to all this bother? Well, namely, I’ve found that historically I far too rarely check my voice mail. This makes things hellaciously more convenient for me without necessitating that I buy an iPhone …
Fair warning … I’m feeling the urge to futz with the blog, heavily. So there may be big honkin’ clouds of (cyber) dust and inconnectivity and so on.
My brain’s running along two paths. First, I am thinking about moving the whole works from WordPress over to Tumblr … since I tumblelog much more often than I write big long epic posts. The nice thing about Tumblr is it can pull in feeds from everywhere, which means that my Flickr photos, my del.icio.us links (the ones you see as “Links for YYYY-MM-DD”), etc. could all be very easily integrated into one place.
And the Tumblr blogging software certainly doesn’t have any problems accepting the occasional essay-size post.
If I do that, it would actually involve a DNS change … I’d have to change windycitymike.com to point to Tumblr. Which wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but I’m not sure how it’d affect some private things I’m using for the webspace.
I may instead see if I can integrate Tumblr into the guts of this blog somehow. Or somehow reproduce Tumblr’s functionality with WordPress — there are a few hacks going around.
The point behind all of the above is that I am really for the most part doing much more tumblelogging than I am blogging, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s just automatically running from stuff I do … the linklogging, for example, is a daily collection of what I post to del.icio.us, which is done using a Firefox extension.
At the very least, I’m a little dissatisfied with the theme I’m using, and want to “redecorate.” I see myself actually going with something a little more plainer. I may shop around WordPress themes and look for something very retro, or at least a different design.
So, anyway, if one day you try to get my blog and get either a weird connection or something unexpected, just hang on for a bit and keep trying; it’ll straighten itself out. 
Sleepy: I had to go all the way down to freakin’ CHINATOWN to be able to go northbound. (Chicago has a Chinatown too.) Friggin’ reroutes.
This alone sways me heavily towards voting for Ron Paul:
Re “Clinton Plans to Consider Giving Up Some Powers” (news article, Oct. 24): The American Freedom Agenda, an organization of conservatives founded last March 20 to restore checks and balances and protections against government abuses, requested all presidential aspirants, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, to sign an American Freedom Pledge.
They were asked to renounce the following powers if elected: torture; presidential signing statements; indefinite detentions of American citizens as enemy combatants; military commissions that combine judge, jury and prosecutor; spying on American citizens in contravention of federal statutes on the president’s say-so alone; kidnapping, imprisoning and torturing suspected terrorists abroad; executive privilege to shield the executive branch from Congressional oversight; prosecuting journalists under the Espionage Act for exposing national security abuses; listing organizations as terrorist groups based on secret evidence; suspending the writ of habeas corpus during the conflict with international terrorism; and invoking the state secrets privilege to deny victims of constitutional wrongdoing any judicial remedy. Senator Clinton has balked at signing the pledge, as have all other candidates except Representative Ron Paul.
ARGGGGGGH! What the fuck?!?!
Battlestar Galactica’s fourth season isn’t starting until next April?!?!?!?!?!
Upgrading to Mac OS X v10.5 evidently just completely wiped out my crontab. The process doesn’t even back it up. WTF, Apple?
The world just got a little brighter: “Dollhouse“, a television series starring ol’ Faith herself, Eliza Dushku, is coming to Fox. They’ve already given a seven-episode commitment.
The world may be goin’ to hell in a handbasket, but it’s going a slight bit slower now.
A great point about torture made by The Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias whle reviewing the new film “Rendition”:
[N]ormal people find the idea of torturing another human being distasteful. And everyone understands that. A normal person isn’t going to have the stomach for the torturing job. So, consequently, once you adopt routine torture as a matter of policy you’re soon enough going to find that your torturers — not the Bushes and Cheneys and Yoos but the people who actually need to get their hands dirty — are going to be people inclined toward sadism. Normal people aren’t going to want to be professional torturers, and the ranks of professional torturers are going to be filled with people who like torturing. Like everything about this foul business, of course, that’s a terrible way to get accurate information.
Update: See bottom of post.
For a while, I’ve been meaning to document a “hack” I made to Remember the Milk’s “Quick Add” form which proved quite useful for me. I haven’t seen it reproduced anywhere else, so my hope is that I might have the rare occasion to offer up a idea that’s new to the blogosphere.
Basically, the idea behind the “hack” is this: rewrite the HTML of RTM’s “Quick Add” page to suit your own particular tagging system and habits.
This idea arose when I noted that the tagging system I was using was dependent on me actively remembering to include certain types of tags with each task: the task’s context (home, work, Mac, Web, or phone) and the goal it worked towards. The problem was that I was frequently not remembering, especially for quick tasks. Things were significantly falling apart, to my great annoyance.
If only, I thought, I could simply pick the tags off of pulldown menus on the form. Well, wait a minute … why couldn’t I? I’m not a programmer, just a splicer of sorts … but I knew basic HTML, and all that would be involved was gutting the “Quick Add” form and moving around some of its organs.
The essential main lesson is that there are four variables in the Quick Add form which RTM needs: t contains the task name, tx the tags; d the due date; and l the numeric list ID. Those variables are passed along to http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/ext/addtask.rtm via the “POST” mechanism of an HTML form. That’s all there is to the idea, really. If you’re an HTML and CSS wiz who already groks the idea, you can take it from here and skip the rest of the article. If not, read on …
I think the most incredibly foolish thing that the Democratic Party could do for 2008 would be what it looks like it is intending on doing … nominating Hillary Clinton as their Presidential candidate.
The reasons why such a move are well-iterated in this Reason article. First, there’s the fact that she is an extremely hated figure. Republicans are fairly disspirited nowadays; political weblogs are documenting how one incumbent Republican Senator after another are indicating they won’t run again. Democrats and some of the better evangelicals (the ones focused on what Jesus Christ actually is said to have cared about: the sick and the poor) are forging connections. What would be the worst thing to do? Give Republicans nationwide something to rally about, as they would around a Clinton candidacy. She is one of the most hated figures of the right; her nomination would be a rallying cry, but Obama wouldn’t.
[... M]orale on the right is down right now. They’re disappointed in their political leadership — with the scandals, the spending, and the uninspired politicking. Campaign contributions are down. Motivation is lagging. Why give them the one general election opponent most likely to get them fired up and, more importantly, writing checks again?
Finally, I agree with the article’s suggestion that she is pretty much a Democratic equivalent of George W. Bush. Now, she isn’t as stupid as him, and I daresay she’s not as immoral, but she is as power-hungry as him, and she does strike me as likely to continue the push for a “unitary executive theory”-style Presidency.
Mrs. Clinton’s grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn’t conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.
In fact, the L.A. Times reported last week that Clinton has refused to commit even to pulling U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, which, if elected, would be the end of her first term. TV journalist Ted Koppel recently told NPR that Clinton has admitted the U.S. would still have troops in Iraq at the end of her second term.
[...] Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government’s ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing “decency” standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.
Leftists concerned about the entertainment industry’s increasingly imperial stand on copyright might take a cue from copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, who wrote on his blog for Wired magazine: “Of all the Dems, I would have bet she was closest to the copyright extremists. So far, she’s done nothing to suggest to the contrary.”
I’ve not liked Hillary Clinton for a while. In fact, there is only about one circumstance in which I could envision myself voting for Hillary — if Illinois is actually in play (the state did go to Bush Sr., both terms of Reagan, and both terms of Nixon) and she’s up against Giuliani or someone equally dangerous. If that’s not the circumstance and she’s the Dem candidate, I’m voting either Republican or third-party.
If she’s up against Ron Paul (unlikely, but possible), I may even join Democrats for Ron Paul. I don’t want “President Clinton” in office. I don’t like many of Ron Paul’s positions, but I think I trust his character …
If you use an iPhone, it should be about 2000% easier to look at the site now; I’m using this plugin/theme to autoformat the site for you when you visit, and looking at it in iPhoney it looks fairly good.
Also, Tumblr seems to have repaired the problem with tumblelogs’ RSS feeds, so my tumblelog’s RSS feed is now in the top righthand corner of the site. I post videos, YTMNDs, images, and quotes there, not here … and a lot of that stuff is fun, so if you’re not checking it out, you’re missing some fun stuff.
Finally, this is being written in the new MarsEdit 2. Not that you’d have a reason to care, but just so y’know.
Tumbles
