My divine role of King of Missing the Point shall forever go unchallenged!

Footnote 1: At least, he’s famous among the circle of people whose opinions I care about.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that, having dropped so many thousands of dollars on a durable consumer good, suddenly other items seem a lot cheaper. So consumer electronics that, if you were sane, you’d dismiss as “too expensive” suddenly become little things to be casually picked up with pocket change.

This is happening to me now, because I’m looking for a GPS to use for Geocaching, even though I don’t really need one.

I have, to date, found exactly one (1, as in singular) cache, using a borrowed iPhone 3G and the awesome geocaching.com app. But since some of the caches I’m going to be looking for are in pretty rugged terrain, I was thinking about picking up a dedicated GPS, ideally one with topo maps and an electronic compass.

I’m currently leaning towards the Delorme PN-40 over the highly-regarded Garmin GPSMap 60csx. This mostly stems from my previous experience with both companies. My impression is that Garmin is a GPS company that happens to have some maps on their units, and Delorme is a map company that happens to sell GPS units. Which one you prefer is probably largely a question of taste.

Of course, the other solution to the problem would just be to buy an iPhone 3G.

Any recommendations from the experienced GPS users out there?

Now, obviously I hadn’t been playing Wii Fit during the several weeks that it was in the shop. And losing the data sort of took the wind out of my sails, so I didn’t really start up again until this week. At which point I feel somewhat relieved that I don’t have the historical data, because believe me, I’m in a lot worse shape now than I was in October.

I’m definitely ready for winter to be over.

It appears that after a bit of technical chaos and angst that we are back. In a slight breach of protocol I’m going to spend a bit of time sending a big raspberry to the “developers” who create the wonderful weblog publishing software that we spend so much of our time using.

Take the WordPress upgrade and migration scheme. Please.

It’s not clear to me who thinks that this is a well designed process. Here is how upgrade works:

1. Replace your current install with the new install.

2. Make all of your customizations again by hand.

3. Upgrade your database and pray that something doesn’t get irreversibly destroyed.

Who thinks that this is anything but a poor retarded excuse for a technical solution?

Migration is a similar hassle. You copy everything to the new server by hand, import the database and then try to test it. And… you get redirected to your old server, which you left up until you are sure things are working. This is because the mental midgets at WordPress put some critical server configuration data in the database which causes this redirection to happen. Therefore, without hand surgery to the database, you can’t run a live and staging server at the same time while you migrate. This makes it a bit hard to test the new server.

Of course, I should not really blame WordPress, because their competition is no better, and usually worse. We switched to WordPress a while back in the first place because the previous system could not even restore itself from a native data format dump of the entire weblog. So everything is relative.

Weblog software is a strange beast. It is strange because so many relatively naive end users use the software, and yet the software itself is so bad. You really have to wonder about a software segment where every single desktop posting client is actually more painful to use than just connecting to the web server and typing in the little text areas. For example, are there any desktop clients on the Mac that let you post drafts to the server and then let you edit them conveniently with your writing partner? No? This situation is like some kind of genius level of brain damage that deserves recognition.

And speaking of the text areas: here is a plea to web developers everywhere. Stop stealing my god damned key bindings in text areas. I do not want Ctrl-e or Ctrl-p or Ctrl-a to do your pet little thing. I want them to do my pet little thing. I need those keys to act like Emacs, lest my brain melt.

Thanks for your time. More regular programming on this channel when I get done playing Fallout 3.

I think one or two of the most recent comments on posts might have been lost. I’ll try to move them over later today. In the meantime, consider visiting our forums and commenting there instead, while things settle down here.

There’s only one problem: I don’t know how to play the harmonica. I dug around a little on the net, and found a series of instructional materials on YouTube. As soon as I started watching one, I realized there was something crazy going on here:

The guy teaching the lessons was Adam Gussow, of Satan and Adam.

Satan and Adam was a blues group that was in heavy rotation at WRCT in the early 1990′s. The story, so it goes, is that Adam Gussow began jamming on the streets of New York with Sterling “Satan” McGee, a session-turned-street musician who played guitar and percussion at the same time; the documentary about them describes him as “Parliament Funkadelic meets Robert Johnson,” and the description is pretty good.

So, from his web site, modernbluesharmonica.com and on YouTube, Gussow has published over 150 video lessons for the beginning, intermediate, and advanced harmonica player. That this resource exists is so wonderfully ridiculous: it’s as if you decided to take up painting and you google for “painting lessons” and found Monet on YouTube, giving tips.

And even if you don’t want to learn how to play the harp, you can just listen to the amazing music:

Most of Satan and Adam’s music is available for purchase on Amazon. If you like straightforward and intense blues, you can’t go wrong with any of their albums.

My comment is “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

We’re not sure whether this is something we want to support, but I figured it would be an interesting experiment to set it up and see if there’s enough of a community that’s interested in using it. The choice is yours.

Tonight, I opened the door to The Room I Don’t Go Into for the purposes of throwing away a few things.

The Room I Don’t Go Into is worse than I remember. Apparently, in the course of cleaning up the house I might have, er, made it worse.

So, this weekend will require another Goodwill run. If I don’t update for a while, it probably means I’ve fallen in to The Room I Don’t Go Into and can’t find my way out.

Coming soon: I interviewed Mike Nelson from RiffTrax. As soon as I have it transcribed, I’ll post it here.