As you know, I think Jason Kottke's new design is really hot. So I have modified my blog to be in the style of Kottke.#

Some features of this change:#

• A nice new 'tag' on the top.
• Wider entry text boxes, for less scrunchy reading.
• Prose on the side bar and on the bottom.
• Nice initial 'Archives' page.
• No more calendar on every entry page.

I'd like to know what you, dear reader, think about it.#

Also, over the coming week(s) I am planning on restructuring my category hierarchy with what I've learned over the past six or seven months. I have looked at my logs and only see myself and search engines referring directly to category pages, so not much would break even if I didn't strive for compatibility.#

My new strategy for categorization is to focus on the real world object that is being discussed. So, I would not have a category called "Philosophy" but I may have "People/Philosophers." Then, I will have a "Subject" or "Topic" category that will contain those abstract ideas. Also, rather than having a category for each author of the books I've read in "Books", this category will be flat except for instances when a book's posts are split up--as is the case of The Divine Comedy, in which case the book, not the author, will get the subcategory. I think this is more logical and in the future I would to provide a feature like Faceted Classification, for when the blog goes wiki.

I'm older today. Wee!#

Also, yesterday I got notification that I got a "scholarship" I applied for. I will be going to the Cato University conference/lecture series in San Diego at the end of July this summer.#

From the page:

Cato University's 2004 Summer Seminar is a weeklong intellectual feast. Come expand your horizons, make new friends, renew your commitment to liberty, and hone your skills as an advocate for freedom.

Rediscover your passion: Remember the excitement of reading Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Thomas Jefferson, or F. A. Hayek for the first time? At Cato University, you can rekindle that spark. Imagine all your favorite subjects, taught by people who understand liberty, in the company of others who love to think and learn about freedom. Whether you're new to classical liberal thought or an expert looking for a refresher, Cato University will reinvigorate your passion for liberty.

It should be fun, check out the schedule. And obviously I'll be blogging it.

I have recently made some changes to makeoutcity.com that will hopeful put a few more cents in my pocket every so often.#

I signed up for an Amazon Associates account and whenever I provide Amazon links I will put them through my associate id. Note, however, that I will not interfere with any of the links that I pull from outside sites. Thus, if a blog I quote links to an Amazon item with their own associate id, I will NOT replace it with mine. Also, on the left sidebar there is now an Amazon link... I am not sure if I am required to show this. If not, it would probably be gone shortly.#

Secondly, I now have a Google Adsense account. When this service was first offered, I tried to sign up but I was rejected. I figured they were still in beta testing and didn't want to have a great deal of users, so I waited a while and tried to sign up again. On the second try I found that I was ineligible to even attempt to sign up. This made me guess that I was probably being rejected by "makeoutcity" sounds like it might be a pornography site and I was prompted refused because of this. When I emailed the Google Team about this earlier today, I got a pleasant reply from James saying that he had check my site and put me into the program. Nice guys.#

So, be mindful of these ads, perhaps they will advertise something that useful to you or that will enrich a thought that starts here.#

I just updated my site template and I think it looks nice. I would like to get a different colour scheme though, and in time I will change it--probably green or blue. I borrowed and heavily hacked the code off of The Web Standards Project, hopefully they won't mind.#

In other news, I have recently been experimenting with Tinderbox, and soon I will write up how I am using it to run my site.#

From the 14th to the 21st, I will be in Italy on vacation. This means that I won't be blogging, so I wanted to let everyone know not to expect anything. When I return, I plan on posting pictures and my travelogue on blog, so look forward to that.#

I will be going to Rome for 5 days and Sorrento (which is near Naples on the Amalfi coast) for 2 days. Excited!

If you just can't live without me, then I want to recommend some blogs to read this week and some of my older posts you may want to check out.#

Blogs:

• The Marginal Revolution
• The Binary Circumstance
• Just a Gwai Lo

These are a few of my favourite blogs for getting a diverse picture of the world, and I hope you will find that true about them as well.

 

Older Entries:

• Patent Theory versus Patent Law, a discussion of the patent system, by Alexander Tabarrok (of the Marginal Revolution.)
• A commentary on The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom.
• This post goes through many essays of George Orwell's.
• A commentary on The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis, a book about good and evil.
• Some quotes from Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, a book about the choices humanity makes and has made.
• A commentary on The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun, a cultural historian.
• A commentary on The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond, a historian with a scientist's mind. Or, a scientist with a passion for history.
• A commentary on Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, by Lawrence Lessig, a discussion on how the law must deal with the Internet, and vice-versa.
• A commentary on The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, by Shadia B. Drury, an explanation of this influential man.
• And, my commentaries on the Purgatorio and Paradiso, of Dante's Divine Comedy. (There is also one for the Inferno, but it's not as good and I want to re-write it.

So, yesterday my iBook started freaking out and having display problems. I'm going to try and get it fixed today but it requires moving around my schedule and I may not get a few things done. This means that blogging may be light.#

The problem seems to be an iBook Logic Board failure, which Apple has just announced (yesterday!) that it will extend coverage of--although the iBook is still under warranty anyways. (Reported by Mac Net Journal, Gen Kanai, and MacInTouch.)

Sorry guys, I was really sick this morning and woke up kind of late. Now I have a bunch of stuff to do before I leave so I won't be blogging until later in the day.#

However, I have a few pointers.#

The Berkman Center at Harvard Law School is having a luncheon today. Clay Shirky will be there at 12pm talking about Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. And, I will be webcasting it and attempting to allow people in IRC to participate. The direction will be same as for Thursday Meetings.

Update: The Clay Shirky Luncheon has been cancelled due to weather/airline problems.

And with that in mind, there is a Thursday Meeting tonight at 7pm. It will be webcast and IRC enabled. Among other things, I will be attempting to demo my blog style.

Today, I am working on my blog software and email so there won't be a blogroll-run until later in the day. If you are craving, look at yesterday's page.#

Also, the notes from the Berkman Thursday meeting are up:

• OPML Version
• HTML Version

I just spent the last few hours rebuilding the machine that makeoutcity.com is hosted on. I've been having problems with it for the last few weeks and hopefully now everything should be chipper. There was some really gross downtime. le sigh.#

I got rid of some crappy software that was running and now it's all good.#

makeoutcity.com was down from 01:41 this morning until 08:25, ick. Also there seems to be some weirdness with my RSS feed where if I edit an old post it shows up on the feed. I dunno why? Whoops.#

So I finally upgraded my harddrive. Hopefully it is happy now. Sorry for downtime.#

More problems with my drive today, so makeoutcity.com was down from
about 3:30pm to 4:30pm. Bummer, maybe this will be my lesson and I'll
finally get a replacement?#

so the server that this blog is hosted on has a very unhappy hard drive. the drive locked up at 07:05 this morning and I was able to get it back up by 07:41. i plan on getting a new hard drive for it this week - sadness.#

so there was some gross downtime this morning, from 6am EST to 10am
EST. I just had to reboot the firewall/router that connects the server
to the outside world... ridiculous!#

today i upgraded my blog creation software to the latest blosxom and started using some new plugins while i was at it: #

• SmartyPants
• entries_index_tagged so I can avoid the problem i was having with subversion changing my files' modification dates.. yes!
• meta because others require it.
• textile because it is wicked awesome
• blogroll so that I can share my wonderful blog list in full form, although i still need to integrate the blogs that don't have rss feeds... but its a start. oh, and i have to clean up some of the names so that they make sense.

cool!#

This is really annoying... I just moved around a bunch of old entries into better categories and because subversion (where i keep my blog entries in) doesn't preserve the timestamps of files when you add them it screwed up all the entry dates, because bloxsom uses the file modification date to decide what date the entry is from... so all my permalinks are dead... hmm, what will i do? good thing no one links me so it doesn't really matter where they are :)#