18 August 2004 Archives

I’ve added an ‘about me’ link to the sidebar. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, though my About page is probably not as professional as many of the ones I’ve read elsewhere. Oh well — life is full of wonderous variety, as they say in the movies.

Seriously, when I get the ‘professional pages’ in my site up (not this weblog, no worries there– it will always remain as funky as I can make it), I’ll replace the About Page; but I figured it’s fun for now.

A succinct version of this page could be that I’m a Moron on the Pilgrim Specification Adherance Scale. I hope that I’m a fairly successful Moron, and that I keep my forays into being an Asshole to a minimum. I do try, though, for the Expert Moron ranking in the technologies I work with frequently–except for syndication feeds I hasten to add, where I’m happy just to remain a simple Moron.

When it comes to RDF, I even wavered for a time as Angelic (though some thought I tended more to Asshole than Angel); but then the W3C came out with changes in the released specifications, and my work was pushed back into being Moronic again.

Ain’t that just the way it goes?

In the About page, I also mention my Port-a-Bloggy business, and the camera fund. I have a new port-a-bloggy customer waiting in the wings for WordPress 1.3 to release and then *poof* I’ll have him off Movable Type and into WordPress, quicker than a cat can clean its whiskers with a spit soaked paw. Just think–I can do the same for you.

I’ll have you know, that WordPress is very sexy. Just ask any WP site owner, they’ll say that their sex appeal has increased by a factor of 2 since they moved to WordPress. And you’ve never been moved until you’ve been moved by someone like me.

I did want to say thanks to those who have helped so far with the camera fund, or have trusted me enough to manage the move of their weblogs. I also wanted to thank those who have come out with tips on what to do with my current quirky camera. Because of them, I can continue to take the photos just like the ones posted this week until I do get my new camera.

Those with a modem, tremble with fear.

Dare Obasanjo wrote a terrific post in response to my noticing that the Applied XML Conference had no women speakers. He listed out several women in the XML world who would be great speakers, several of whom I was familiar and agree with him, 100%.

In particular, I would be intrigued by a presentation by Lanqing Dai, who is now working with WinFS, but used to work with the XmlDocument class. The subject of WinFS came up in conversation in a thread associated with a post I wrote over at Practical RDF, and I’ve been wanting to learn more about it.

(Yes, time to drop some of my bias about Longhorn and take a closer look at the technologies.)

Another person to add to this list of exceptional XML leaders and practioners would be Dorothea Salo, who recently gave a tutorial on XML classification systems at Extreme Markup, and who was also one of my tech editors for the Practical RDF book.