Category: Burningbird

Categories
Writing

Media Mailed

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Tonight I sent off the books for those of you who emailed me your addresses. The UPT is in boxes, and the Practical RDF is in bubble envelopes. Zoë helped me pack the books, so you’ll know which ones are from me by whether they glow in the dark or not.

Just kidding — Zoë’s radiation does not rub off on inanimate objects. Not unless she were to pee on your books. I can assure you that if my cat peed on your book, I would not send it. Well, not without drying it, first.

I got a very good deal on envelopes and boxes at our local Office Depot, and the Media mailing rate is incredibly low. All total, mailing the Practical RDF books came to about 3.00 each and the UPT to about 5.00. Since I would rather not have 3.00 and 5.00 charges on Paypal (of which I believe it would take 1.25 anyway), instead I’d like you to consider donating some canned goods or money to your Humane Society. If you would prefer, you can also donate to another charity, or drop it into the tin of a really good street performer. Or you can have a good cup of coffee and a PB & J sandwich, on me.

Then, if in my journey late summer, my odyssey through the States and beyond, I come into your area and you want to buy me a beer, well, you’re on.

Speaking of the little princess, she’s happily home and has spent the last several hours exploring every last bit of the town-home, climbed into boxes, snuggled, ate, snuggled, played, and snuggled some more. She hasn’t slept once. I did a little research and found out that if we hold her close for three hours a day, the amount of radioactive exposure we’ll experience is 3 mrem/year–an increase of 1% over normal radiation doses we experience from the sun and other sources. This is supposedly equivalent to drinking one cup of coffee or one diet soda per day. We have decided to snuggle Zoë the 3 hours and do without one can of soda or a cup of joe a day.

It was a surprise to hear, though, that coffee and soda add to our radiation exposure. I wonder if Starbuck’s is managed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Further research shows that drinking coffee shortens our lives an average of six days. If you think that’s bad, did you know that if you eat 40 tablespoons of peanut butter, one after the other, you’ll die of aflatoxin poisoning?

All in all, I’ll take my chances with Zoë.

Categories
Writing

The Eagles have landed

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Today I finally found the eagles. I am both exhausted and exhilarated. I have photos, which I have to go through to see how many survived both the sunlight, speed, camera shake, and distance. When the five or so out of 300 have been found, I’ll post them and their story online.

In the meantime, O’Reilly has been trying out different publication business models, including a new type of book experience called Rough Cuts and publishing smaller works, online, for less money.

Rough Cuts are pre-production releases of books focused on new, and hot, technology while the book is currently going through final revision and production processing. You pay less money, download PDFs and also, hopefully, provide feedback for the final book. With this, O’Reilly hopes to get books on hot tech into the hands of the readers that much more quickly.

One of the books is Ajax Hacks, which I helped tech edit this last December. Lots of helpful tips and tricks when working with Ajax in this book. It’s this book that inspired me to dive, happily, into Ruby on Rails.

As for the short publications, yours truly wrote one of the first for O’Reilly, on none other than syndication feeds. Per Derrick Story at O’Reilly:

O’Reilly recently commissioned Shelley Powers, a specialist in technology architecture and software development, to create a comprehensive PDF document that would help webmasters manage their incoming and outgoing feeds. Shelley produced nothing short of a must-have reference for online publishers, titled “What Are Syndication Feeds.”

This eDoc, as O’Reilly has termed it, is focused primarily at those newly exposed to syndication feeds and needing to understand what they are, and how to use them. It’s not focused at developers; it is focused at end users, regardless of degree of technical experience. It also doesn’t cover any of the history or the politics, as folks newly introduced to syndication feeds don’t need to know about either of these. RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom are all featured.

I also noticed that O’Reilly used a bird for the colophon on the eDoc. Rather timely considering my recent successful quest for eagles.

Categories
Writing

Great book give away

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

While Zoe is in the kitty hospital, I’m taking advantage of not having my typically very curious kitty getting into everything and am cleaning out my closets. I also need to make room for a bookshelf in one closet in order to, hopefully, start filling it with new works.

I had planned on bringing the rest of the complementary book author copies of my Unix Power Tools and Practical RDF books down to SxSW to give out, but that plan fell through.

So, instead, if you send me an email or leave a comment and agree to pay packaging/shipping, I’ll send you a copy of either Unix Power Tools or Practical RDF — signed, if an author chicken scratch counts for something. When they’re gone, I’ll post a note.

Now, I realize that you’re not getting your copy in a fancy house, after being fed all sorts of nifty foods, but you’re not having to pay for it, either. So, you can take the money you save by not having to buy either, and treat your significant other to pizza in a nice place. Oh what the heck: and buy yourself a beer, too.

With email and comment requests, the UPT books are all gone. Still some Practical RDF to give away.

Update Well, that’s it, all gone. If those who have snagged a copy, chicken scratch and all, could send me your address, I’ll get these out this week.

Categories
Just Shelley Technology

Are black holes Firewire or USB 2.0?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

What’s spooky about cleaning out closets, and I mean really cleaning out closets, is all the stuff you have that has absolutely no value.

For instance, I have about 100 zip drive disks. I’ve long gotten rid of the drives, as well as the computers that take floppies.

Then there are these power cords for what, I have no idea because all the devices I can find have their cords.

I figure I have 2437 parallel printer cords, and 193 miles of cable wire. These go nicely with the 87 kilometers of ethernet line.

What is this? What is this? I haven’t a clue what it is. It’s black and plastic, that’s all I know.

Why does one woman need 13 maps of California?

I have instruction manuals for microwaves I got rid of 8 years ago. And I still have Microsoft CDs from 2000. If I owned an orchard, I could hang them from trees to scare away deer and birds. Since my roommate has declined to play Cubical War, I might as well toss them.

One can have too many pens.

I have several hundred slides of lava lamps.

Categories
Burningbird

The Escapes

I can see I need to improve my use of escapes with quotes in some of my semantic web technology, though the effect can sometimes be a bit humorous.

I’m about to publish a series of posts on photography, but before I do I have a question: has my site been as slow for you to access as it has been for me? I’m thinking this is a by-product of the Blonde Joke hits, but it could be my new DSL connection and only I’m having problems accessing pages.