Sportus interruptus

Sportus interruptus: Three miles from the finish, the leader in the men's marathon was knocked to the ground by a spectator and was subsequently passed by two runners. The attacker has attempted similar stunts at other events to promote his apocalyptic religious books.

Sports · 2004/08/29 · Comment · Link

The Too-Much-Information Age?

A longtime Jacksonville weblogger normally devoted to wonky subjects like his blogging software made a frank public admission on his weblog recently: "I had an affair with another woman. My wife was a severe depressive and I was uncaring and unfeeling towards her when she needed me the most."

Metafilter · 2004/07/29 · Comment · Link

Waiting 79 Years to Build a Home

My wife M.C. Moewe wrote this week's cover story for Folio Weekly, Jacksonville's alternative paper. While looking at real estate in the St. Augustine area, she found Vermont Heights, a failed land development off Interstate Highway 95 that continues to attract and disappoint new buyers, 79 years after it was launched.

The Vermont Heights neighborhood has 600 residential lots within 10 minutes of the Atlantic Ocean and some of the best beaches in Florida. But no one can build there because they have no roads. (Today, a developer would never be allowed to sell lots without roads and utilities.)

She interviewed the daughter of the original developer, who lives in one of the handful of houses that were built back in the 1920s, and found a July 14, 1925, newspaper ad touting the development and its lot prices from $75 to $300:

"Lots high and dry, an abundance of oak and pine trees. Electric lights, telephones and soft water, 5-8 miles off Dixie Highway, both sides ... Highest point in St. Johns County -- wide streets, 12 parks and 80-foot boulevard. An ideal place to establish a home and offers golden opportunity for investment. Prices will advance rapidly as sales increase."

How old is this still-unfulfilled project? The same newspaper had a story from the Scopes Monkey Trial.

2004/07/26 · Comment · Link

Famous anus

Famous anus:: In sports world medical news reminiscent of George Brett's hemorrhoidal issue during the 1980 World Series, an exhausted Jason Giambi is being tested for entamoeba histolytica, a parasite that embeds itself in the intestinal lining and can cause fatal illness.

Sports · 2004/07/26 · Comment · Link

Squashing Link Spammers in Movable Type

I'm finishing a new book, Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition, by covering the subject I've been most eager to cover: plug-in programming.

As you can do with UserTalk scripts in Radio UserLand, you can write scripts that enhance the functionality of Movable Type. The software can be extended with Perl scripts that are executed by placing HTML-style tags and attributes in templates, the same technique employed by the software itself. The script output appears in the rendered file.

Plug-ins also can filter text on any Movable Type template tag. I wrote one this afternoon that tackles an obnoxious form of comment abuse: Posting a bogus comment packed with spam links.

The RemoveExcessiveLinks filter sets the number of links you're willing to tolerate in a user-submitted comment. When a comment hits or exceeds the number, all links are removed from the comment.

To use it, place the RemoveExcessiveLinks.pl script in Movable Type's plugins directory. Use it with a tag by adding a remove_excessive_links attribute with the number of comments to trigger your wrath, like so:

<MTCommentBody remove_excessive_links="5">

With this example, any comment with five or more links will be sanitized to remove all of its links.

Movable Type · 2004/07/22 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Blame Canada

Blame Canada: Calling the conflict in Iraq the "stupidest war ever," Toronto Blue Jays player Carlos Delgado has been avoiding "God Bless America" during games.

Sports · 2004/07/22 · Comment · Link

Taking a Radio Road Trip

Over the last two weeks I drove 2,300 miles from St. Augustine to Dallas and back, visiting for a week to see the oldest and youngest members of my family -- my 80-year-old grandmother and 8-week old nephew.

I subscribed to XM Satellite Radio during the trip, stopping at a Wal-Mart in Live Oak, Florida, to buy a Delphi SkyFi receiver.

The Jetsons future has arrived. I set up XM service with a cell phone and credit card as we drove down Interstate 10, placed an antenna smaller than a floppy disk on the dash, and began receiving 230 stations within 30 minutes.

I bought the radio to free myself of the need to maniacally hunt for stations as they dropped in and out of range on the road trip. Though I got it primarily for Sporting News Radio (how could the Lakers trade Shaq?), the most useful channel turned out to be Open Road, a truckers' radio station that offers frequent interstate weather reports.

Because of Open Road, we avoided storms on I-10 coming home, stopping for the night in Biloxi, Mississippi, when they reported thunderstorms from Alabama to Jacksonville. Driving at night on a highway full of trucks and tired travellers always makes me think about Jayne Mansfield. And not in a good way.

Open Road's a fascinating example of a community forming out of thin air. More than 70,000 of XM's one million subscribers are truckers, according to Truck.Net, and callers, who are primarily long-haul truckers, talked about road conditions, kvetched about concerns such as the law that forbids idling trucks overnight to keep with the air conditioning on, and discussed the need to organize politically. It felt like an 18-wheeled MetaFilter.

2004/07/18 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries