RasterWeb!

Oh sure, you hear a whole lot about Identity Theft, but what about Identity Sale?

When asked recently by Czeltic Girl about Metafilter, I confessed that it’s been quite a while since I’ve been a regular visitor, so when I checked I learned that I am Metafilter user 577 (since March 8, 2000 anyway!)

I also remembered someone asking me about Slashdot a few years ago, and there too I mentioned how I used to visit Slashdot pretty often many years back, and my Slashdot user number is 871.

Most of the people I know have numbers that are a zillion times higher than those, which got me thinking… Maybe I should auction off my identity/user numbers? I mean, just think of the credibility you’d get if you could say “Yeah, I’ve been using Metafilter since 2000, I’m user number 577” or “Slashdot? Yeah, I practically helped start it! I’m user number 871…”

I’m tellin’ ya, fame, fortune, beatiful cars, fast women, prosthetic forearms, they could all be yours… Just make me an offer…

The The Milwaukee Weblogger Meetup Group will be meeting next Wednesday March 16, 2005, and while I’ve never made it to a meetup in the past, I’m going to actually make an effort to attend this one. (Though if I get there before 8 PM it’ll be a miracle.)

So, in the Milwaukee area? Got a blog? Show up!

I’ve known Brent for maybe 10 years now (well, in an online sense.) I think it’s been about 10 years, though I’m not sure, I just remember we were both involved in Frontier back then…

Anyway, there’s an interview at DrunkenBlog, and in it is this quote from Brent:

Life’s too short. I want to work on things I like working on. That excludes Windows.

Is that a great philosophy or what? I knew that Brent was a smart guy…

When you hear about a web-based RSS aggregator from Microsoft and it says it “doesn’t work in Firefox” are you at all surprised? Would you expect anything else?

Do you think it works in any browser/platform besides IE/Windows?

And if someone feeds you that crap about how it was developed using IE, but later they will make it work in Firefox or Safari, or lynx, it’s most likely a load of crap, and if it isn’t a load of crap, then it’s just proof that Microsoft hires people to build stuff like this that just do not understand the web, because the killer web developers/designers I know certainly don’t work that way…

Honestly, everytime I see something from Microsoft that someone else has already done (and done better) I’m convinced it’s just added to the MS CheckList so they can say “Yeah, we got that” as in “Search? We got that” and “Blogs? We got that” and “Aggregator? We got that” and on and on…

Some advice you can apply to your text processing needs:

When in doubt, add another 50 lines of regular expressions…

Really. I’m serious. Any text processing problem can be solved by adding in more regular expressions to your code.

It may be ugly, you may be laughed at and looked down upon, but at the end of the day, when your text is cleaner, and it’s all sitting in MySQL nice and proper, you’ll be the one looking down on those who poo-poo adding in 50 lines of (completely ridiculous) regular expressions…

Mark my words… I know of what I speak!