Photography, art, things that occur to me.
I took the Christmas lights down today. It’s kind of like driving home from vacation: taking them down felt a lot more onerous than putting them up.
There are a few houses in town that not only still have them up, but still turn them on. Maybe they’re thinking what I was thinking, which is “Why not keep them up all year?”
Mashable makes an extremely valid point in the debate about the safety of location-based apps. As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new tool that aggregates public check-ins from location-based apps that users have posted to public places like Twitter and lets you search them by zip code. “I’m not going to link to it or even call it by name. I think it’s completely irresponsible to create something that exposes other people’s vulnerabilities, whether or not you’re claiming to do it for their own good.” My friend Wayne Sutton has a good rundown of the whole issue.
I used to worry a lot more about security and anonymity on the Web. I’ve relaxed a bit, although I still try to use common sense. I’ve stopped accepting Foursquare requests, for instance, from people I don’t know. “For one thing, if I don’t know who you are, why would I care where you are?”
But here’s what it comes down to for me: I was burgled twice in my old house, almost certainly by the same people “they entered the same way, were very tidy, and only took consumer electronics that could be easily sold – I assume they waited until I had replaced everything before coming back a second time”. Those people robbed my house because it backed up to the woods, because I didn’t have a back porch light and because there was no one there to see them. Also, I’m sure it was clear I wasn’t home.
In other words, I’m not worried about a crackhead with an iPhone casing me on Foursquare, when the vast majority of the robberies in my town are someone kicking in a door or breaking a window, grabbing a laptop or a DVD player and running. If the typical burglar around here had a device that he could use to check Foursquare or Gowalla, he would have sold it by now.
I decided to change the theme of this blog to the Thesis theme for WordPress, after hearing so many good things about it, and watching a demo. So far, I like it. It gives much more control over a lot of basic functions, and has a control panel front end for things that you would ordinarily have to do with .php or CSS or CSI Miami or blah blah blah I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I’ve stayed up late a couple of nights working on the blog, and I still have a lot of things I want to do. I imported our Blogger blog “not sure if that looks or sounds sillier” that is mostly a stream of photos of The Boy, and I want to exclude that category of posts from the homepage, so that not everyone who comes here has to look at photos of the cutest child in the world. That sounds awful, but you know what I mean.
Still figuring out how to make that happen. I just tried adding a piece of .php code that I found in a Thesis support forum using the “oh hell, I don’t know, maybe I’ll just stick it in this file and see what happens” method. Thanks to Jeff Cohen for helping me fix my blog, which immediately turned into a blank white page that said, “Idiot idiot idiot idiot” across the top, only written in code.
The irony, of course, is that I’ve been staying up late to work on the blog, which means I haven’t written anything for the blog. I hope to get back to writing again soon. Once I finish categorizing all the uncategorized posts.
Thank you, nice vandal.
