jeez louise. there's so much going on at the moment. kris and i met with the midwife and during the exam we heard the baby's heartbeat! it was a exciting as you can probably imagine. we had a prenatal exam and everything looks fantastic. kris is doing her job and being a great mama and everything looks healthy and normal. it's hard to imagine that the first trimester demarcation has come and gone. it won't be long before we have a happy, healthy anklebiter.

there's been an interesting discussion on the "fairness" of quoteblogs , which pull whole posts and only "weakly" attribute the source, if at all. the original inluminent post contains several examples of quoteblogs that are causing the concern, including scoble's soon to be continued quoteblog .

i had recently become quite a fan of scoble's quoteblog because it was such a relatively effficient way to find things that i wouldn't have found any other way, except that it was always irritating that it was rough to decipher where the original post came from. i had tended to think of it as a "readibility" issue, since it's clear that scoble's intent was never to "steal" and it was usually easy to determine where the post was coming from after doing a little digging. i'm a bit less comfortable about sites like stargeek that don't make it clear at all that they are swiping content without attribution . it certainly seems like stargeek is playing fast and loose with any reasonable definition of "fair use".

i've actually dealt with similar issues with the other sections of the which aren't quite linkblogs, but aren't quite quoteblogs. years ago when i started, say, conflux i had a simple idea of keeping track of all the little quote snippets that i would collect related to issues that interested me and see how they would evolve over time. conflux is tomalak's realm with a broader scope and "contextual threading". in the naive salad days of yore, i had the vague impression that it probably wouldn't be o.k. to quote whole articles, that i probably shouldn't link to "for fee" content unless it was part of a freely available summary and that i should probably make it obvious where the link was coming from. i didn't think in terms of the legal definition of "fair use", but it seemed to be fair to me and i didn't think anyone would be concerned with the half a dozen readers i might get.

i think it took a year before i got a mildly threatening letter from an editor at a publication asking if i knew that my site was "illegal" and likely to expose me to the whims of the interpretation of "fair use"? i promptly responded that i'd be happy to remove all links to their publication and alert readers as to why i had done so. after a few more emails the editor decided that i was harmless and let the issue go without getting any lawyers involved.

but now it's years later and i found myself with a few more than the original handful of readers and every once in awhile, i wonder what would happen if i placed ads on the site and started collecting some pocket change. is it fair for me to make money off "collecting" other people's content? does it make a difference if money is involved [ the editor said that it did factor in her decision to not pursue the issue further ]? is it "fair" to pull five sentences? how about ten? twenty? does the length of the original article matter?

i have a family member or two that suffer from crohn's disease, so i'll have to ask them if they'll be trying out the "diet of worms" therapy. some might think the cure is as bad as the disease, but the results seem impressive:

"In many of the volunteers the symptoms of IBD, such as abdominal pain, bleeding and diarrhoea, disappeared. The remission rate was 50 per cent for ulcerative colitis and 70 per cent for Crohn's, says gastroenterologist Joel Weinstock of the University of Iowa, who devised the treatment."

[ via paracelsus ]

• Google's Gmail as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) via olivier travers
  [ "Unix-style RIA: Gmail is a great example of this. It's essentially text-only, with keyboard equivalents. It's reminiscent of Pine or vi, particularly with regard to how keyboard shortcuts work. The emphasis is on speed, not friendliness -- it's best for geeks and most likely designed by geeks (and I mean that in a nice way)." ]
• Maxing out at mini?
  [ "...Jupiter Research has a new report out saying that MP3 players with 4GB of storage space is more than enough for most people since 90% of consumers don't have more than a thousand MP3s..." ]
• people who RSS this feed this also feed...
  [ "Interesting observation I made while tooling around Bloglines. In my bloglines subscriptions, which you can see on the blogroll on the left, I can click on the feed and see who is subscribing to the feed by clicking on a neat little link they have titled "subscribers"." ]
• it's morbus' world
  [ "Allow me, if I may, to go on a short ego trip:" ]

phew. due to a story that's far too long to go into now, i've got my internet back on. remember all that stuff about us selling our house ? well, when you sell your house, it usuall means that you're moving somewhere else - which is exactly what we did.

yes, that's right. i'm typing this from somewhere new. we're still in grand rapids , but we've embarked on an interesting adventure that has left many of our friends and family scratching their heads. more later. right now, i'm just happy to have a stable wireless connection in the new digs. i wonder what's been going on in blogland while i've been away.

the plot thickens. after cameron "gumshoe" marlow broke the lid off the purported hot abercrombie hoax, he uncovered that "the hot abercrombie chick" at the very least, pseudonymous. and now, it looks like the hoax allegations have been pulled from google.

my theory is that "the hot abercrombie chick" is actually a clever marketing scheme concocted by none other than abercrombie & fitch. think about it. you think that abercrombie wouldn't have sent a "cease and desist" letter when they found out about the site? trademark law dictates that companies like abercrombie are obligated to fight all attempts at brand dilution ( except in cases of parody ). and who had the pull to get the allegation quickly removed from google? it makes you wonder how much advertising abercrombie does with google.

for the humorless, i suppose i should probably point out that the previous statements are completely baseless and not meant to be taken seriously, although i do think it'll be interesting to see where cameron's gumshoes take him.

• Inside Firefox
  [ "Firefox development musings by Ben Goodger." ]
• thunderbird rebrand
  [ "Following on from the branding of Firefox, comes the new logo for Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird." ]
• What's coming in NetNewsWire
  [ "The next release of NetNewsWire is going to be a big upgrade, perhaps bigger than you were expecting." ]
• bugday for topsites
  [ "With the upcoming release of Mozilla 1.7 and Firefox 1.0, it is extremely important that we discover any outstanding top 100 website blocker issues while we still have time to get them fixed." ]
• 10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis
  [ "So, recognizing that this is an emerging area, here are 10 rules for using blogs and wikis to achieve your branding goals..." ]
• What is Google Cooking?
  [ "I suspect this is a hint of something new coming, perhaps feed-aware search like Feedster or RSS links in search results like Yahoo. Maybe a Google-aggregator? Google BlogNews?" ]

funny. i was wandering through my aggregator and saw that steve jenson is offering to hand out some leftover gmail accounts. so i shot him a quick email, but can't tell if was sent, because my IMAP server is acting funny. while i was trying to figure out if the mail was actually sent, i noticed that ev posted a blurb about how "active blogger [users] " can get an account. so i logged into blogger and lo-and-behold, i found that i "qualified".

is it coincidence that i'd get the account just as my regular email is acting all funky? i suspect google/blogger operatives are at work at this very moment attempting to snare unsuspecting victims with a vast conspiracy which is surely related to the filesystem to end all filesystems.

when gazing at the various artifacts of the ronco empire , it's amazing to see just how many of the devices were owned by me or my family or friends - including the "smokeless ashtray" and even the "DIY" plastic foliage kit. if you're of a certain age, you know that you sang 'cum on feel the noize' into your "mr. microphone". [ via boingboing ]

• page 23, sentence 5: an autopsy
  [ "Mean while, I was infected by a distaff branch, which I was able to trace, with some missing links, to stonemirror who seems to have been a major LJ infection vector for p23s5 which he refers to as the "Discordian Book Meme" - April 5th." ]
• I Like (FanPants) and I Cannot Lie
  [ "Fan Pants are a patent-pending invention by Larry D. Kuhuski, inventor, which alleviate the need to bring cushions to your favorite sporting event by placing extra padding in the seat of your (certainly very stylish) pants." ]
• hot abercrombie hoax?
  [ "The notion that this attractive college freshman was spending all of her time trolling weblogs looking for exposed weblogs seemed implausable to me." ]
• Why MySQL grew so fast
  [ "The mysql.com domain sees almost as much traffic as ibm.com." ]

• Post to MovableType from Jabber
  [ "When I told Mena about this last night, she said "where's the code?"." ]
• Using Perl code from PHP via anil
  [ "The PHP Perl extension was implemented to allow the usage of Perl code from within PHP. It is a wrapper that embeds the Perl interpreter and converts data from PHP to Perl and back." ]
• The semantic engineer via blackbeltjones
  [ "He doesn't think a thermostat is conscious. But he thinks its behaviour embodies assumptions about the world, and these can't be distinguished, in their effects on the world, from beliefs..." ]
• Let them eat HIV
  [ "It's important for porn to be legal. The government has no business outlawing sex or sexual fantasy. But this principle is not so sacred that we need to allow an industry to exploit and endanger its workers. There's no fundamental right to express HIV. There's no right to pay someone to play Russian roulette for your entertainment." ]
• Book Review: Against All Enemies
  [ "To a great extent, the book is a chronicle of failure - failure at the White House, failure at the CIA, failure at the FBI, failure everywhere. Clarke is quite clear about this, and his willingness to admit where he failed adds punch to his criticism of other people - people who, to a large extent, have still not admitted their failure." ]
• State of the Computer Book Market
  [ "Another point that I want to bring to your attention is that book sales tell a very different story about technology adoption than do many other statistics." ]

perhaps this is a trite observation, but i think the there's a social science ph.d disssertation just waiting to be written on the range of reactions to gmail . where some see a revolution others are left scratching their heads - and, of course, there's been everything in between . who knew that web-based email could invoke such passion?

if i don't switch to greencine from netflix after they raised their monthly subscription price, does that make me lazy or loyal?

interesting. dan bricklin is thinking about how to make a living as an entrepreneur software developer and it looks like it might involve new ways of looking at licensing.

oh the mind reels at the thought of the tagline for the nascent "NRA news".

"all the news that's fit to pry from my cold dead hands"?

speaking of that, don't miss out on the opportunity to win charlton heston's "my cold dead hands" rifle - and no, that's not clever onion article .

at the very least the "nra news" will probably be more entertaining than air america .

• marketers press for product placement in magazine text
  [ ""The only way we're going to be more successful is to get even more creative and try to find ways to address this church-and-state" issue of editorial vs. advertising in magazines, said Matthew Spahn, director of media planning at Sears, Roebuck & Co." ]
• maciej ceglowski on the pc forum
  [ "Strutting around like those long-legged birds that fearlessly pick insects off the heads of large predators were the countless publicists, most of them frighteningly well-dressed women in tight black pants." ]
• Another view on Entrepreneurial Myths
• Reality's Apprentice
  [ "On screen, the team leaders stood outside our stoop and negotiated for the apartment above us. Off screen, we knew a few things they didn't. A month before, for instance, the previous occupant and my upstairs neighbor had jumped out the window." ]
• Girl chimps learn faster than boys
  [ "Daughters pick up their mother's skills, while sons play rough and tumble. " ]
• Pfizer Offers Free Viagra to Loyal Users
  [ "After six Viagra prescriptions are filled, the seventh will be free, Pfizer told the Journal." ]

dave thinks that the technorati comments link should have an icon. i don't know if i'm violating some sort of "fair use" clause, but it seems like the technorati bubble icon ( ) would fit the fill perfectly. hopefully dave sifry doesn't have a problem with me swiping it for testing purposes. maybe if i get around to it, i'll implement jon udell's suggestion for a displaying a technorati comment count, which i guess it might look something like this: : (5).

feel free to comment.

why should boingboing have all the fun with technorati "comment threads" and movabletype? it's easy and fun with to do with your blogger template. just add the following link somewhere to your template:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?&url=http://path/to/your/archive/$BlogItemArchiveFileName$>#<$BlogItemNumber$>" title="Technorati Cosmos">Other blogs commenting on this post</a>

wierdly, technorati appears to be chomping the # permalink stamp from the url. you can see it in the url bar, but it doesn't look like it's showing up in the actual search. am i doing something stupid, dave?

in case, maybe somebody will comment on this post so i can see if it works.

update: nothing like reinventing the wheel. apparently the "pound sign problem" is well known and easily fixed by using "%23" instead of the "#". hi. ho.

update again:hey! neat. people are commenting and apparently finding the rediscovered blogger template link useful. neat.

• musiCompass via hublog
  [ "Each person is represented by their music profile, a computer-readable representation of their listening habits So far data has been collected from around 60.000 users, totaling over 100 million listened songs." ]
• Mac OS X: The Grand Unified Platform
  [ "The facts are becoming too huge to ignore: Windows has become a liability." ]
• Why Mobile Phones are Annoying
  [ "Bystanders rated mobile-phone conversations as dramatically more noticeable, intrusive, and annoying than conversations conducted face-to-face. While volume was an issue, hearing only half a discussion also seemed to up the irritation factor." ]
• How to write a masterpiece of a resume via inluminent
  [ "The resume is a tool with one specific purpose: to win an interview. If it does what the fantasy resume did, it works." ]

i've got the perfect recipe for a dish i'll call "easter sleepy sleepy". first, run 17 miles and follow it up with heaping plates of ham, turkey, potatoes and a few adult beverages.

nothing says springtime like the inaugural starting of the galaxie 500 motor. i don't really properly "winterize" the car beyond putting it in the garage, so it's always a little suspenseful to pump the gas pedal and turn the key for the first time each spring.

i haven't done much of anything with the car since i bought it and i think kris is probably getting sick of it taking up space, so we'll see what happens in the coming months. as much as it hurts, i might have to find a new home for her [ the galaxie, not kris ].

• Problems with the iPod mini?
  [ "Over at iPodLounge some iPod mini owners are complaining about its sound being distorted and crackling whenever any pressure is applied anywhere on the player." ]
• Google FAQ
  [ "Some extremely enterprising individuals have created a FAQ based on questions that frequently appear in the google.public.support.general newsgroup." ]
• The Music Recommendation System via veen
  [ "This system, designed by students at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), operates by taking ratings from your own iTunes playlists and comparing them against other users who have used the recommendation system." ]
• Clarke's Hot Book Best Beach Reading Since Ludlum, Proust
  [ "If you're reading these words, you could probably use a hobby." ]

• Gentoo Linux: Your Friendly Quick Installation Guide
  [ "I've managed to take the standard 20-30 hour installation and bring it down to about 2-3 hours of time." ]
• The Usability Wars
  [ "I hereby publicly accuse X-Windows of graphically castrating UNIX software design from a usability standpoint." ]
• prada epicenter revisited
  [ "Ubicomp is hard, understanding people, context, and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high. I used to say ubicomp was a ten-year problem; now I'm starting to think that it's really a hundred-year problem." ]
• Reply to Clay
  [ "It's as if a real world dating service not only matched you up, but also insisted that you date at its restaurant, send mail through its private service, and have sex at its motel. ASN's are like relationship theme parks." ]
• electric sheep
  [ "Behind the scenes, the screen-saver contacts a server and joins the parallel computation of new sheep. Every fifteen minutes 24/7 a new sheep is born and distributed to all clients for display." ]

hallelujah! if you want to know if your contact information is up to date you'll have to contact me directly because i've permanently opted out of plaxo. if you don't know how to get ahold of me to find out if your contact information is up to date, then i guess that probably tells you something, since i've been the proprietor of this here vast wasteland for quite some time.

well that was easy. this whole fsbo thing has turned out to be a breeze.

the couple from yesterday came by with their realtor. after a bit of very mild uncomfortableness about making an offer in front of us, they made it and we countered and they accepted. the final offer was very close to our asking price so we're obviously very happy. all of their paperwork seems to be in order, but we're going to have a realtor friend go over the paperwork to make sure all that everything looks normal. of course, there's still the inspection and a few other details to be finalized but everything is looking as positive as can be expected. i still can't believe it. we didn't even have to advertise in the paper, pay to have the house included in the mls, or even have a single open house. even better for us, they'd like to close by the end of month which works out perfectly for us.

inquiring minds are wondering why we're moving so quickly. you'll have to wait just a little bit longer for that story.

we had a realtor and his partner stop by today on behalf of a client who was out of town. they live in the neighborhood and after they booked the appointment we realized that we had all met each other several times in the past through mutual aquaintances. they own 20 properties around town and have seen just about everything on the market so it was a great opportunity to get some honest feedback on our pricing. they thought it was priced very conservatively and would move fast. in fact, they knew of some recent fsbo sales in our immediate vicinity that we didn't know about when we were coming up the pricing and it looks like we might be pricing it very conservatively. hi. ho.

the buyers from yesterday came by again today and once again it was tough to tell how interested they were. i gave their realtor a really quick tour and they left without many questions and saying that they were on their way to another walkthrough.

3 hours later their realtor called back and said they'd all like to meet tommorrow evening to "construct" an offer. typically a buyer will just submit an offer through their agent and ask that the seller get back to them in a predefined amount of time, so i'm not sure what to make the request for us all to get together. i've been upfront that we're not going to move much on the price if we have to pay their realtor's commission, so it'll be fun to see what they come up with. it's hard to read the tea leaves on this one. i guess all questions will be answered tommorrow.

1. release garageband .
2. release device which "...commands maximum buyer demand" .
3. let everyone from #1 sell through the itunes store . via the tao of mac
4. create new ways to find new music from 3 and link it to 2. [ and turn a blind eye to playfair ]
5. profit!

things have been pretty quiet around here lately. it's time to let the cat our the bag on this one. in addition to the new pregnancy and training for the marathon , kris and i have been getting ready to sell our house, so the last few weeks have been a frenzy of completing all those half done house projects that we've been procrastinating on the past two years. my nights and weekends have been filled with wallpaper removal, sanding, painting, caulking, removing toilets, laying vinyl flooring ( well, actually, kris single-handedly did that ), putting toilets back in, more sanding, painting caulking, taking doors out, putting new doors in etc. etc. you get the picture.

all this in anticipation of putting the "for sale by owner" sign out front and waiting to see what happened. we've never done an fsbo [ industry lingo ] and we weren't quite sure what to expect. i've seen a few comments from people i respect that seem to be negative on going the fsbo route. and of course, the web at large is filled with enough anectodes on either side of the argument that it's pretty easy to support whatever position you'd like to take on the issue. in our case, we happen to live in a neighborhood that currently has and has historically had a high number of fsbo properties for sale, so we thought we'd take a shot at taking advantage of the precedent.

we stealthily put out signs on friday night, and much to my surprise, we started getting drive-bys and phone calls by 9 a.m. saturday morning. by saturday night we had several calls from a couple that was extremely interested, after having heard the price and the basic information about our house, and they wanted to come by that night or on sunday. we were caught totally off guard. my expectations were fairly low since weren't listed in The Realtor Database [ a.k.a. the mls ], and i figured it would take us a week or two to get some momentum going. so we put them off until tonight ( sunday ) and spent all day today cleaning and finishing last minute tasks. we set an appointment for between 4:30 and 5 p.m. and at 4:35 we finally finished the last of the cleaning and kris loaded the car with dogs and took them to the dog park, on the assumption that the process might go a little smoother without two dogs jumping all over the prospective buyers or otherwise making a nuisance of themselves.

at 5:10 p.m., as i was beginning to think that we had done all the cleaning in vain, a husband and wife pulled-up with their kids. they didn't look at all like what i had imagined over the phone and i wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. having been around the block a few times with buying and selling houses, i know i hate it when the owners are hovering over you when you look at a place, so i immediately let them know that i'd like to give them a whirlwind tour to explain a few things and then i'd make myself scarce.

when i get into situations like this, i'm incapable of not making jokes. very dry jokes. if i try to not make jokes something happens and the jokes start coming faster. so i'm making little dry jokes as i'm walking the family through the house. they're falling flat. these people have their poker faces on and aren't saying a word. they don't seem to be looking closely at anything. they don't open any cupboards, they didn't look under anything, they didn't look in the closets. nothing. so, they get the whirlwind tour and i ask if they'd like me to leave them alone. no, they say, they've seen enough and will just go talk amongst themselves and get back to me. they ask if there has been any interest from other buyers and i tell them honestly that we've been surprised at the number of phone calls, but that they were the first to see the house. and that was it. as they leave, i think that it's funny because i have absolutely no idea if they like the house or hate it. as i finish the thought one of the children says as she's bounding down the walkway, "mommy, you know what that is? that's our new house!" the parents don't say anything and i'm not sure what to make of it.

two hours later the couple calls back and says that they'd like to schedule a second walk-through on monday at 6 p.m., which seems like a good sign.

four hours later the husband calls back and wants us to let them know if we get any other offers. i might be wrong but that seems like an even better sign.

why are we selling our house? well that's a longer and potentially more interesting story that will be the subject of a future post. stay tuned.

apparently lost in the all the april fool's day fun is the fact that amazon patented the cookie. and it's not a joke.

really, could you have a more fantastic juxtaposition than bob dylan and victoria's secret ? over-the-hill, grizzled pop culture icons pimping lingerie on scantily clad supermodels seems perfectly normal to me. personally, i'd like to see keith richards and mary kay get together. [ and no i didn't come up with that post title all by myself, i ripped it from link rotted article on the subject ]