Why in hell is there no standard and preferred “author” element in RSS? I know I have bitched about this before. Reading a groupblog feed without the author credit is so aggravating.

Decent overview of how Google’s recent blundering attempts to compete with Facebook have resulted in breaking their relationship with their initial core userbase.

this appears to be the tree that the lightning struck last night.

oh man, I am trying to plug my late era Roman history ignorance gap and it is a total struggle, very much like trying to get a grip on Egyptian century-by-century pharaonic heritance or Chinese imperial regimes. there are too many names of unfamiliar provenance. they slip around one another like tadpoles in a pond.

about a minute ago there was a HUGE lightning strike just north of our house. man, scary.

whenever something like that happens i think about what it must be like to live under an artillery barrage. not a desirable thing.

This week, our water bill came in. it was for five hundred dollars. i freaked out, of course.

a bit of elimination (rimshot) (double rimshot) pointed to the ancient toilet downstairs, to which I have done various maintenance things over the years, including reseating it and replacing the flapper.

The primary culprit was the old and corroded refill valve, which appears to be original 1967 vintage. So I swapped that out for a new $10 refill assembly with a leak-sensing refill feature that would prevent the tank from refilling if there was a drainage link.

Sure enough, there was a leak in the base of the drain which slowly would add the tank water to the bowl. so i had to replace the drain valve assembly.
This involved taking the back tank off the toilet and jerry rigging a range of bolts and washers to successfully implement the tension join at the base of the tank. This took three trips to home depot and I am awaiting the verdict on the most recent install.

so the non-labor repair costs as of this moment are about $30. a whole new unit was $50. they also had a low-flow model with a city of seattle $30 rebate for $88, but it was out of stock.

i think it is likely that if this install attempt fails, I will just have to go with a new unit.

you know, i spent years playing Irish music with a large and rotating cast of characters.

I find that today has sort of mutated into a day of the dead for me.

to you honored dead: you live in me, and I miss you unreasonably.

So I started running again and after the third day, my tendonitis was back. So I’m off again for a while, which is aggravating.

Terrill and I were able to swap some tunes, including his latest recordings, which are freakin’ GREAT, totally over the top reverb and feedback psychedelic freakouts.

I am this close to project complete. The last time I posted that, I was blown up by HDCP.

In the meantime, and before that, I have assembled comprehensive personal knowledge of XBMC, MLB playback options, cabling, and the current state of affairs with regard to HDCP in general and in specific Apple’s clearly over-reaching implementation thereof.

I am pretty reluctant to write about HDCP, because the DCMA pretty clearly makes it basically illegal to discuss in public from a critical perspective. Were I to express an opinion on the matter, it would be highly negative.

So instead of discussing HDCP, I will discuss something else, when I get around to journaling this project. Hodcip Green Frog, perhaps.

Where’s _why?: What happened when one of the world’s most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers disappeared.