Memos from April 2006


My Findings on coComment and Movable Type 3.2 Integration

coComment

After 12-hours or so of usage and debug­ging my MT tem­plates to prop­er­ly inte­grate with coCom­ment, I final­ly got some­where to say the least. If you need to catchup to what this is all about, you may read my pre­vi­ous arti­cle on what coCom­ment can do.

Any­ways, I final­ly got around fix­ing my Indi­vid­ual Entry Archive tem­plate. I did the fol­low­ing:

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coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

I was actu­al­ly think­ing of some­thing like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambi­tious. Any­ways, plain and sim­ple,

coCom­ment is the only ser­vice that allows you to enjoy the full poten­tial of blog com­ments on the web. Before coCom­ment, the blo­gos­phere was not a glob­al con­ver­sa­tion, but tons of frag­ment­ed, hard to fol­low, and untrack­able dis­cus­sions.

Using coCom­ment, you can now keep track of what you have been com­ment­ing on, dis­play your com­ments on your blog, and see what is new in the dis­cus­sions you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in (if oth­er users are also on coCom­ment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track com­ments from blog posts that they have actu­al­ly com­ment­ed on, and only com­ments left by oth­er cocom­ment users are shown.“1 But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new ver­sion out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yes­ter­day about ver­sion 0.4c being released, the team also men­tioned the fact that there is now a Fire­fox exten­sion for coCom­ments. This addi­tion, for sure, will make things a bit eas­i­er than hav­ing to use a book­mar­let on the user’s com­put­er.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was tak­ing a look at coCom­men­t’s Blog Inte­gra­tion sec­tion which lists which browsers and blog/CM­S/site-plat­forms it sup­port­ed, I read that Mov­able Type blogs must have the fol­low­ing for­mat,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Oth­er­wise, the com­ment (in coCom­ment) will show up as “(unti­tled)”.

So, see­ing that, there might be an issue of hav­ing every­one involved have a stan­dard way of tem­plat­ing their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and has­n’t been addressed in it’s next iter­a­tion, coCom­ment is pret­ty much forc­ing every­one to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Micro­for­mats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coCom­ment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t got­ten to play around with coCom­ment that com­plete­ly yet.)

All in all, the ser­vice is prac­ti­cal and very use­ful for those that like to read and inter­act with dif­fer­ent blogs. It’s great for coCom­ment to have got­ten around and imple­ment­ed some­thing use­ful to the mil­lions that are very involved with interblog-inter­ac­tiv­i­ty. In it’s cur­rent state of ver­sion 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the oth­er fea­tures it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pret­ty much, like all the oth­er “Web 2.0” appli­ca­tion-sites. =)

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  1. Michael Arring­ton, coCom­ment vis­it to Sil­i­con Val­ley []

What Causes the Lazy?

I just over­heard some­one say­ing this:

I get lazy when I don’t do any­thing.

Does that sound weird to you at all, or is it just me? I mean, aren’t you already lazy if you don’t do any­thing? The def­i­n­i­tion of “lazy”:

adj. la·z·er, la·zi·est

1. Resis­tant to work or exer­tion; dis­posed to idle­ness.
2. Slow-mov­ing; slug­gish: a lazy riv­er.
3. Con­ducive to idle­ness or indo­lence: a lazy sum­mer day.

Mean­while, I also know that if you don’t do any­thing, you are relax­ing, but that itself is weird too. I mean, “relax­ing” is a verb.

Abbr. V or vb.
* The part of speech that express­es exis­tence, action, or occur­rence in most lan­guages.

Action” is the key­word. So I guess, if you are relax­ing you ain’t real­ly doing noth­ing or any­thing. Thus, my pre­vi­ous state­ment that “if you don’t do any­thing, you are relax­ing” is some­what wrong to an extent to what relax­ing is define d as. Know­ing this, it proves say­ing that

[you] get lazy when [you] don’t do any­thing”

just does­n’t make sense—just plain pleonas­tic.

Bot­tom-line kids, don’t do drugs.

WTF Used Drugs?

Well, I’ve been sick the past two weeks. I’ve been cough­ing and all that oth­er nasty stuff that comes with it. This past week­end, I was­n’t even able to get out of the house. I pret­ty much stayed in my room and just coughed my lungs out. Oh what great fun it was?!

Any­ways, giv­en the fact that I picked the High-Val­ue PPO for my med­ical when I came in to work at the Bay last April ’05 (and the fact that I haven’t got­ten sick till now), my pri­ma­ry physi­cian is in LA. So, after call­ing Alame­da Hos­pi­tal for the past two days and email­ing them to help me find a doc­tor that can do a check up on me, Dr. Mom (and side­kick, my aunt) bugged me and told me to just call in to our fam­i­ly doc­tor’s clin­ic.

Fun­ny thing though, my mom called the clin­ic first to set­up some kind of appoint­ment with the admin per­son­els to get the doc­tor free for a bit in order to talk to me. But thats not it yet, my mom told the admin lady that since I’m over here, he (the doc­tor) should just lis­ten to me cough “over the phone” so he can pre­scribe me some med­i­cine. Moms… moms…

Mean­while, I got some prescription—believe it or not. The clin­ic then faxed the order over to the Rite-Aid across the street from work so I can eas­i­ly just pick it up. After fif­teen min­utes or so, I final­ly got the drug for $85. Damn, I hate get­ting sick—you feel like crap and get robbed at the same time.

So, fast for­ward to about a cou­ple of min­utes ago… remem­ber­ing what the phar­ma­cist told me about the dosage of each pre­scrip­tion, I decid­ed to just take every­thing at night before going to bed. Then, the moment of truth came. After tak­ing out the stuff from the paper bag, I thought to myself: “this bet­ter be worth $85, and not get me sick for anoth­er year or so.” Tak­ing one tea­spoon of the cough syrup and a tablet of some aller­gy stuff (seems it’s a sea­son­al thing), I final­ly got to the last item; which was for Bron­chi­tis (I guess).

Care­ful­ly try­ing to open the pack­age, I saw the fol­low­ing:

The quan­ti­ty on the receipt and brochure states that there should be 5 pills. One pill per day. But damn, WTF?!?! This ain’t 5.

Wowsers. Haven’t gone run­ning for days; cough­ing my lungs out; had to pay $85 to get well; and now this. Damn. Ai Dios Mio!

That being that, I just have to write about it and share it. Just remem­ber to check your pre­scrip­tions when you leave the phar­ma­cy so you don’t run into things like this. I nev­er thought it was pos­si­ble for such an over­sight from the phar­ma­cist. They usu­al­ly do dou­ble-check­s/triple-checks so they give you the right stuff.

I’m going to try and wake up real­ly ear­ly to go to the phar­ma­cy and do some­thing about this sit­u­a­tion. Sucks ass. Damn. This is so messed up.

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Mammoth Mtn. Trip Photos Up

Two-thirds of the 15-hour-SF-to-Mammoth-drive Crew

Caren, Jenn and I left Fri­day, 3/31 around 2pm.ish from SF/Alameda. With rainy weath­er, Fri­day traf­fic, an avalanche, bath­room-breaks, mul­ti­ple road clo­sures and detours, etc… we final­ly man­age to arrive at Mam­moth Lakes Sat­ur­day, 4/1 around 6am. Being that we only had one day to board, I did­n’t even sleep after tak­ing the 13-hour-dri­ve shift. Man… I was knocked out Sat­ur­day night. Good times.

Album link.