Monkinetic Weblog

Bill Bumgarner: IP more sacred than life? >In Japan if you develop software that MIGHT be used to violate copyright laws you can be charged with a crime and be arrested. Yet, in the USA, if you manufacture guns that MIGHT be used to kill someone you are essentially immune from criminal prosecution...

Hehe. I went looking for information again this year on planting a winter lawn (something we have to do in Arizona since the Bermuda that survuves the summer heat can't survive the cooler winter temps) and discovered that my weblog post from last year is the #2 result on Google for arizona winter lawn. Not that it helps, but it was funny.

Bill has some good comments on Microsoft's acknowledgement that Longhorn is not going to ship until 2006.

Wow, I actually had to find out about this from Lockergnome (Thanks Meryl!) - R.E.M. has a cool mock news site up at morningteam.com promoting their new release, "Bad Day".

BIll points us to this bit of absurdity from Donald Rumsfeld.

Eric Meyer went and saw Weird Al Yankovic...

Tim Jarret saw R.E.M. in concert. Sounds like an awesome show! They're going to be at Red Rocks Sept 13, but there's no way I can make it this year. ($54 before TicketMaster fees!)

No time to blog this properly, but Bill blogs an IM conversation we had about Mark Pilgrim's "Winer Watch". See Bill's site for links.

Well, I managed to survive Monday's brain-bake, so obviously Murphy was not satisfied. Grilling a nice fat rack of boneless pork ribs tonight I got a rather severe burn to my forearm from the grill lid. Damn.

Michael Clarke posted (it's an old post, but I just found his weblog) [some mildly tortured self-analytical thoughts](http://llareggolb.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_llareggolb_archive.htmlNone#200208624) about being a PR flack and what happens when PR and Blogging collide...

Dave Hyatt, beloved of Safari-using geeks everywhere, has had his two blogs redesigned. Very nice!!

I got to talk to Mo, owner of Coffee Rush, today. He and his brother Yanni (no idea if I'm spelling that right - they're Jordanian) have been running Coffee Rush for a year now, and evidently started planning for it 5 years ago.

Jodi, dear that she is, has been picking up my blogging slack lately over on . She's covered our visit to Paulo Soleri's Arcosanti, my mom's plans for an Ivy Family portal, as well as a site of her own, and she's reviewed X-Men 2, which we saw yesterday (hint- it rocked!). If posting seems slack here, for the latest!

Keola Donaghy sums up my feelings on Apple's Music Store exactly: quote...please don't ignore the greater potential of this service to level the playing field for artists and smaller labels who cannot get the attention of the major labels that are now available on your service.endquote

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The Blogger fail-safe: pictures of your cat. In this case, Toby, our cute, lovable and ornery tabby.

I recently found a solution to a problem that had been bugging me for some time.

Conversant has this really cool email gateway - all posts to this site go out to anyone who is subscribed to the site and has the list feature turned on.

So, when I write a post like this one, the post goes out over email, and the <blockquote> tags are stripped. How do my subscribers know where the quote is?

To the rescue: Conversant&#39;s text resources. A resource is like a Manila/Radio shortcut: it&#39;s a defined piece of text that gets replaced with something else when the content gets rendered. Resources are most often used for links and images, but Conversant has a powerful resource type called a Text Resource.

A text resource can have anything in it - html, text, and Conversant template macros. So I essentially write my own no-arg macro called&#39;quote&#39;:

<-#if condition="ioInterface&#39;email&#39;"-->
----- quote --<-#else--><blockquote><-#endif-->

If the post is being rendered for email, it inserts the "----quote----" text, otherwise it renders the blockquote tag. A partner resource called&#39;endquote&#39; inserts "------" or the closing blockquote tag.

Now, when excerpting text, I start the excerpt with |quote| and close it with |endquote|, and it gets rendered legibly both on the site and in the list email.

Scoble's got a series of posts and replies relating to a bill in Oregon that would make it law that state agencies would have to consider using open-source software. The first post is this one.

Scoble says he was told that Jim Fawcette (of Fawcette Publishing) thinks weblogs are a waste of time.

Jon Udell: The Future Of Online Community.

Ok, I'm on my second cup already because I got distracted. After noticing Scoble's link to Joel on Software, I decided to read Joel's most recent email article, on Building Communities with Software. It got me thinking about how the forum on this site works. I may make some changes around here but I'm not sure yet.