I visited my family in the Bay Area last week, after a week of some of the worst weather all year; it stopped raining an hour after my plane landed, and did not rain again for the six days I was there. But while I was away, it snowed here in St. Louis, ending a spell of (apparently) unusually warm December weather.

My conclusion is that I must bring the good weather with me where I travel. The weather report says that it’s going to be warmer again here for the next week, so that’s a good sign.

On the other hand, posting about this here is probably just asking for trouble.

I just read an article from last Monday’s Chronicle about a course being taught at San Francisco State University on The Lord of the Rings. I don’t find this particularly newsworthy (universities have been teaching classes on Tolkien for decades), but the article did quote one of the instructors on the recent movie versions: “The truth of the matter is — I don’t think Tolkien would be very happy with it.” Having just seen The Two Towers for the second time, I disagree.

Apparently the instructors of this course disapprove strongly of the changes the movie has made regarding plot details. My understanding, though, is that Tolkien’s goal was to write a modern myth, a legend for a society that was no longer interested in the old epic tales that Tolkien studed in his day job as a professor of Old English. Most legends do undergo change, though, as the story is passed from person to person, generation to generation and through different mediums. I think Tolkien would have approved of a good screen adaptation of his tale (which I think the recent movies are) that made his stories and its themes and morals more accessible to a large, modern audience, even if they did require some minor changes in the plot and characterization.

Tolkien scholars might point out that Tolkien wrote several letters in which he writes disapprovingly of the idea of movies based on his books. My take, though, is that he probably thought the result would be more “silly” than anything else; he probably never imagined that it would be possible to put a ‘realistic’ visualization of Middle Earth onto film. Also, I am given to understand that he was soured to the idea by some bad business deals involving the movie industry. I think, though, that he would have appreciated the movies, had he seen them.

P.S. This reminds me. If you’ve read the entire trilogy, you should definitely read this piece that Jim Cambias posted to Usenet a year ago. I read it every few months, and it gets better every time. Major spoilers for all three books (or movies, I suppose — check back again in a year).

I just did a Google search for official (I forget why). For some reason, I find the top results fascinating, probably because the word official has nothing to do with why these sites are popular. But I guess these are sites whose topics inspire a lot of unofficial content.

Top results include the official Web sites for the NBA, Star Wars, and the Vatican.

For the first time since high school, I have an email inbox whose message count can be measured in single digits. I finally figured out the secret to clearing out the 3000 messages that have been lurking around my mail client since before the turn of the millennium: turn up the keyboard repeat rate and hold down D.

It’s possible I deleted something I might want later on, but it’s unlikely. Most of the messages are either spam, mailing list traffic, emails I read and dealt with years ago and didn’t get around to deleting or saving, and emails that I needed to respond to that I didn’t, and the sender either contacted me again, or gave up hearing from me long ago (this happens far more often than I am proud of). Either way, I’m just in awe of how quickly my email client launches right now.

I’ve tried a few times recently to cook an omelet, but I can’t seem to get the hang of it. Either the egg doesn’t cook quickly enough to keep its shape, and I end up having to scramble it, or I have too much heat and the egg fries as soon as it hits the pan, resulting in something that looks a lot like an omelet, but doesn’t really taste like it, or stay folded well.

Maybe I should stick to easier breakfasts, like cereal and milk or leftover pizza.

I have a LiveJournal now, thanks to Laura. I still plan to keep writing here, but it will be nice to be able to comment in other people’s LiveJournals as someone other than anonymous.

Eric is using Movable Type for his weblog now, too. By my count, that means there’s at least
four
seperate
copies
of
Movable Type running on rescomp. I guess it’s a popular choice.

By the way, Eric, the lack of titles in your Radio RSS feed never bothered me that much. It was the lack of links. Now, if only you had comments enabled, I wouldn’t have to keep responding to you here :)

Dammit, Eric. You’ve got this song stuck in my head now.

Either that, or I’m getting dumber. I just got this email:

From: "Jennifer Hawkings" <meinlv@msn.com>
To: "" <akosut@Stanford.EDU>
Subject:
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 21:51:55 +0000
 
Browsing through the CNN website I came across this CNN article which seems to
be about you:
 
http://www.cnn.com:USArticle1840@www.liquidshirts.com/
 
Yours,
Jennifer Hawkings

I fell for it, too. Opened the URL, at least. Sigh.

A few weeks ago, I was walking down the hall in our building, when I ran into a woman who (I hope) lives on our hall. She looked at me, said “happy little person” and walked through the door into (I hope) her apartment. I was a little confused, but proceeded into the elevator and forgot about it. The other day, I ran into the same woman in the elevator, who again looked at me and said “happy little person.” I wondered if perhaps this was just an expression she used, but when the elevator stopped and someone else got on, she just said “hello.” I guess she recognized me.

I guess it’s possible I have really bad hearing comprehension, and in fact she said something entirely different and less eccentric. Or maybe I just look like a happy little person to her. Even though I am a good foot taller than she was.

The Omni Group has a real nice-looking set of Cocoa frameworks that they make available under a relatively liberal license. In particular, OWF looks like it might be a perfect fit for some projects I’ve been thinking about. But the enormous complexity of the framework (there are 580 header files describing OWF and the other Omni frameworks it relies on) combined with a lack of documentation, means that it would probably take me longer to understand how to use the frameworks than it would to just write my own code to do the parts I need. This seems like a shame.

I’m not sure whether to be more impressed that there’s a thin layer of snow covering everything outside this morning, or that the weather report was actually right for once.

I’m in the Bay Area for a few days, and I have no plans for Monday afternoon. Does anyone want to have lunch?

Laura and I were discussing this evening what the word “weblog” means. It turns out we think different things, and it also turns out I may be wrong. Which means maybe I need to rename this site. I found this article on Diarist.Net (their server sends the wrong media type, so unless you’re using Internet Explorer, you’ll get the source instead of viewing the page. IE is wrong, by the way) that tries to make a distinction between weblogs and online journals. It doesn’t exactly cover our discussion, but it’s close enough for government work.

I use “weblog” to refer to a vast array of different kinds of Web pages, related really only in the sense that they contain information that is updated or amended on a regular basis, and my definition would include most online journals, including ones that Laura thinks aren’t weblogs (and that, in fact, predate the term). Looking over definitions on the Web, it looks like a lot of people would rather use the term to refer only to short (“pithy”) comments presented on a single Web page in a stream of dated entries. Some would like it to refer mainly to entries that focus on the Web; e.g., links to other Web sites with occasional commentary. The latter usage appears to be what the word was originally coined for. Personally, although I frequented plenty of sites by the late ’90s that epitomized that idea, I never actually encountered the word “weblog” itself until relatively recently, and I arrived at my definition by looking at the sites I knew that used it, and I generalized it, extending the term to include the online journals of the sort I had been reading for years, like Mike’s, which I read back in high school.

To me, it seems like the term should cover a more inclusive range of sites. I guess I want “weblog” to mean “a log on the Web”, and not “a log of the Web”, which is the apparent true etymology. Maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid (and by “kid”, I’m including the Enterprise I watched last week), but I think of “weblog” and I think of something like the Captain’s Log, which included everything from reports on the ship’s status and mission to digressions on personal issues. In the Trek movies, Kirk repeatedly uses his log to rant about Klingons, and this doesn’t seem out of place. I’m not sure what this has to do with weblogs anymore, but it made sense when I started this paragraph.

I guess what I’m getting at is that If I want to write mostly about myself or my life, or to write multiple paragraphs instead of short “sound bites”, certainly I’d hope no one is going to stop me. But I’ve already named this site “Alexei’s Weblog”, which I am now worried pigeonholes the site into a framework I didn’t intend, and prejudices the reader against the sort of log I do intend on keeping.

Eric complains that my RSS feed (the Movable Type default) provides only puts the first few lines (20 words, actually) in the description. I’m not sure this is entirely bad; it certainly saves bandwidth, and I think RSS was originally designed mainly for headline syndication, not for whole articles (Slashdot doesn’t use anythings but headlines and links, for example). Besides, maybe I’d rather people have to go to the Web page to read the whole entry; it won’t be mangled by whatever aggregator they’re using, and they might make or read some comments.

Still, in the interest of playing with fun new toys, I’ve got an experimental new RSS feed with full entry descriptions. I don’t plan to switch to this anywhere else on the site, though, at least not for now.

Of course, Eric’s RSS has some problems too. The lack of <link> tags for the entries, for example. Eric also complains about not being able to easily find the RSS feed for LiveJournal sites. While little orange XML buttons are handy, tools that can parse the HTML header for <link> tags (different ones) have no trouble with LiveJournal sites. While LJ’s own aggregation engine, ironically, can’t do this, tools like NetNewsWire will find the RSS feed automatically if you enter the URL to many sites. I think this is cool.