CD rants bore me, I should stop.

I hate buying CDs. Three years ago I tried unplugging my CD player and have been listening to MP3s exclusively ever since. I’ve already downloaded and listened to several of the albums below and liked them enough to own. When the albums arrive I will take each CD out of the jewel case exactly once, rip the songs to MP3, eject the CD from the computer, place them back into their jewel cases and throw them into a box with the the 500 or so other CDs which have never been unpacked since we moved.

CDs are obsolete, they don’t hold enough data (early eighties data compression), they don’t contain any meta-data about the music and they take up far too much space. Additionally I hate knowing that my purchases are going to help the RIAA continue to exploit artists and further erode my fair-use rights by lobbying Congress with half-truths. If there was any way to bypass the recording industry and send money directly to the artists, I would. I’m buying these CDs for convenience and because I know I should, but it feels like an obligation and is completely devoid of pleasure.

Anyway, I’m buying these:

• Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot


• Craig Armstrong: As If to Nothing, The Space Between Us


• Moby: 18


• Tom Waits: Alice, Blood Money

Babies love these things, no matter how ugly they are. Lila’s is coming later this week.

For the past several days (months if you count thinking about it), I’ve been researching different content-management systems for the FXScript Reference. I’m currently evaluating:

• PHP-Nuke (installed, far less than thrilled)
• Geeklog (installed, might be too rigid)
• phpWebSite (installed, this might be the one)
• PostNuke
• Greymatter (no database)
• Movable Type (been thinking about this one, it might actually work quite well)

…and a others as I stumble across them.

My goal is to end up with something between an O’Reilly Nutshell book and the PHP Manual, which is not only dynamic and searchable, but also actively commented by users. User comments would be reviewed, edited and potentially deleted, but it would open up the FXScript Reference to be much bigger than it is now and much bigger than I could do on my own.

I’m bouncing between a do-it-all solution with most of the bells and whistles removed or a simple solution where I custom build the features I need. Currently I’m leaning towards a stripped down solution. It must use a database and will hopefully allow attributed, non-registered posting. (I hope that isn’t a mistake.)

I’d like this to happen with a pre-built system for a few reasons: First, I don’t really know how to build one of these yet. Second, I don’t have time to build one from scratch right now, even if I did know how. Third, an open-source solution can be taken apart and learned from, so next time I will be able to build my own. I’ve been wanting to learn this stuff for a while anyway and this was supposed to be my “database year”. Most of the new web projects I’m thinking about these days should be built on a database, so it’s about time I learn this stuff.

“…we will be able to render movies like Final Fantasy, Shrek and Toy Story in real time on a PC next year.”



— Dave Kirk, chief scientist at Nvidia.

RCN’s domain name servers have not propagated yet, neither have the ones at w3.org. Most others seem to have updated.

About a third of the DNS servers I’ve been checking have propagated in the past hour. I have to get up early, hopefully it’ll be 95% by morning.

The site is now hosted by Liquid Web. Amazing deal, ugly web site, extensive server access and configuration tools, spotty tech support and poor people skills. Good thing it works well enough that I don’t need to talk to them. I’m happy to have a bunch of socially-challenged über geeks manning the machines, they tend to really know what they’re doing. So far the site seems much faster.