Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

Its a shame to see bad things happen to good people. After all, Nick is making a good effort into trying to revitalize Cincinnati's Over-The-Rhine neighborhood.

Guide to Cincinnati Public Art is a pretty nice listing of publicly displayed sculptures and paintings in downtown Cincinnati. My personal favorite is Two Rectangles Vertical Gyratory II, Variation IV. There is something I find mesmorizing about this kinetic sculpture.

Recently, I had a dream that I was discussing wireless technology with the Queen of England. Not sure what to make of this but I thought it was random enough to share with others.

I've updated my Photo Gallery to use the Creative Commons Attribution and Non-Commercial 2.0 license. I've felt strongly that is is very important for people who create stuff to properly label their creations so other people know what your rules are for reusing your creations. Its nice to give the explict go ahead to people that can use your stuff in some way they see fit. I've already had someone use my Hawaii photos in a presentation. I've also had someone approach me about buying one of my photos for a brochure. The CC license helps create a nice framework for people to share their stuff. I highly recommend to people that they seriously consider explictly licensing their content wether it be a CC license or not. It helps everyone to know what the ground rules are.

Oh, and I have also added a RSS feed for the photo gallery. The next version of Gallery has this feature already, but I am too lazy to upgrade so I hacked together the RSS support.

Update: Thanks to Josh for pointing out the link to Gallery was broken.

If you have a bunch of people over to watch a television that everyone is deeply into, Fondue isn't a very good thing to serve. While it is tasty, the fondue is far too distracting for everyone to get through the shows you want to watch in a timely fashion.

Here is my recommendation for a Darwin Award .

I was recently introduced to the Cincinnati Blogs list which is attempt to list all the blogs from or about the Queen City. They also provide a helpful aggregation of all Cincinnati Blogs which is nice way to start reading what your neighbors have posted.

I've written before about Cincinnati Tomorrow, a group promoting change in our fair city. Well, they've changed names (and websites) to Cincinnati Advance. There website makes it hard to find their RSS feed, but you can find it here.

This is absolutely wonderful, almost obssesive piece of reasearch.

(via Tim Bray)

With all the buzz about the no follow attribute value for links, I thought I'd check into enabling this for the blogs on this server. Turns out it was really easy to implement, since Six Apart is offering a No Follow plugin for Movable Type. It was dead simple to install, and with a rebuild of the site's content, all the comment and trackback hyperlinks have the no follow attribute value added.

My feelings on this issue is that it won't stop the spammers since sending out comment spam is dirt cheap. It will probably help the search engines in the long run provided better results although so of the commenter provided links are going to loose some of their "Google Juice" in the short term. The Six Apart plugin in my opinion is a bit on the draconian side since everything gets tagged with "no follow", even the comments I leave on my own site. Hopefully in the future, when I upgrade this site to something that provides for commentor authentication, there can be a way to leave off the "no follow" for trusted users.

I can't say that I am big fan of tatoos. In fact, when I think of ink on skin, my mind usually thinks of Charlie Manson's swastika or numbers on a concentration camp survivor's arm. So, it was quite surprising to see my reaction yesterday as the television showed Iraqi after Iraqi showing off their ink-stained thumbs after voting. The joy on their faces and in their body language was readily apparent. It brought a smile to my face. I know its a long hard road from here for them, but its a good start. If they can keep in mind that a vote means a say in what goes down but doesn't guarantee your choice of outcome then that will be enough for now. I wish them all the luck in the world.