Apropos Of Absolutely Nothing

Pacific NW Summer 2011

2011-10-12T23:56:00.000-07:00

This year’s summer makes an interesting comparison with last year’s, as both were influenced by a La Nina that lasted deep into spring if not summer itself, and both taken together were probably the most moderate summers in the 2000’s.

The most notable aspect for Portland had to be tying the record (downtown) for the latest day in the year to hit 90: August 20th. That ended up being the hottest day of the year, too. (Portland airport saw one year where it didn’t hit 90 until deep in September; and there was only one year, in the 1950’s, when Portland didn’t hit 90 at all.) Once the dam broke, Portland went on to see a spate of quite hot weather fairly consistently from the third week of August through roughly the first 10 days of September, with a brief reprise later in the month. September was surely the most uncomfortable weather of the year.

I probably don’t need to mention that it was a dry, dry, dry summer. Last year’s wet May/June/September was anomalous

Of note in Seattle is that they escaped any 90-degree days all summer, which is quite unusual. .

Portland 2011:

Days in 80's: (May: 0, June: 2, July: 10, August: 15, Sept: 10)

Days in 90's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 0, August: 2, Sept: 5)

Highest temp the whole season (Aug 20): 96

Precip (inches): (May: 2.82, June: 0.63; July: 0.96; August: 0.04; Sept: 0.51)

Seattle 2011:

Days in 80's: (May: 0, June: 4, July: 7, August: 8, Sep: 10)

Days in 90's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 0, August: 0, Sept: 0)

Highest temp the whole season (Aug 21): 87

Precip (inches): (May: 3.20, June: 1.42; July: 0.71; August: 0.13; Sept: 1.29)

Pacific NW Summer 2010

2010-10-07T16:52:00.001-07:00

There’s no way around it: this was a temperate summer. No 100’s at all, no 90’s until after July 4th, a record-breaking amount of rain in May and June. I don’t recall a better year in the 2000’s. There were only two official heat waves: the first, a 3-day affair in the first week of July, and the last, a punishing 5-day event in mid-August. We can thank La Nina for this fairly fluky summer.

Portland 2010:

Days in 80's: (May: 0, June: 4, July: 12, August: 5, Sept/Oct: 5)

Days in 90's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 4, August: 7, Sept: 2)

Highest temp the whole season (Aug 14): 98

Precip (inches): (May: 4.75, June: 4.28; July: 0.59; August: 0.09; Sept: 3.36)

Seattle 2010:

Days in 80's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 7, August: 6, Sep: 1)

Days in 90's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 3, August: 3, Sept: 0)

Highest temp the whole season (Aug 15): 96

Precip (inches): (May: 2.83, June: 2.49; July: 0.31; August: 0.64; Sept: 4.80)

Pacific NW Summer 2009

2009-10-01T09:19:00.001-07:00

Another summer gone by, and this one was memorable for all the wrong reasons. In the weather department, the reasons were twofold: the worst Portland heat wave on record, 10 days extending from Jul 25th to Aug 3rd, with three consecutive days within that period reaching 103/106/106. And the most number of days 90 degrees or above: 24.

Seattle even had a less-than-pleasant summer, notably in late July and early August, where they reached into the 90’s a staggering 5 times and eclipsed 100 for the first time (103).

Portland 2009:

Days in 80's: (May: 7, June: 6, July: 9, August: 9, Sept: 8)

Days in 90's: (May: 0, June: 1, July: 11, August: 7, Sept: 2)

Days in 100's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 3, August: 0, Sept: 0)

Highest temp the whole season (Jul 28-29th): 106

Precip (inches): (May: 3.26, June: 1.32; July: 0.34; August: 0.76; Sept: 1.40)

Seattle 2009:

Days in 80's: (May: 2, June: 3, July: 13, August: 6, Sept: 5)

Days in 90's: (May: 0, June: 1, July: 4, August: 1, Sept: 0)

Days in 100's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 1, August: 0, Sept: 0)

Highest temp the whole season (Jul 29th): 103

Precip (inches): (May: 3.61; June: 0.18; July: 0.06; August: 1.16; Sept: 1.75)

Pacific NW Summer 2008

2008-10-02T12:29:00.001-07:00

Has it been a year already? This summer was notable for a surprising stretch of temperate weather in the second half of July, a time which typically features the worst weather of the year. Reality soon returned, however, in the first half of August, which culminated mid-month with the worst stretch of summer: 100/102/99. The pattern then repeated: the second half of August was reasonable, but soon into September things were smoking again, and by the end of the month we were pushing 90 just when it seemed like summer was over. September was much warmer than normal overall. Precipitation was normal all summer long: virtually non-existent.

Portland 2008:

Days in 80's: (May: 3, June: 6, July: 15, August: 10, Sept: 11)
Days in 90's: (May: 2, June: 0, July: 5, August: 3, Sept: 2)
Days in 100's: (May: 0, June: 1, July: 0, August: 2, Sept: 0)
Highest temp the whole season (Aug 14th): 102
Precip (inches): (May: 0.96, June: 0.71; July: 0.26; August: 0.29; Sept: 0.35)
Seattle 2008:
Days in 80's: (May: 1, June: 3, July: 9, August: 7, Sept: 1)
Days in 90's: (May: 1, June: 2, July: 0, August: 3, Sept: 0)
Highest temp the whole season (Jun 29th): 92
Precip (inches): (May: 0.19; June: 0.58; July: 0.25; August: 0.88; Sept: 0.54)

Pacific NW Summer 2007

2007-10-22T14:12:00.001-07:00

As I've done the last couple years on this blog, I like to summarize the summer that was in these parts. Subjectively, at least, this summer couldn't compare to 2006's notable heat waves, and I appreciated that the heat high-tailed it out of here with two weeks of calendar summer left to go. Let's see what it looked like by the numbers.

Portland 2007:

Days in 80's: (May: 5, June: 6, July: 16, August: 7, Sept: 6)

Days in 90's: (May: 1, June: 0, July: 2, August: 4, Sept: 1)

Days in 100's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 1, August: 0, Sept: 0)

Highest temp the whole season (July 10th): 102

Precip (inches): (May: 0.54; June: 0.39; July: 0.26; August: 0.32; Sept: 1.08)

Seattle 2007:

Days in 80's: (May: 4, June: 4, July: 9, August: 6, Sept: 2)

Days in 90's: (May: 0, June: 0, July: 1, August: 0, Sept: 0)

Highest temp the whole season (July 11th): 98

Precip (inches): (May: 0.56; June: 0.38; July: 0.45; August: 0.25; Sept: 1.19)

Opera 9.22 not for Vista either

2007-07-23T18:25:00.001-07:00

So Opera Software released a new version of Opera last week after a short beta test period. You would think that they would take this opportunity to make their browser work better in Vista, particularly considering that this may be the last released version of Opera for several months in advance of the testing period for "Kestrel" (Opera 9.5), the final version of which is due late in the year.

But other than a vague "Fix for accessing certain Web sites using Windows Vista" note in the the 9.22 release notes, there were no documented fixes for Vista at all. This is despite the glaring issues Opera has in Vista, as documented in my last post.

Given that Opera Software only bothers to list the highlights in its revision notes (something they've admitted to), I moved to 9.22 full-time in Vista and can now confirm that both problems are still there, which makes sense since A) Opera is still in radio-silence about the issues and B) The issues seem to have the same root cause.

So where does this leave us? Vista was released in November 2006; the problems were reported in February 2007 (including formal bug reports by at least the first poster in the problem thread); there have been four releases of Opera since Vista's release; and Opera Software has barely said two words about the issues in any venue in all that time.

Disinterest or incompetence, I ask again.

10 Things in Opera that piss me off

2007-06-12T08:45:00.001-07:00

In no particular order. Some major some minor, but all annoying. I currently use v9.21/MSI in Windows Vista Ultimate, on a P4 3GHz (Hyperthreaded) with 2GB RAM.

In Vista only, exiting Opera will leave opera.exe in memory taking 100% of your CPU. Nice. It may remove itself after 5, 10, 15 minutes or more, but then it may not, so I simply End Task on it after about 30 seconds to un-cripple the machine. This didn't happen in XP, where with rare exception it would remove itself within 30 seconds. The only way to avoid this issue in Vista is if you run Opera very briefly with only a few tabs, which is not realistic. No other app I have does this. Known problem since February 2007.
In Vista only, Opera will "pause" for about 5 seconds at random times throughout the day. When it does, its title bar will usually say "Not responding." Apparently, this coincides with Opera writing out a small .TMP file to its profile directory, which never posed a problem in XP. No other app I have does this. Known problem since February 2007.
Obscenely inefficient use of disk resources. Fire up Process Monitor some time and watch Opera go absolutely mad with disk and Registry accesses. I've never seen a program that can compare. My I/O Writes, for example, are typically around 50 million by the time I close Opera out every night. Sad.
Making changes in Preferences--or even viewing some areas--can be agonizingly slow. A few choke points within Preferences include: Manage Cookies, Manage Site Preferences, and OK'g out after having made even a minor change.
Apropos of nothing (hey!) Opera will "permanently" highlight random pieces of text on a page. There's no way to un-highlight the text short of refreshing the page. There are reports of this happening since early builds of v9.0 in early 2006.
No support for major add-on programs like the essential password manager Roboform, which works with numerous other browsers, such as the legendary "3B Browser" and "Flock." Roboform is particularly necessary because Opera's own password manager, Wand, is so pathetic. Support for such add-ons has been a requested feature for years.
No support for in-line Autocomplete in fields, similar to the feature in IE, FF, and every other browser made this decade (most likely). No, I'm not talking about the few things that you can pre-program into Wand, but Opera being able to recall what you've typed into any previous field on a Web page. I waste a little time every day by Opera not having this feature. This has been a requested feature for years.
Inability to recall a list of recent searches in the Search box on the address bar (Google, etc). Of course it should be able to do it; of course it doesn't. I'll cheat by making this a two-fer and suggest that the Search box should also have the ability to auto-suggest items as you type them in, just like FF does.
Support for very few typed-in URLs, such that a site you know you visited the day before yesterday isn't recognized when you begin to type it into the Address bar, forcing you to type in the entire address. But there's a # of "Addresses" section available in the History section of Preferences, you say? Yes, there is, but when you increase it much beyond the default, it exacts a terrible toll on Opera's startup time. IE and FF can remember weeks on end of addresses with no impact on performance.
Why is it when you "Find" an item on a page, whether you use the traditional Ctrl-F or the newer inline find, that it never tells you when you've found the last item? Wouldn't that be more useful than silently cycling back to the beginning, leaving it up to you to notice? Apparently not.

You didn't think that was all, did you? These were just the first 10 off the top of my head. There will be more to come.

Just be glad you don't live there

2007-02-13T15:09:00.001-08:00

I'm sure there's a reason people want to live on the eastern sides of Great Lakes. I don't know what those reasons are, but there must be some. Anyway, some areas east of Lake Ontario have picked up, oh, about 12 feet of snow over the last week. Doesn't this scene from Redfield, NY look idyllic?

Pacific NW Summer 2006

2006-09-16T19:19:00.000-07:00

Compared to last year's summer, this year's was hell, featuring four official heat waves in Portland (at least three consecutive days 90F or above) in less than two months, one of which was a sprawling five-day affair that brought most of the Pacific NW to its knees with not only 100+ degree temperatures but dew points for a couple of those days that would do the East Coast proud.

Portland 2006:

Days in 80's: (May: 4, June: 5, July: 12, August: 8, Sept: 14)

Days in 90's: (May: 1, June: 2, July: 4, August: 8, Sept: 2)

Days in 100's: (May: 0, June: 2, July: 2, August: 0, Sept: 0)

Highest temp the whole season (July 21st): 104

Precip (inches): (May: 2.54; June: 0.93; July: 0.51; August: 0.11; Sept: 0.86)

Seattle 2006:

Days in 80's: (May: 1, June: 5, July: 8, August: 11, Sept: 7)

Days in 90's: (May: 0, June: 1, July: 4, August: 0, Sept: 0)

Highest temp the whole season (July 21st): 97

Precip (inches): (May: 1.65; June: 1.67; July: 0.06; August: 0.02; Sept: 1.43)

ESPN picks the World Series winner

2005-10-03T19:23:00.000-07:00

It's always amusing to track experts' predictions for the baseball playoffs, which have been so utterly unpredictable of late that a prognosticator stands barely more than a statistical chance of actually being correct. In other words, their guess is as good as anyone's. ESPN asked 15 of their experts to take a crack at it though, and here are the teams involved, their season records, how many think they'll make it to the World Series, and finally the number of picks they received to win it all:

St. Louis       100 62 (7,2)
Chi White Sox    99 63 (1,0)
NY Yankees       95 67 (3,1)
Boston           95 67 (2,1)
LA Angels        95 67 (9,6)
Atlanta          90 72 (0,0)
Houston          89 73 (8,5)
San Diego        82 80 (0,0)

Oregon: What is it good for?

2005-10-03T17:45:00.000-07:00

Many have asked the question, but now we have an answer, thanks to a comprehensive list in The Oregonian last Sunday. The accompanying article put it best in these excerpts:

You could argue that everything in Oregon is world-class. You also could argue that nothing here is world-class. But what fun would that be? That's where we come in. Two dozen of us set out to add a little truth-squading and to spur debates with what we think makes the grade. And the results are not necessarily what you'd expect. (Goodbye Multnomah Falls and Tillamook cheese.)
Local boosters call this state Paradise Found. A utopia of outdoor wonders. A misty isle where the natives celebrate food and drink and creativity. A retreat from the freeways and fast lanes. Of course, they would be right. To naysayers, Oregon is a mediocre place, underpopulated and overprincipled. A place that settles too easily for the OK, where few things stack up to their counterparts in bigger cities. They have a case, too.

Pacific NW weather this summer

2005-09-13T11:43:00.000-07:00

Summer weather this season, courtesy Weather Underground. With the absence of any days in the 90's in Seattle (though several were close), and no days in the 100's in Portland, along with unusually mild May and June weather, overall this would be considered one of the "cooler" summers.

Portland 2005:
Days in 80's: (May: 2; June: 3; July: 11; August: 15; Sept: 4)
Days in 90's: (May: 1; June: 0; July: 7; August: 7; Sept: 0)
Highest temp the whole season (August 4th): 96
Precip (inches): (May: 3.81; June: 1.79; July: 0.41; August: 1.05; Sept: 1.68)
Seattle 2005:
Days in 80's: (May: 2; June: 0; July: 9; August: 12; Sept: 0)
Days in 90's: (May: 0; June: 0; July: 0; August: 0; Sept: 0)
Highest temp the whole season (August 14th): 88
Precip (inches): (May: 3.32; June: 1.63; July: 1.03; August: 0.29; Sept: 0.41)

Nano Nano

2005-09-12T19:19:00.000-07:00

Mork may not have trademarked "Nano," but how is it that Creative didn't when they released their Zen Nano Plus back in April 2005?

Along comes the iPod nano almost six months later and... nothing, no controversy. Could it possibly be because one is capitalized and the other isn't?

If I was, say, Mazda, could I make a Mazda prius and not upset Toyota? I don't think so. Could Creative have been so stupid as to not protect the name? Perhaps, for some reason, they couldn't? Is "nano" in the public domain?

I'm sure the matter has been vetted by Apple's legal team, so there must be something basic here that I'm misunderstanding.

The Bloglines Plumber

2005-09-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

So I logged on to Bloglines tonight and received the following, which was so cute that I didn't even mind that Bloglines was down for maintenance:

I'm the Bloglines Plumber. Bloglines is down for scheduled maintenance. We will be back at 10:15PM Pacific Time, Friday Sept 9, 2005. Bloglines will be all better when I'm done with it.

Doing the Smart Shuffle

2005-09-08T10:54:00.000-07:00

Quoteth Paul Thurrott on Internet Nexus:

I've written several times in the past that, contrary to the stated goals of the products, the shuffle algorithm employed by Apple in its iPod portable audio players is not even close to being random. A number of readers have written in about this, with a few defending Apple's "randomness," while the majority have expressed similar experiences to mine. Now, in iTunes 5.0, Apple seems to be throwing in the towel. One of the new features of this release is Smart Shuffle, which lets you set the "randomness" of iTunes' shuffle feature on a sliding scale. So let me ask you something. If it was "random" to begin with, why was this feature needed?

I'm not sure why that feature needs explanation, since it gives itself away: "Smart Shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album." In other words, with iTunes 5.0 you can set it to be effectively less random than before by having it check to make sure that the song about to be played by luck-of-the-draw isn't one related to the song just played, either by artist or album. At least to the extent that is possible given the set of songs. Is it so hard to imagine that before such a feature existed you would easily get adjacent songs that were related?

Incidentally, I would have simply left this as a comment on his blog, but he doesn't have that feature enabled, even though the software he uses, Blogger, has a word verification feature that easily eliminates comment spam. I suppose any question he poses is thereby rhetorical, but oh well. Also, email sent to the address posted on the site bounces with a "554 Sorry, message looks like SPAM to me" message.

Major Disasters of Bush Administration A-Z

2005-09-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

We learn something every day. This week, courtesy of The Daily Show, I learned that the Bush administration is taking its missteps alphabetically, with a plague of locusts being next up.

Bloglines on the mend?

2005-09-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

Quoteth Bloglines about the recent problems with some feeds not updating in a timely fashion when read through Bloglines. I hope this does the trick:

Feeds Not Being Crawled
We have discovered a problem with our RSS crawlers that caused many feeds to not be crawled. The issue started yesterday morning after one of the crawler machines crashed. We have fixed the problem, and all feeds should be crawled within the next two hours. We apologize for the problem, and continue to work on improving the Bloglines system. Thu, 1 Sep 2005 22:00:00 PST.

Microsoft Vista's ties to Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki

2005-09-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

Quoteth Paul Thurrott in Wininfo:

Microsoft now plans to ship Windows Vista Beta 2 on December 7, 2005, about three weeks later than the last schedule I obtained….

…Microsoft currently plans to release Windows Vista to manufacturing on August 9, 2006, and make the product broadly available by November 15, 2006.

Not that I’m normally overly suspicious, but two of the dates in this article—which purports to be a leaked schedule revealing the timeline of Microsoft’s upcoming “Longhorn” operating system now called Vista—jumped out at me. The dates are far enough in the future that there’s a certain arbitrariness about them; they could have chosen any other nearby dates without making a whit of difference, yet we have Pearl Harbor and “Fat Man” Nagasaki, on December 7 and August 9, respectively.

What does it say about Microsoft that it schedules the two most important dates in the product’s development (Beta 2 and Release To Manufacturing) to two of the most decisive bombing missions in world history? The first effectively starting WWII (for America) and the second effectively ending it.

Could Microsoft be a little confident, perhaps? Maybe trying to make a statement?

Shock and awe.

Kudos to Bloglines

2005-08-31T19:39:00.000-07:00

As you can see in my now-updated post of a few days ago, in which I described some issues I’m having with the superlative Web-based news aggregator Bloglines after having used it for about a week, the Bloglines folks actually read my somewhat windy missive and even thoughtfully responded to it in my Comments.

That’s way above and beyond the call for a software company these days, and as if the product itself wasn’t proof enough, this shows that Bloglines gets their customers (and I use the word “customers” for lack of another, since the service is free!).

Good stuff, and highly recommended for experts and those who are just dipping their toes into the syndicated waters.

Water falls from gray billowy things in the Portland skies

2005-08-29T13:40:00.000-07:00

At about noon today, something that I believe is called “rain” fell out of something called “clouds” onto this little corner of Oregon.

It only lasted for five or ten minutes, but it was bona fide rain alright, though according to Weather Underground it entirely missed the airport, the official arbiter of weather events in these parts. So there will be no record of it happening, but I swear up and down that it did.

I wouldn’t lie to you. At least very often.

And if you’re asking yourself: “But isn’t it supposed to rain all the time there?”—I’m here to tell you that the answer is most definitely ‘no.’

You’re thinking of London.

It’s so sunny and dry (and often hot) in Portland in the summer that you almost literally forget what a cloud, and especially rain, looks like. It’s relentlessly sunny. In 2004-2005, the summer sun extended deep into fall and winter, and the real rains didn’t come until late winter and early spring….

Bloglines Gripes

2005-08-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

After a week using the fantastic Bloglines, which has finally allowed me to feel on top of my RSS feeds rather than vice-versa, I do have some criticisms, problems, and wishes. This list will likely change over time, but for now, in no particular order:

Despite having the “Keep folders open” item checked, they don’t stay open consistently. With some views they all close, other times only some of them do, and once in a while they really will all stay open – for a time. The end result is that I’m fiddling with folders more often than I like.

Allow us to edit the feed URL.

When clicking “Keep New” for a given message, why does the feed list have to refresh every time? That’s not really the time to refresh it, and it’s annoying.

Give us a “Keep All New” check box for those times we might want to keep all messages in a given feed and don’t want to go down the list clicking every one. [8/31/05 Update: In Comments, the Bloglines PM responded: “There's a ‘mark all new’ link at the top. Maybe there's a better way for us to reveal that feature.”]

When subscribing to a large, established feed that has a lot of history behind it, when you first visit it, Bloglines tends not to display the latest set of messages. Instead, it seems to pick an older block of messages – say, a set of messages from long ago – and shows those instead. Of course, you can choose “Display items within the last Month” and get the latest and greatest, but why should you have to do that?

Speaking of the “Display items within the last…” control, how about also putting it somewhere near the top, rather than making us scroll all the way to the bottom of a window?

Perhaps there should be a default option to set how many posts you want displayed by default when first visiting a feed after subscribing to it. More than once I’ve subscribed to a feed and then clicked on it only to have to wait a long time for an enormous number of photo-laden messages to come down (and this is on broadband). Eventually, I’m able to make it down to “Display items within the last…” (see previous item) to set a more appropriate window of messages.

There seems to be a display width problem with some feeds, where despite how the blog looks when looking at it directly with a browser, the version of it you see in Bloglines is very wide, so much that you have to scroll back and forth horizontally. This is relatively rare, but it does happen. I’ve noticed it happening quite often with Feedster search feeds.

If using the “Large” font setting (located in Bloglines “Basics” configuration area), when you’re editing a given feed, the Edit Subscription window doesn’t size itself properly. The end result is that to click on the “Update” or “Unsubscribe” buttons at the bottom of the Edit Subscription window, you have to either scroll down or resize the window. This is not a problem when you’re using the “Medium” or “Small” font, since those sizes allow all elements to fit within the window.

Bloglines surprisingly doesn’t seem to offer a search tool for finding a feed in its “Add” feed area. It does offer a bevy of other things, including Quick Pick Subscriptions, an area to paste in the URL of a feed you already know, the ability to set up search queries – even package tracking – but if you want to know what, say, Robert Scoble’s feed is, good luck. As far as I can tell, you can’t do it through Bloglines. [8/31/05 Update: In Comments, the Bloglines PM responded: “The search box is pervasive in the header so you can search for a feed no matter where you are on the site, including after you've clicked on ‘Add’. Even so, good feedback to improve that interaction.”]

When adding a feed, allow us to modify the name of the feed right then, as some are either ridiculous or unduly long.

When renaming a feed name after it’s been added (using the master Edit mode, not the individual “edit subscription” function available when reading a feed), and you have unread messages in that feed, once you submit the change the feed is marked as read and you essentially lose those messages.

The number of new messages in parentheses next to every feed is often lower (but sometimes higher!) than the actual number of new messages awaiting you once you click on the feed itself. So it seems that even when you’re freshly visiting Bloglines, the number of new messages for a given feed does not always reflect reality at that moment, but instead reflects, perhaps, the last time the feed was checked. And when you click on a given feed, the number is updated as the feed is checked again. This is just a guess, but in any case, it should strive to be more accurate.

How about a way to suspend a given feed short of actually unsubscribing from it?

This one isn’t really Bloglines’ fault, but it’s driving me crazy anyway so I want to include it here: Opera 8.02 doesn’t let you change the Folder destination when you’re either adding a feed or editing an individual feed. This is highly annoying, given that it does work with older Opera versions and other browsers. A workaround is that after adding the feed, you can reorganize feeds by using the Edit function at the tree level, checking what you want to move and then submitting that. I’m guessing that this problem will likely be fixed in Opera 8.03, though it’s always possible that something could be done on the server side in the meantime. Another possibility is a temporary fix for 8.02 with user Javascript, but that’s beyond me.

Note: And finally, I should add that Bloglines has been having some capacity problems, and some feeds have been lagging well behind, but this problem, which from other reports was particularly pronounced in early August, seems to be all but solved for me. [9/1/05 Update: I’m afraid I have to rescind the optimism reflected in this addendum. As mentioned in an August 9, 2005 status update on Bloglines, they’re apparently in transition to new facilities in order to alleviate these problems, but I don’t think they’ve made it yet since over the last few days I’ve seen another upswing in delayed feeds and even feeds that are skipping posts. I’m not the only one still experiencing problems, as can be seen here and here. However, I do continue to hope and expect this will be resolved sooner rather than later.]

This is only a test

2005-08-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

This is a test. Had this been an actual post, there might be some worthwhile content, but for now I’m testing Blogger for Word to see if it’s worth using or not.

I’ll be using this space mainly for random notes, thoughts, and pointers to items that I might find interesting or noteworthy. Since it will be lost in a sea of millions of other mostly useless blogs, I don’t expect that a single person beyond me will ever see it, and that’s just fine for what will be essentially a personal notebook on the Web available for my easy access.