Yes, it is that time of year again. It is the third birthday of this blog, Asymptotia, and once again I’d like to thank everyone for reading, commenting, emailing, and otherwise participating in building the community we have here. It continues to be […] Click to continue reading this post
Ok. So here’s a little experiment. I’ve noticed (perhaps you have too) that everyone seems even busier than they did a couple of years ago, and furthermore, that facebook, twitter, and other such social networking sites have fragmented and otherwise mopped up some of the conversation that used to take place a lot on blogs. You might say that there’s nothing wrong with that since the conversations are still happening somewhere, but the problem with that is the fact that if parts of the conversation disappears behind the horizon of people’s facebook accounts (so that only their friends can see it) it takes away from a lot of what I think is the best spirit of an open blog – (1) anyone can join in, (2) the conversation is there on the web to be searched for and used as a resource later, and so on and so forth. Besides, in my opinion there’s a lot of fun chatter on facebook, etc, but it is mostly the exchange of (sometimes playful) short remarks about a status update or a picture of something. Conversations can be more than that, but I’ve found little of that there. (Of course, as we know, conversation can rapidly deteriorate on blogs as well, for a variety of reasons. As you know I’ve tried to steer clear of the shouty stuff here for that reason.)
Anyway, I’m not expecting a huge change as a result of this, but in an effort to try to connect thoughts expressed here to conversations inside facebook, I’m trying out […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, I’ve upgraded my Wordpress installation and since some plugins might be not quite working with the newest version, things are going to look slightly different for a bit. But not hugely so.
Oh, if you are on facebook, you might like to know that I have put Asymptotia on the NetworkedBlogs application so that you can sign up and get a feed directly within facebook. Click through to here if signed in. Please note the difference between me, my facebook page, my blog Asymptotia, and Asymptotia’s space on facebook. All four are different. I’m just sayin’. Don’t forget to keep visiting here, for example.
Strangely, as a result of upgrading a few things, something weird happened that I […] Click to continue reading this post
The things one has to deal with before breakfast. Seems that Danica McKellar got married. As a result, my 2007 post about her mathematics book was getting heavy traffic loads from search engines, resulting in the whole site being slowed down, and being occasionally unavailable. Sorry if you were affected. … Click to continue reading this post
Hmmm. With all of the current bandying about of “Billions” and “Trillions” in the news (at least over here in the USA – referring to dollars, and economic stimulus packages and so forth), every single day, “One Million” sounds decidedly underwhelming doesn’t it? Perhaps I should instead write [tex]10^6[/tex]. Does that help?
Why am I focusing on this number? Well, while I’ve been in hermit mode the last week (uh… yes, that’s where I was and I’ve got the beard to prove it – was resetting my head over Spring break – more later) the sitemeter counter continued ticking away and sometime today passed the One Millionth Visitor To Asymptotia mark! So we have a landmark of sorts. One worth noting. So…
Hurrah!
I’d planned to note carefully that visitor’s data (you can tell roughly what part of the […] Click to continue reading this post
I thought I’d follow Janet and do a sort of end of year review or summary (or, really, snapshot) in the following style: List the first sentence of every first post of the month for all twelve months. I’ve no idea what this will produce, so here goes:
January
I’ll admit that I was quite surprised by this.
February
Lovely layers in the distance on a hike at Runyon Canyon this morning, looking North East.
March
A snapshot from last Friday night (a week ago).
April
Well, I learned recently* that the BBC wildlife program makers have done it again, breaking new ground in scientific discovery while making a new series.
May
Well, here’s a turn up for the books.
June
Well, you’ve probably guessed that I’ve been somewhat distracted for several days. […] Click to continue reading this post
Following Janet, I decided to check to see what my “blog personality type” was supposed to be according to Typealyzer. Apparently, it (and hence, I suppose, the person who writes it) is of type ISTP – The Mechanics:
The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.
The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.
Aw shucks. You flatterer, you. (Wow, and they even got my overalls and hairdo right too!)
Then there was some sort of fanciful brain diagram, showing where things are on the […] Click to continue reading this post
Oh! I just noticed… The previous post was my 1000th on Asymptotia! Of course I don’t need much more than a flimsy excuse to break out a bottle of something tasty to drink, but this is cause for celebration! Hurrah! Thanks very much to all of you for reading and … Click to continue reading this post
Yes. I am. Still here. Several of you, noticing a gap in my posting, got in contact to ask what’s up, and I appreciate that you care. The story is that I’ve been somewhat frazzled over the last several days, mostly due to an intense combination of work and social … Click to continue reading this post
Well, you know I almost missed it: Asymptotia, this little blog that you come to read from time to time, is two years old today! It has been a pleasure and an honour being part of this community we’ve formed, made up of you the reader and maybe sometime commenter, and me tossing up a few things to look at, consider, laugh at, and/or discuss from time to time. I really enjoy the kind of connections that are made, and seeing people brought together (both on- and off- line) using Asymptotia as a focal point. Have a look at what I said on this date last year, and in the inaugural post.
For those of you who are not regulars, assuming you’ve already read the about page, let me mention that I think of this blog as a bit like a gathering (a party, if you will) in a comfortable home, with people in several rooms carrying out (or just listening to) conversations of various sorts. Some rooms just have things to look at. Some people […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, every now and again the link tracker from google’s blog search engine (which reports some links to the blog to me on the blog software’s control panel) throws up some weird random stuff. 
There was a funny one today. Some site that aggregates random stuff had a post about the Fresh Prince. It then gathered images from the web to illustrate, and somehow grabbed an image from this blog among the haul, which is why I knew of this. Two that ended up together are to the right.
Prince pictures, it said. Excellent. […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, I’m standing here at 11:45pm slowly stirring some tasty custard I’m making to pour onto a slice of steamed homemade date pudding. A while ago the wonderful Margaret Atwood was on the radio (talking about an influential editor who died recently – can’t recall the name), which is bliss for me since I love hearing her talk about anything. Absolutely anything. I just love her voice, tone, and turns of phrase. There’s a cold wind blowing outside…
Why am I doing all this? Well, it’s really cold outside for a start (yeah, I know) so I need some warm comfort food, but mostly I’m treating myself after a long night of writing php scripts and css code, remembering stuff I learned two years ago, with the aim of rebuilding the old look for the blog. I’m really tired of the clunky default style I’ve had […] Click to continue reading this post
Sigh. It was too good to be true. Hours after updating the site (and feeling pleased with myself) because I caught a whiff of something threatening it, a blistering attack came along, in the form of essentially a denial of service attack from hundreds of separate machines/robots all from the same referring site. (See Josh Davis’ report on such things for the Wired Science TV show last year. Video here.) I tried everything I could think of to get rid of it and could not win. In the end, my hosts shut down my account and suspended the domain (fair enough – actually might have helped), and (not cool) one of their fine technical support people blamed me for the problem […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, due to seeing signs that the blog was partially hacked (although not as badly as last time), I decided to do a full upgrade (long overdue) of the blog software. On that score, Asymptotia is now as current as it is possible to be, for a while. Hurrah! I … Click to continue reading this post
Well, it is more or less the tenth anniversary of the blog. Not this blog – the whole weblogging thing. NPR did a rather nice radio pastiche to survey the business of blogging. It was done with good humour – they made a radio blog, with audio versions of hyperlinks, scrolling, and so forth. It’s rather amusing, and even somewhat informative as a bonus. They interview various people including (of course) Justin Hall who is identified as one of the earliest bloggers. He’s an interesting guy. I met him briefly when he was here at USC’s Interactive Media Division, during that meeting on academic blogging I blogged about a while back. You can start out finding out a bit more about him and blogging by google searching. Sooner or later you’ll hit the […] Click to continue reading this post
