As I first saw at Slashdot, they point to an article at the Guardian about how record labels and even some musical acts are using Hit Song Service to try to predict what will be a musical hit. The service used AI technology to go through decades of musical hits and found some common factors in them. From this, a label or act can submit a song or a CD to the service and recieve a score which tells the the likelihood of a hit.

Since I don’t listen to the radio, or watch eMptyV, I probably shouldn’t care. The problem is that artists will only try to create songs with high “scores” and labels will only put out CD’s that have a high chance of success. They won’t strive for originality or take risks. Of course, if people want their tastes dictated to them, then that’s that their choice (Baa-aa-aa-aaa).

Luckily, there are alternatives.

Now that I have a ton of blogs listed, I have been going to them and reading some of the older stories. Over at A Commonplace Book, I found this story a bit – un-nerving.

He talks about an article at Beliefnet that talks about alternative service for contientous objectors. The Selective Service says there is no draft on the horizon, but that begs the question – if there isn’t going to be a draft, then why should an organization start setting up alternative service? I guess the answer would be “Just in case,” or “If a draft does happen, then we can get the ball rolling that much quicker.” Add to that, the idea that the government might be up to shenanigans in Iran, then our military will be involved in war on three fronts.

It may seem a bit selfish, but this is one reason to be glad I’m 37 years old (knocks on wood). I think the last draft only drafted 18 – 25 year olds, though they could draft up to 35 year olds for certain professions (doctors, engineers, etc). I agree the military is better off without the draft, but I also think the military might not be able to keep up with the Bush administration’s commitments.

Of course, it’s good to keep humor about such things.

I just added a blogs page and a profile page to the menu.

While making my forays to various blogs, I noticed some of them have a “Profile” or “About” page for the site owner. Some of them have resumes, but most are just some inane information about the author – well, in my case it is It was just quick, dirty, and in the third person. I will probably add a picture or two of myself sometime in the future – like a true attention whore

As far as the blogs go, most of them are local ones (Indiana), but some are ones I ran across that sounded interesting. There are quite a few blogs on the list, however I didn’t just add them with no thought at all. I found a few that hadn’t been updated in a while, and some that seemed… well, more boring than mine. Mainly, I put in the ones I plan on visiting again. One or two have content that ususally doesn’t attract me, but they have great site designs, so I will probably go back to them. In the future, I will probably add or delete some as I find out more about them. for now, though, I encourage you to take a peek.

I’ve lost track of how many times I have renovated, or planned on renovating this site. I’m pretty sure this is the fourth major renovation. As mentioned in the previous post, the downloads and forums aren’t working at the moment, although I will probably get them working this weekend. Comments are working for the blog, so you can do that.

The basic WordPress setup has some features on the main page that I didn’t want there – namely the calendar and the archives. I’ve been doing this site for a few years, so the archive list is getting pretty long and since the calendar was a bit distacting, I put both of those under the Archives link on the menu. They serve more or less the same purpose – to access older articles. Categories could probably gone under the same page, but that is mainly geared towards finding articles by topic, not based on time. I am also thinking about adding a few more categories – such as software and/or graphics. Mainly for Linux and for the occassional 2d stuff I do. Still thinking on it though.

There are a couple of neat tricks on the new layout. One is the static image of the coffee ring in the lower left hand corner. The image should stay in place, even if you scroll down the page. The other trick is that the stories (and the menu) are semi-transparent. This was done with CSS, not a PNG or GIF. Actually, both of these tricks were done with CSS. Since not every browser *cough* Internet Explorer *cough* handles CSS very well, it may not work for everybody. I’m using Mozilla 1.7, which seems to work very well, though I am guessing Safari, Opera, Galeon, and Firefox should also work well. Konqueror seems to do okay, but it doesn’t take the transparency. However, it scrolls much faster than Mozilla, which took a speed hit due to the tricks. OTOH, Konqueror wants to open the PHP and HTML files in a text editor, and when it does open then in the browser, it has trouble with quotes and apostrophes :-/

I have been getting more into other blogs, too. I’ve been browsing some of the different blog directories looking for bloggers in my area or who have similar interests. I thought about putting a blogroll in the menu, but I like the mostly clean look it has now. I may do it in the future, but for now I am putting them on a separate links page. Actually, I plan on doing that soon – too tired right now.

Here I am, minding my own business by doing some coding on the website, when I felt I needed a stretch. I got up and looked in the fridge for some food, then wandered by the window and looked outside. It’s snowing. Not bad, but there is probably about 1/2″ of accumulation. It’s 3:00 am right now, so there will likely be more in a few hours when I need to go shopping – not much in the way of food in the fridge. I have enough for some grilled cheese, which I will make in a moment.

The renovation is going well. I will probably set it to the main page before stopping tonight/today. I did notice that the forums and downloads sections are broken. It took me a few minutes to realize I changed the password on the database and I didn’t update the config files for phpBB and paFileDB. Gallery is okay for viewing, but I have a feeling that I will have to change the info there as well – at least if I want to add photos and do admin stuff.

Time for some food.

This is my 100th post to the blog – according to the database anyway. It’s about as exciting as watching an odometer roll-over in a car, but then again, some people get kicks from that kind of stuff.

I am working a bit on the site renovation, but I am doing it behind the scenes. If you want to see how it is progressing, you can check out the test page here. I worked on it last night, so it is progressing. I’m going to do some more work on it this weekend.

Earlier this past week Apple sued the website ThinkSecret.com over the alleged release of trade secrets. According to this article over at Yahoo, the lawsuit sounds a little dubious.

ThinkSecret (along with other sites) publishes rumors about upcoming Apple products. Every year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gives a keynote address at MacWorld in which he talks about the general state of Apple and technology. However, during his speech, he also announces new Apple products and/or services. Apple fans are a fanatic lot, and Jobs’ keynote speeches generate a lot of buzz primarily for the product announcements. Apple is also very secretive about what they are working on, and what he will announce. As such, they discourage rumors as much as Apple’s fans thrive on them.

Apple accuses ThinkSecret of divulging trade secrets, even though Apple releases the same information at MacWorld. It seems to me that ThinkSecret might be guilty of stealing Steve Jobs’ thunder, but I don’t see where Apple comes to any harm from this. They are the ultimate beneficiaries of the excitement created by ThinkSecret, since the site make Apple fans even more anxious for these products.

For a long time now (years) I have had sleeping problems. Usually when I lay down to go to sleep, I end up awake for at least half an hour, sometimes I am awake hours. When I took an Abnormal Psych class in college, the prof described “Sleep Onset Insomnia,” which is what I figure this is. This means, if I get 6 – 7 hours of sleep, I consider myself lucky, because I sometimes I only get 4 – 5 hours (or less).

On the weekends and on breaks, my sleep schedule gets all messed up. I think my body natuarally wants to stay up late and sleep late. Two nights ago, when I was fooling around withthe websites and perusing blogs, I ended up going to bed around 3:00 or 4:00 am. I was plenty tired, but when I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I think I ended up with 1 or 2 hours of sleep. So when i got home from work yesterday (had to work late, too) I got my daily dose of Fark, Slashdot, and news, then laid down in my Poof chair, which is very comfortable, to take a nap. I have a bed, but for quick naps, the Poof Chair is probably better. I laid down at about 7:00 pm. I forgot to set an alarm (probably for the best) so when I woke up, it was almost 2:00 am. I did a quick calculation and figured I got a good night’s sleep, even if the hours were weird.

Since changing over to the new WordPress, I figured it would be sooner or later before I got some comment spam, even with some of the newer protections it offers. I have the site setup to send me an email anytime someone comments. Since I don’t get that many comments, it isn’t too hard to keep on top of them.

Today, I checked my email after work and saw that I got a comment spam. This one was different than the others. It only had one link, which was to some casino, the rest was some sort of bizarre jibberish comment. I deleted it, then went to bed (strange sleeping hours lately). When I woke up, I started working on some more robust comment protection.

The first thing I tried was a captcha, which is where a person has to type in a random code that appears in an image before being able to post. I couldn’t get it to work, so I had to try something else.

Now I am using WP-hashcash a/k/a Spam Stopgap Extreme. It is an actual plugin for WordPress instead of a hack. It presents some sort of javascript calculation in the HTML code for the browser to work on. If it comes up with the wrong answer, I guess the comment won’t work. There isn’t anything for the reader to do. It’s all done within the browser.

Hopefully this will be the key.

I don’t know what I am still doing awake. It probably had something to do with waking up at noon. :-0

Anyway, the new WordPress changed some stuff with the way the stories are categorized. For the past hour or so, I have going through some of the older posts and putting them in the right categories (Now I can even put them in more than one category). In order to figure where they go, I have to read the article and figure it out. I haven’t gone through all of them yet, but it’s kind of interesting to read some of the older posts.

Her is the very first post:

26 Dec 2001 14:55 – It doesn’t have a logo, or any flashy graphics. It just has a few hyperlinks and is really more of a testbed than anything like I actually want it to be. I’ll be tinkering with this over the next few hours, hopefully, adding some actual functions, like icecast

The way I had the site set up originally was much different than it is now. However, I managed to preserve the vital database info, such as stories. The full first post can be found here. IIRC, the quote above was more of a static page than anything. I don’t think I had even heard of a blog at the time. I think then it was just a an online personal journal for geeks – or something like that. The first few posts weren’t even live. They were just on my personal machine, but I probably caught onto the concept from slashdot. I had been fooling around with web pages in college, but I consider the quote above to be the first post for gottahavacuppamocha.

In college, there was a coffee shop in the student center called Sweet Sinsations. They always had cute girls working there, so I tried to pass by every so often. One day I tried a cafe mocha, which is just a cappucino with some chocolate in it, and I knew I found my drink. Since I was a poor college student, I couldn’t afford them too often, but if I had the money I would get one. The caffiene in them made me a bit hyper (which was sort of good for studying), and in my mind I just kept repeating gottahavacuppamocha gottahavacuppamocha gotthavacuppamocha. I liked the sound of it, so I typed it up, printed it out, and taped it to my monitor. I knew if I ever got my own vanity site I would call it gottahavacuppamocha.

After I more or less stopped watching TV in 2001, I got more into the net. Getting more into the net, I wanted to make my own voice on the net. I messed around with HTML on my own PC as a means of learning a potentially marketable skill. Eventually, in April of 2002, I purchased the domain, and the rest is history.