As of late, most people who find this blog via search engine are interested in one of three things: Lego, chess, or bathroom remodeling. (One day perhaps, I shall explore the intersection of those things. Susan will undoubtably object, but I believe there is some weekend’s worth of amusement therein.) Then there’s a small number [...] » Read more

Information for levork.org from Google Webmaster tools, since I’m a stats junkie: All searches: (Canada) google.ca Top search queries Average top position 1. julian fong 1 2. julian fong is stupid 1 3. julian fong is gay 2 Huh. I must have been very bad to someone in Canada lately. I have no idea how or who. It’s not like [...] » Read more

Our DSL modem died last Sunday, breathing its last wheezing gasp under an onslaught of BitTorrent traffic. It took over an interminable week for the replacement to arrive, including a visit from an AT&T technician who came out and verified that yes, it was a modem issue. We could have told him that. Susan rallied [...] » Read more

The maximization of the data-ink ratio of Tufte didn’t last very long. For the new theme I decided to look for inspiration in posters from the turn of the 20th century. I found it in one from 1901 advertising Fry’s Cocoa. (Coincidentally, our cocoa of choice growing up; I’m not such a fan nowadays.) The [...] » Read more

Switched over for only a couple of days and I’m already annoyed. By default, Wordpress pings on every edit of a published post. Given that I have 300+ published posts which I need to start categorizing, and changing categories is an edit, that’s potentially a lot of pings in a short interval; and some of the [...] » Read more

It’s a new year, decided it was about time to upgrade blogging software. I still remain fond of Blosxom and its chicken wire and duct tape sensibility (check out the old colophon). I continue to use it at work, but for this blog it was starting to feel a little long in the tooth. In [...] » Read more

I decided the blog needed upgraded search capabilities, since Fletcher Penney’s find plugin just really wasn’t cutting it for me. So today I installed swish++, easily compiled and installed it, and after a quick perusal of the man page, indexed my web page in a matter of seconds. I then looked at Matthew Gregg’s [...] » Read more

Just spent an hour restoring this web site from backup and reconstructing a few pages that had changed since then. It’s amazing how destructive find . -mtime +1 | xargs rm can be when you type it from the wrong directory. Yeah, I’m stupid. [...] » Read more

Someone interested in blogging asked me a while ago how my blog was put together; I told her “you really don’t want to know, you should probably just sign up for Typepad”. So today, I was trying to add a feature to the blog and (while trying to debug a plugin conflict) realised I’d [...] » Read more

On April 16, 2000, Toy Story 2 was still in theatres, I still sat in front of an SGI workstation in Point Richmond sharing an office with Mark, NASDAQ had just logged its biggest single-day loss ever, and the NHL was still in the first round of the playoffs. And I made meatloaf, and [...] » Read more