Fiat Lux

Four years ago today, Fiat Lux came online.

I've averaged a post every 1.21 days since then. Not bad, for a solo effort (plus one guess post from Scott).

I've had days where fewer than a dozen people came to my site, and a few days where more than 6,000 people stopped by.

I've had days where I couldn't wait to get something up onto the blog, and days where I've though about shutting it down entirely.

I've learned a lot about the mechanics of web marketing -- SEO, how to build traffic, how to get links -- that I use in my professional work.

I like to think that the discipline of writing this blog has made me a better writer (although this post is probably not one of me better efforts in that regard). At the very least, I'm more aware of my weaknesses as a writer now, and hopefully I do a better job of working through them.

Lately, though, it feels like most of what I want to write about is me, me, me. And this blog is at it's best when it's not all about me. Not sure how to resolve that contradiction right now; perhaps I need a few more days away from the blog to get my groove back.

I closed my first post like this:

What next? Who knows. But I think that I'd like to blog the journey.

And now, 4 years later, I still do. So let's see what happens.

There's an old truism that if you get good customer service, you tell two people, but if you have a bad experience, you'll tell 10. So here's my small attempt to balance the scales:

Hotwire, you guys rock. Not only do you help me book good, inexpensive rental cars, but when I needed to cancel our vacation last week, your Customer Service staff told me exactly what I needed to do to request a refund, and then they processed the refund quickly. And this despite Hotwire's very firmly stated 'no refund' policies. (No, I did not purchase trip insurance.)

Things have been stressful enough around here; you helped lessen my stress. I'm deeply grateful, and you can bet I'll be using Hotwire again in the future.

Scott, after all this time, has got himself a blog.

After looking at MovableType and getting a little frustrated by the setup process, he decided to use WordPress instead. So now we've got a Battle of the Blog Platforms in our own home! :)

I'm waiting for the first bug-fix patch before I go to MT 4.0 though.

There will be no more encores for stellar tenor Luciano Pavarotti.

I had the pleasure of hearing Pavarotti live once, years ago, in New York. The world will not soon see his like again.

UPDATE: Yahoo has a nice aggregation of news reports, obituary notices, etc.

Last night's colorful, hazy sunset:

And a cat on my desk chair:

Scott and I headed up to San Francisco today to catch the Ghiradelli Square Chocolate Festival. We had a great time, and tasted a lot of yummy chocolate goodies.

We also got to make the acquaintance of a very friendly bird (a Cockatoo, I think) who was visiting the festival with her keeper. She stepped right onto Scott's good arm and allowed herself to be petted and photographed:

74%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Well, at least I'm less addicted than Jeremiah Owyang is.....

I've been going by 'Fiat Lux' online for 4+ years now, but I think it might be time for a change.

I'm getting very tired of being called 'Fiat' by people, for one thing. I'm a person, not a car. Yet for whatever reason, people fixate on the first part of a name when creating a nickname, not the second half.

As I've said before, I'm also getting very tired of having my comments on Wordpress blogs filtered into the bit-bucket because whoever runs the Akismet spam filters decided that the phrase 'Fiat Lux' is spam.

So what are my options?

I've been using 'rslux' as my blog handle on Wordpress blogs recently (it's also my Twitter handle), so that's one option. It's not terribly catchy, though, and it incorporates my middle initial, which I don't usually use, so it has the potential to be confusing.

I could also start using my real name more. It's not my first choice either, because frankly it makes me feel unsafe. Being female and having an easily Google-able name makes me gun-shy of putting my full name online more than I need to, although I'll be the first to admit that any information any stalker could ever want or need about me is already available online, one way or another. Plus, if I were that concerned about my privacy, I would have picked some other domain name for my blog.

There's also an argument in favor of using my full name -- doing so is better for my own personal branding. But as Kathy Sierra saw, that's a very two-edged sword. I'm just not sure I want to go there.

I suppose I could split the difference of all the options and switch to using 'Lux'.

There's one other issue to consider -- there are some blogs where I've been a regular commenter under my current handle. I either have to keep my current handle, or risk losing my identity and credibility on those sites.

What do you think?

Six years.

I was thinking this morning about 9/11, and about closure.

They say that 9/11 was the Pearl Harbor of our generation. I suppose that's so. But America had closure for Pearl Harbor eventually -- we fought and won World War 2.

What do we have? Iraq, which regardless of whether we win or lose is not closure, because Saddam Hussein didn't cause 9/11. We don't have Osama Bin Laden, and for all we know, we never will. He may be skulking in a cave in Asia, or he may be rotting in an unmarked grave. Either way, no closure there.

So what do we do?

I had some thoughts last year about time and the memory of pain. I find my feelings haven't changed all that much since then.

Two years after 9/11, it was still painful for me to be at work that day. Tomorrow will be an normal workday for me; we're even having a special event, part of a new product launch.

But in my heart, I'll still feel the pain.

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

This sounds like a joke, but I found it on cbs5.com, so I'm assuming it's legit.

A California judge says an Oakland carpenter caught hammering nails and sawing wood in the nude can legally work without wearing any clothes.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Julie Conger found Percy Honniball not guilty of indecent exposure Thursday. The 51-year-old was arrested last year after the he was spotted building cabinets in the buff at a home where he had been hired to work .

Conger ruled that although Honniball was indeed naked he was not acting lewdly or seeking sexual gratification.

The carpenter has said he likes to work in the nude because it's more comfortable and helps him keep his clothes clean.

Oy.

There's a downside to every hype cycle, and given the heights of hype Apple received around the iPhone, it was inevitable that a backlash would hit sooner or later. The last 10 days have seem a number of Apple missteps, from the $200 iPhone price cut, to dissatisfaction with the way Apple is handling custom ringtones, to reports that the new, oh so sleek iPod touch devices may have some display issues.

And to top it off, the New York Times has weighed in with an article suggesting that Apple's making no gains in the overall computer market due to poor handling of their retail channel.

It's certainly not positive press coverage. But if you compare it to the kind of coverage Microsoft is getting these days -- that same NY Times article called Vista "a world of hurt", and when what the last time you saw any press at all about the Zune? -- I'd suggest that despite the backlash, Apple is still in a better position.

Could someone explain to me how a Catholic follower of Kabbalah would have the unmitigated gall to declare herself an "ambassador for Judaism" when on a trip to Israel?

By way of the Huffington Post:

Madonna toasted the Jewish new year with Israeli President Shimon Peres and declared herself an "ambassador for Judaism," local newspapers reported Sunday.

The singer, who is not Jewish, arrived in Israel Wednesday on the eve of Jewish new year to attend a conference on Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism.

Madonna met Peres at his official Jerusalem residence on Saturday evening and the two exchanged gifts, with Madonna receiving a lavishly bound copy of the Old Testament.

Oh, of course, it's a superstar diva with entitlement issues. Carry on, then.

So, a few weeks ago, I was getting fed up with the comment spam onslaught, and tried using captcha technology to shut it down. And it worked, which was great, but it also caused some problems for some readers, which was not so great. Pissing off readers is not something I want to do, so I dropped the captcha and am trying some new back-end spam filters instead.

Although the new spam filters seem to be working well so far, I'm a bit bummed about the outcome, because the captcha plug-in I was using -- reCaptcha -- is a bit more than your average spam deflector:

ReCaptcha is a rather clever service using them to help digitize books scanned into the Internet Archive as well. It’s a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

The Internet Archive is home to over 200,000 scanned copies of classic books. Some of them are gorgeously crafted, like this children’s book, but fancy styling can make it difficult for computers to translate the books into an indexable digital text. Much like a Mechanical Turk application, ReCaptcha uses humans to translate images of scanned words that a computer couldn’t understand.

I'd like to implement ReCaptcha at work instead of the captcha currently in place on the blog there, but it's busy as hell right now; I probably won't be able to get to it for a few more weeks.

There's a few reports on the Web today that the Vista Service Pack 1 will actually be Windows XP.

Yes, I know, it's a JOKE. But in every good joke, there's a kernel of truth.

The next computer I buy is going to have OSX on it.

A lot of things from our younger days can be disappointing when you revisit them as an adult. I used to love Yodels cakes (aka HoHos, if you're not in the Northeast), for example -- the cake, the filling, the crunch of the chocolate coating as you bit into it -- but they taste like crap to me today. At any rate, I'm here to report that there's at least one thing that I still love as much today as I did when I was 15:

Swedish Fish

Oh how I love them. (Except maybe the green ones. I eat them first because I like them the least. )

I love Swedish Fish so much that I rarely buy them, because I know all too well that I'll eat the whole damn bag in one sitting unless I exert a LOT of willpower.

I had some today. I'm trying to be good and not gobble the entire bag of them, but it is not easy.

Gimi the Chair Thief:

I may or may not do more blogging before Yom Kippur, so if I do not, I wish my fellow co-religionists an easy fast. May we all be sealed for a blessing in the book of Life.

My employer launched a new product at midnight last night. As a result, I've been alternating between working furiously and sucking down quantities of coffee, as this photo illustrates.

I'm beat.

I've switched over to WordPress.

Sorry, MT, it was a good run, but you're just too old, too clunky, and too slow to keep up with me anymore.

Please go to the home page to see my new blog and add the updated feed URL to your feed reader!