cia page 14 - Dave's Blog

BBQ x 2

2007 Jun 11, 3:36This past weekend I was invited to two BBQs. Consequently, the weather took a break from the heat to drizzle.

The first was a lunch BBQ in celebration of Sarah's mom getting her Masters degree. Sarah and I went to her sister's house on the East-side where we had traditional foods you might associate with a BBQ including some enjoyable sausage. There was a bit of Wii to be had and Sarah's mom killed at bowling. Sarah seemed a bit dismayed at this. I guess Sarah didn't expect it since she's had more experience compared to her mom who was playing for the first time.

For dinner we drove over to Seattle to have a BBQ at Jeannie's house. Jeannie's family and my family became friends through our church when I was born and Jeannie even babysat me. The second bit about the babysitting is how Jeannie would introduce me at the BBQ. I met her boyfriend who seems like a cool guy. He works for Microsoft as a consultant and has traveled to various countries for his job. Guests had been instructed to bring side dishes and so there was quite a spread which was eclectic as well. We brought red potatoes, humus, and pita bread. As it turns out, one of the other guests had produced humus in bulk as a supplier and apparently had a grudge against the big humus chains. We played it cool and she didn't say anything so we can only assume she didn't know it was us. Jeannie was a great hostess and I had a fun time.bbq washington personal nontechnical

Cat Roundup

2007 May 17, 1:04I've seen several humorous kitty related stories recently and then happened upon the whole lolcat scene. Rather than post all the links to humorous kitty lolcat photos to delicious I figure I'll roundup the links here.

A cat in England enjoys riding the bus and does so regularly (associated lolcat commentary).

A cat trees a bear (also with lolcat commentary).

xkcd has a comic on the topic of lolcat commentary. xkcd also had a non-lolcat cat related comic recently that I found funny.

And now I'm out of commentary so I'll just... "X cat is X": interested, aggressive/defensive. VG related: SF, Zelda. Other: cookie, sad.roundup comic kitty personal cat humor nontechnical

Movie Times

2007 May 1, 3:48The Sunday of the weekend before last I had friends over and we watched Antitrust and Sneakers. Watching Antitrust makes me wonder if Bill Gates has seen it. Tim Robbins plays a character that is essentially based on him but so over the top that its ridiculous.

A few days before that I watched The Prestige with Sarah. I can't tell if I was or wasn't supposed to know what was going on until the end but it was cool anyway. I didn't know until later but David Bowie plays Tesla which is just awesome all the way around.

We also watched The Illusionist sometime before. Both movies are adaptations of novels with stage magicians set in turn of the century England. And I enjoyed both of them. I thought one would be a rushed attempt by one studio to compete with the another on the same ground but that doesn't seem to be the case. I've noticed this before with those asteroid disaster movies and the two movies about Truman Capote. It turns out Wikipedia has a huge list of competing similar movies.personal movies nontechnical

Bunny Weekend

2007 Apr 8, 3:46This weekend was fun. Sarah and I went out for Jane's Birthday. We ate at a little Italian restaurant where our group was almost too large for the place and afterwards went to the Viceroy lounge. The website apparently isn't very representative because although I looked at it before going out and I'd been to the place previously, I didn't realize it was the same location until we got there.

I got several games for my Wii through Sarah's connections including Wii Play and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. We played both of them and I thought Find Mii was especially fun.

Sarah's bunny is getting pretty big. Its been biting through wires now includig part way through the power cord to the cable box. You'd think after getting to the copper that it would learn to stop. At any rate, it didn't hide any eggs. I don't have any new photos but you can see the old bunny photos via my Vizicious tool.personal nontechnical seatle wii

Delicious shortcut tag

2007 Apr 8, 3:05Shortcut Tag?
I just saw this on another user's delicious links: a link to ESV search that's tagged with, among other things, "shortcut:esv". When viewed on del.icio.us there's a text box that lets you search using that link. I hadn't seen this before, but it seems pretty cool and I'm surprised I hadn't seen it previously. A delicious post with such a tag ends up looking like the following: I tried searching for information on this and I've found other delicious users doing the same thing, but nothing about the tag itself. If you know any information especially official information from del.icio.us itself please post links in reply to this post. So without further preface here's what I've learned about the del.icio.us shortcut tag.

How-to
To get a search box in your del.icio.us links make a post that satisfies the following requirements:

1. One of the tags must begin with the text 'shortcut:'. You can have more text following that in the tag if you like but it must at least start with 'shortcut:'.
2. The 'url' you post must be a shortcut url rather than an actual URL. It must contain a '%s' with a lowercase 's'. When you enter text into the textbox on the del.icio.us page the text will replace the '%s' after being percent-encoded. For example 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s' is the shortcut url for Google and if you type 'foo bar' into the textbox the URI you will navigate to would be 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foo%20bar'.

Complaints
This is neat but I do have a few complaints:

1. The text from the textbox is percent-encoded before replacing the '%s'. Most sites use application/x-www-form-urlencoded which encodes spaces as '+' rather than '%20'.
2. The shortcut url format seems to be taken from Mozilla's Firefox Custom Keywords. Its a shame it wasn't based on something more adaptable like the OpenSearch URL template syntax.
3. A '%s' in the url means technically what you're submitting to del.icio.us isn't a URI as defined by the standard.
4. Allowing text after 'shortcut:' means you can't look at all of a user's shortcut using this tag.

The next step is to create a tool to sync my IE7 search providers with my shortcuts saved to delicious...technical howto tagging tool tag delicious