Have I mentioned how much I love programming and coding lately?
Probably not since I seem to be doing more tech support and client
installations :( Hopefully a rash of really simple errors will make my
boss realize that when I tell him that a new piece of code is untested
it *really* is untested and shouldn’t be used by customers.

It’s the classic small business dilemma I’ve been told but I still have
trouble with it — probably why I stopped doing software consulting many
moons ago.

“Ted”:http://www.sauria.com has turned me onto yet another cool tool. I
just have to stop reading his blog :)

At first glance it seems to be your basic aggregator but there seems to
be more lurking below the surface.

For a look at it running (there doesn’t seem to be a cvs repository of
it yet) check out “Planet Apache”:http://www.planetapache.org

How, you ask, could these two items be inter-related? Because yesterday
both sucked!

The Philadelphia Eagles managed to lose a game that had the opposing
team score only a single touchdown. The receivers for the Eagles
managed to *not* catch most of the passes *and* also directly caused 2
of the interceptions — horrible!

Ok, enough of sports for the year — well at least until the other
football starts getting interesting :)

It seems that all of the negative energy of the Eagles sucking must have
passed thru the cable infrastructure and burned out some important piece
of equipment. I have to think that because otherwise I have to come to
the conclusion that the techs of Comcast (my lovely ISP – truely they
are normally good) do not subscribe to the redundant hardware philosphy.

Anywho, the point I was badly making, is that somehow Comcast lost one
of their core servers and that caused Internet access to drop in 3 of
the largest counties in my area. It was down for close to 6 or so hours
and when it did come back up the dhcp server in my area decided to
require a kick in the pants. After all that their accounting database
decided that I really didn’t have the modem I’ve been using and switched
to a modem definition that I had swapped out 4 months ago.

Joy!

At least the techs on the phone were polite and informative – even if to
tell me it was something only the weekday folks can fix.

Stay tuned.

Thanks to “Ted”:http://www.sauria.com/blog sharing his atom flavour
templates I now can generate an atom feed.

Now if I could figure out if anyone actually reads this[1].

fn1. Yes, yes, I know I can parse the apache logs and all that :)

_Update_: now according to the “textism”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/index.html tools page
the fn1. above should have generated a footnote entry. My list of
python items to research sure is growing :)

I have noticed that I seem to be making entries late in the evening.
Why this is something to remark on is not for me to figure out: I just
decided to make the observation public.

Another observation is my habit to “quote” phrases. That *is* something
I plan on correcting as I have realized that -it’s- +it is+ a crutch on
my part to avoid having to style or phrase the sentance to make my point
clear.

One of the things I think will make it easier is writing these entries
in something other than “nano”:http://www.nano-editor.org/ while ssh’d
into my server. But that will also depend on me making headway on my
new year’s project.