technonerdgirl

I woke up at 5 a.m. this morning. Though I remember to change my clock to adjust to Daylight Savings Time, my body clock stayed the same. Ah well.

So I spent did a lot of writing on my novel yesterday. I'm working on the climactic end bit now, which is fun. I wrote 1800 words yesterday, prompted partly by the fact that it's only four days until NaNoWriMo. I also leave for OVFF on the Friday, which is the first of the month and when NaNoWriMo begins. I'll probably be doing some writing at the airport and at OVFF, I think. If I don't write on any weekends, then I end up having to write an average of 2500 words a day, which is a tad hefty, especially considering I'll have other writing projects on the go.

Then I spent part of the afternoon catering to my webgeek soul. I've been gradually converting my various online projects to Movable Type. I was about to do the same with The Dandelion Report (my filk e-zine at http://www.filking.net) but then started thinking about ways I could make it easier to administrate, to encourage user-generated content.

After consulting some technonerdboy friends (Jeff, Reid, Parki, Andrew, Bryan), I decided to check out PHP and RSS (combined with Movable Type) as potential methods for helping me achieve what I want.

My goals include:

- Allow columnists and other writers to upload their material via a Movable Type interface (i.e. no need to know HTML, no need to do archiving themselves since MT will do it for them).

- My set-up would take the XML/RDF files automatically generated by Movable Type and use them with the help of PHP to highlight multiple blogs on the main Dandelion Report page. From a user's point of view: You could go to the main index page and get an overview of the most recently added editorial content, which is automatically updated each time a columnist or writer uploads something new.

- I also want a main Filk News feed/blog, sort of like Slashdot, where filkers can upload news about upcoming conventions, community news, etc., and these could be commented upon by other members of the community.

- Have a central Filk Events calendar, which will allow concom members and other approved posters to add entries about upcoming events. In theory, a filker could go to the Filk Events calendar and view a list of upcoming conventions (either on the calendar or in a text list), click on any convention name, see a text file of update information provided by a concom member, or go directly to the con site.

- Having a place where filk dealers and musicians can promote current and upcoming projects and gigs.

I have other ideas, probably too many. I would have loved to have these tools available when I had Inkspot; it would have made administration so much easier.

By now some of my closer friends are probably scratching their heads, remembering how stressed I was during the peak Inkspot-overload days. "What's she thinking? Is she mad, taking on another project?" And of course, they might be right. But I think it would be very cool to be able to offer something like this to members of the filk community, who have already given me so much. It would also give me an excuse to learn tools that I could possibly use elsewhere, like reviving the 'zine I started back in university, for which Jeff's and my personal site is named: The Electric Penguin.

But I am going to be super-careful about not letting The Dandelion Report turn into another Inkspot in terms of time-stress headaches. I'm not committing to a deadline for the launch of the "new" Dandelion Report. I'm going to work on it over time, and it will remain a hobby (Jeff laughed at me when I said this, because it reminded him of what I said about Inkspot when I first started it).

Anyway, here are some useful resources I've found so far, on my own and also with the help of techie friends:

Webreference introduction to RSS

Webmonkey PHP tutorial

PHP manual

PHP FAQ

If any of you have other suggestions, please do let me know, thanks!

early web

The trailer for the Two Towers movie is online (a full trailer, not just the sneak preview)! Thanks to Allison for the URL. It's pretty obviously a bootleg, but it still looks pretty cool.

Busy day yesterday. Finished my chapter for Moira's book and sent it in. Wrote a new column for Muse's Muse (thanks for your patience, Jodi!) for next month.

Jeff and I are going to the cottage tomorrow, will be back next Tuesday. Apparently the phone lines aren't working at the cottage and no one can figure out why, so I might not be Blathering until I get back.

Today's Blatherpic (click on the image to get a bigger version) is from the first edition of "HTML & CGI Unleashed" (Sam's Publishing, 1995). Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, I created a fairly simple personal homepage that linked to other personal sites including Urban Tapestry, a Sara site (how many of you remember that? I'm curious...), and the first incarnation of Inkspot.

Inkspot was chosen as Cool Site of the Day by Infinet in early 1995 back in the days when there was only one "Cool Site of the Day" award. I had a visitor counter at the bottom of the page, and I remember sitting in front of my computer for at least an hour, hitting the return key over and over again just to see the visitor count jump by leaps and bounds. Over 10,000 people visited Inkspot that day. This number may not mean much now, but back then not many people were on the Web. I remember being so excited that I went to tell Jeff, who was still asleep. He was pretty crabby at me for waking him up. Later on in the day he apologized. :-)

The flurry of attention I got from the media and the online community as a result was what helped convince me to expand Inkspot, which was one page of links for children's writers back then. Anyway, one of the resulting e-mails I received was from a writer named John December (what a GREAT name, that), who asked if he could use a screenshot of my personal homepage in his book, as a sample of a personal homepage. I said yes, of course.

Here's what he wrote about me:


"Figure 2.10 shows Debbie Ridpath Ohi's home page. Her page is typical in that she creates a "personal information space" that links to personal and professional information. She links to resources that she maintains or develops, including a list of Children's Writer's Resources, "INKSPOT" (http://interlog.com/~ohi/dmo-pages/writers.html), a page of the WWW Virtual Library, "Writers' Resources On The Web" (http://www.interlog.com/~ohi/www/writesource.html), and her other activities, including her music group, an electronic magazine (E-zine) that she's developing, and personal and "fun" links.


The e-zine to which he was referring was called "The Electric Penguin" (sound familiar?), but I shut it down once I started focussing on Inkspot.

From time to time I think about reviving it again...but then I worry about it becoming another Inkspot.

Funny to hear personal homepages being written about back then as if they're so unusual, like a species of rare animal. But I suppose back then, they were.





(Above pic: close-up of the screenshot John December used in his book. The page counter is inaccurate; I used a pretty flakey one that tended to reset itself spontaneously from time to time.)

confession

(updated 6:40 a.m.)

I think it's about time to make a confession, to divulge a secret I have long been hiding, to unburden myself of an old skeleton in the closet. My secret is this:

I used to be a COBOL programmer.

Yes, it's true. I can hear the gasps of horror now as you all avert your eyes in embarrassment. But I swear, I had no choice! After graduating from the University of Toronto, I worked as a programmer/analyst for the Toronto Dominion Bank, working on the interface the human tellers used. I programmed in COBOL for two years. What an unbelieveably archaic language.

Years later, I was told that I could have made money modifying Cobol code doing Y2K stuff, but I valued my sanity too much.

To all you computer types out there: What was your first computer language? Which language did you like the most? Which did you hate the most? Here's an interesting diagram of the history of computer languages (I believe there's also one in the current issue of Wired magazine).

Languages I have programmed in include: Basic, Snobol, Fortran, COBOL, APL, PL/I, C, Lisp, Prolog and Pascal. I hated COBOL the most. I found APL to be the most bizarre; it was one of the only languages where it's entirely possible for a programmer to be unable to decipher his or her 4-line program written only minutes before. My favourite was Lisp (hey, I love parentheses!). My favourite computer courses in university: CSC149F, the first undergraduate computer class at the UofT to use computer terminals instead of keypunch machines, I believe. And a 4th year/grad course in Artificial Intelligence taught by Professor Tsotsos, who was one of my favourite profs at the University of Toronto. I remember there were only four women in the class. Hey, I just did a Google search for his name and found out that Professor Tsotsos is now teaching at York University.

My very first language was Basic. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model I (for a few weeks until our Model III was shipped). I used to save my programs on cassette tape until the Model III arrived. My brother Jim and I used to take turns reading Basic code aloud from a computer games magazine while the other person typed it in.

My first computer programming job was writing JCL (Job Control Language) one summer for Environment Canada, fulfilling requests for weather history reports in different areas of Canada.

The first computer game I ever played was Eliza, on the machines at the University of Waterloo during a Computer Day trip when I was in high school. I also discovered Crowther & Woods' Colossal Cave back then (remember those "small twisty passages, all alike"?).

I remember Pong, Pacman, Robotron (my friend John Chew had a special glove for when he played this game), Defender, Scott Adams adventures. The first computer game I ever played on the machine at school was some kind of Star Trek game where the "display" was printed out in ascii characters on DEC-10 teletype machines (I think they were called DEC-10s? Reid and Luisa, do you remember??). My friend Michelle got me hooked on Rogue, a little ascii game which I now have on my Palm.

I remember buying my first modem with John at an Arkon (I think the computer store was called Arkon) at the Yorkdale shopping mall; it was a Hayes 300 baud, and we tested our modems out on each other when we got to our respective homes. I remember how THRILLED I was to see John typing at me for the first time.

Geez, I feel old. :-)

So 'fess up, you technonerdgirls and technonerdboys out there. What secrets are you hiding?

Make your confession here.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Me examining Krispy Kremes at Andy's and Christine's party. They were okay, about the same as doughnuts from Tim Hortons. But again, these weren't fresh from the oven. Still looking forward to trying that out in California.
	I think this photo was taken in 1982. The computer on the left is a PET that my dad used to bring home from school (he was a schoolteacher). The one on the right is our TRS-80 Model III. I used to host a BBS called the Bricmef on it; the software was programmed and maintained remotely by technonerdboy friends of mine. I "met" Jeff through this BBS, six months before meeting him in person.