iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Unless you’re reading this posting via Facebook, you may have noticed that you now have to sign in to add comments to my blog postings.

I tried to resist as long as possible, but the signal to noise ratio was getting too high for me whenever I had to approve comments.

I could have add a CAPTCHA, which is a contrived acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” But I find their squiggles to be fundamentally inaccessible, even the audio or reCAPTCHA ones, and I didn’t want to further promote the technology.  My admiration for Alan Turing aside.

So I’m now asking commentators to sign in via Facebook Connect or OpenID.  Both technologies never disclose your password to my site, and warn you about what they are disclosing and in this case it’s not much more than your name/handle.

You may not know it, but you may already have an OpenID! Google, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress and others all provide the service to their users.

This also means that comments are no longer being closed after 90 days.  Feel free to comment on all the postings going back to 2004.

Thanks for your time and patience.

I changed the URL of my blog!

It all started with mattclare.ca/wordpress because that’s the software I chose to use to use back when I wanted to try this blogging thing out in 2004.  Shortly after that I regretted the choice (or lack there of) of the url mattclare.ca/wordpress.  A much better choice would have been mattclare.ca/blog

It took a lot of work to get the pretty URLs working, plus there’s the issue of visitors to my blog and search engines still having the old URLs.  Because of this I was hesitant to change the URL, but today after a lot of research and modelling, I finally switched the URL.  I had been testing redirecting /blog to /wordpress since I re-did the main page of my website, but  today I took the big plunge.

The most important thing was to setup the redirect via the Apache web server I use in a way that preserved my Google ranking.  The trick (according to Google) is to send the 301 header with the redirect.

The “httpd.conf” config line was

RewriteRule /wordpress(.*) /blog$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Please let me know if you see anything that doesn’t work anymore!

Way to organize the worlds information Google!

Meet the street view snowmobile. Deployed at the Whistler site of the Vancouver Olympics.

I think the next step is to strap one to the top of a curling rock! The only way they can get street view inside the house without a lawsuit.

The Fantacura (my 2001 Acura 1.7 EL) went in to the shop for a check-up, complaining about no heater heat at idle, and was told to get it’s affairs in order and make peace with those around it.

It’s not in a bad way, like my Saturn was when it was traded in (sorry Acura in Markham), but it is time to start looking around.

It’s got a few dings, including losing its front Acura A, and the leather driver’s seat has been re-stitched by me with fishing line.

The most recent ailment has forced me to realize that 235,000 Km is about all it’s worth. 170,000 Km was with me behind the wheel, and I think most of that was on the QEW between the Burlington Skyway and St. Catharines.

So now I’m scouring the province for a (manual transmission-ed) slightly used Acura CSX, Mazda3 Sport – or maybe an immaculate Acura EL?

Gina Trapani of smarterware.org / lifehacker.com now has a new series of weekly videos and blog posts at FastCompany.com called “Work Smart”. If you’re STILL one of those people who feel positively overwhelmed by your E-Mail inbox, or you feel that your iPhone/BlackBerry has made you worse at acting on E-Mails, not better, Gina has some simple advice for you.

Here’s her actual article over at http://www.fastcompany.com/article/work-smart-conquering-your-e-mail-inbox