AC Capehart capehart

I don’t acquire much news these days. However, I do still often wake to NPR. Today I heard part of an interesting story on comics. I’d already been introduced to my Central PA neighbor Jay Hosler‘s work as well as the darwin collaboration that the story refers to by a comic book buddy and communications professor (all wrapped up in the same dude) on a bike ride together. I already knew that comics could have a profound impact on our thinking both culturally and individually.

Although it feels a little early for it given our lease constraints, we started home shopping in Altoona today in a slightly more serious way. Today, we visted the first house that we actually went inside. We took several pictures [link since removed since we didn’t buy this house -ed] but even as many as we took, I still want to have taken more. House summary: Built in 1983, it’s a 3 bedroom, 3 bath home with oversized 2 car garage on a 100’x120′ lot on the corner of Lloyd St and E.

Already, I’m glad I entered the Google AdSense program. I’ve been crawled by googlebot a fair amount recently, but apparently, they still don’t have enough info to put together real ads for my page(s). Instead, I can either run a background color (which I had been doing) or public service announcements for which I don’t get paid. As you can see, as of this writing at least, I’m now doing the latter.

This morning, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was reviewing a Java Web Services Tutorialand it was making sense. I tried the examples, and with a little bit of classpath fudging, I got them to work. I tried a quote generator I found on xmethods.comand got it to work. I was impressed with myself. Then I looked through the “additional resources” section at the end and found my way to a book on XML-RPC.

On a lighter note, I applied for Google AdSense ads today for the blog. I have no idea if they’ll take it, and I’m sure I don’t have the readership to actually generate enough money to care about. But, I thought I’d try it. I mention this partly because I think it’s noteworthy. But what cracked me up was when I found the online version of the Wired print article concerning the postal monopolyfor my previous blog entry, I saw that the wired article also had Google AdSense ads.

When I was a young ‘en, maybe about 16, I lived in (two of) the poorer sections of the richest school district around. A school district my parents had moved into three years earlier – and shortly before their divorce — specifically so that I could go to the good county schools instead of the crappy city schools. All, in all, it was not bad. I got the fancy education, but I was not as insulated in my upper-crust world as other school-mates of mine.

I’m not exactly sure when I first put up the picture of me bicycling on my home page, and titled the page “The (hopefully quite temporary) home page for AC Capehart” — probably some time around 1999, maybe 2000. When did I do the MS 150? I bought the bike I’m pictured on partly for that ride. Anyway, somewhere on the order of 5-6 years ago. I intended it to be a placeholder.

I suppose that one never really knows what one’s impact on the world will be. In anticipation of heightened traffic as bk’s blog readers were notified of the existence of my blog, I installed awstats. I had done that a few machines ago, but at the time doing even a basic config for a web server was a PITA. Or, at least I thought it was then. Now, it’s pretty trivial, and I’ve lumped all my *accapehart.

I made a promise that I regret. I told bk that if I posted two more blog entries in the coming 7 days that he could announce my (unread) blog on his (somewhat more read) blog. I regret this not because I fear my voice being heard by the unwashed masses — it’s been too long since my shower anyway — no, I regret it because it’s got me thinking about number and size of blog content in a way that feels inappropriate to the spirit of blogging.

In setting up a wiki for a client (PeopleSpace), I was reminded about how terribly cool this technology is. So, I set myself up one using a Ruby Wiki called Instiki. It’s here: http://wiki.