Minh’s Notes

Yes, the cows have come home: Minh’s Notes is back.

Let that sink in for awhile. I’ve been essentially blogless for over two months, ever since f2o cut me loose ahead of schedule. Lucky me that you’ve nonetheless found this blog’s new location at notes.1ec5.org (as obscure as an IP address).

Obviously, in the two months that this site has lain comatose, lots has changed in the world, especially in my little corner of it:

• I finish my sophomore year in college by presenting a desktop wiki editor for the Mac, which I dub Floret. Written in Objective-C, language of the Mac, Floret supports just about any MediaWiki installation, including Wikipedia. Although it’s nearly usable, I begin rewriting the core of the program in Python so I can hook it up to pywikipediabot.
• The Tri-State area finds yet another way to prove that it’s behind the times.
• Media Landscape Redefined By 24-Second News Cycle
• I start work.
• Binary marble adding machine [1]
• Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace – Not an academic paper, but fascinating nonetheless. For the record, the day I visit MySpace is the day the Internet crashes. [2]
• All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash
• I learn to cook, where by “cook” I mean a jar of Ragú, a box of noodles, and a pot of boiling water.
• 19 Eponymous Laws Of Software Development – Remember Godwin and Postel? They’ve got company. [3]

There are plenty more links where that came from, but I’ll spare you and save those for Part II, Part III, and Part IV. If I ever get around to it.

Entry №1108, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 12:28 AM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Announcements, Summary | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Today was the second time that a man stopped me in White Plaza and offered me ten dollars for being an undergrad and wearing a bike helmet at the same time. (What’s weirder: the offer, or the fact that I fulfilled both conditions?) For the second time, I declined. The woman in the booth behind him exclaimed, “You don’t want ten dollars?! It’s not a gimmick!”

Nope. I don’t question their legitimacy, but I don’t do it for the money, and regular readers of this blog will know why.

Really astute readers will notice that I’ve completely turned off comments on this blog. It’s the first time since I started the blog in 2002. Before you cry “censorship” – or simply shrug your shoulders because you never cared to comment anyways – I should point out the extenuating circumstances. f2o, my wonderful host of three years, is calling it quits. f2o’s provider, Progressive Networks, apparently decided that offering a charge-free, ad-free, feature-packed hosting service wasn’t economically feasible any more. Well, I can’t blame them. I certainly miss the community that existed before f2o was reincorporated as Progressive, though.

I got the eviction notice two weeks ago, and I have about two weeks left before mxn.f2o.org goes dark. So I’m jumping on the DreamHost bandwagon. It’s the first time in five years that this website actually managed to cost me anything. In the next couple weeks, this site’s content will be transferred, more or less in its entirety, to 1ec5.org. This domain will hopefully redirect there when the time comes. Right now, there’s not much to look at on that end, except for some snide comments about your insistence on using an old Telnet client. But coming soon, there’ll be a whole new Minh’s Notes.

(By which I mean the same old Minh’s Notes.)

Entry №1107, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 12:58 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Announcements, College | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

…I started this blog. Well, not really: it was an ordinary personal website, intended to host well-researched essays and helpful tutorials on the Vietnamese language. The only thing is, it also had this “blog-in-kind” on the front page that announced any additions to the website. Over time, it morphed and grew into a full-fledged blog, and eventually the website became little more than the blog you see here. All I can say is that it really started with an article about sesquipedalia (in its original form).

I blame Movable Type, the software that has powered this blog from its humble beginnings as an announcements section. It made things so much easier than the tedious process I had suffered through previously: code a page in HTML, connect to the FTP server, find the right folder, upload the page, and repeat for every page that should happen to harbor a Related Links section.

Movable Type’s Save button made that entirely unnecessary, and it fueled alternating flurries of posts and lulls in activity that probably annoyed my regular readers equally. Though at least it allowed me to claim to my competitors – not entirely falsely – that this site was “Updated daily.” That was some claim to make in the days before LiveJournal’s entrance into mainstream culture (and later Xanga’s and MySpace’s).

I’m not going to go into a long diatribe about how far my blog has gone and what herdles I’ve had to overcome in keeping it going – I’ll save that for this time next year, my fifth blogiversary. (You knew that was a word, didn’t you?) For now, I’ll just serve up a few links from the (read: my) past:

• The first incarnation of the first website I ever kept online for any prolonged period of time, The Loveland Schools Press ONLINE. Notice the tasteless cacophony of animation. After all, we were still in the late ’90s.
• A mirror of the second incarnation of LSP Online. After more than a year of neglect, I later replaced the main site with a “letter from the editor,” declaring quite eloquently the site’s closure – as if that were necessary.
• Archives from the original Minh’s Notes, before it took on a function more or less independent from MingerWeb, my long-defunct personal site.
• A replica of the design that this blog wore from 2002 to 2003, refurbished with the latest entries.
• The last blog entries ever to be published at my Netfirms site, which I maintained until I moved Minh’s Notes to my brand-new f2o account here.
• Another replica of an old design here, the appropriately-elegant Notebook design that adorned this blog for most of 2004 and 2005, after over a year in production. Someday, I might give in and revert to this beautiful design for old-times’s sake.
• …

And here we are. 2006. The day before my birthday, this site stands at 714 published entries, 428 approved comments, and 329 approved TrackBack pings, including those from one translation (Apuntes de Minh in Spanish), as well as a somewhat-popular feed aggregator for 357 blogs by 236 St. Xers. And lots more stuff that I planned but never got around to carrying out.

So that’s my state of the site address for tonight. I hope you’ve been bored utterly stiff.

Entry №999, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 11:51 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Announcements, Loveland Schools Press, Summary, Weblogging | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)