Showing 1 - 10 of 119 posts found matching keyword: wriphe.com
Sunday 14 July 2024
Google has kindly informed me that Wriphe.com has been having a problem with certain pages "without user-selected canonical" resolution. That's a fancy way of saying that you can get to the same content multiple ways, and Google's bots can't figure which one is the "correct" one.
I thought I had this problem fixed before, but my server did migrate my host not too long ago, and it's not unheard of for files to fail to transfer correctly. (I swear you get even one 1 swapped with one 0 and everything goes haywire!)
After a bit of re-coding, I think I have it fixed again, so hopefully everything is now resolving "canonically." What a good thing there was nothing else happening in the world to distract me during this difficult time!
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Saturday 6 July 2024
When an old man dies, a library is burned with him.
—African proverb (according to Parade magazine)
I occasionally worry about what will happen to this blog when I'm no longer alive or otherwise capable of maintaining it. No one owns anything in the virtual realm, and all sites (and all the knowledge they contain) evaporate like mist as soon as they are no longer profitable enough to maintain the energy cost of their digital existence. Since I have selfishly chosen not to have any children of my own that I can emotionally manipulate into keeping Wriphe.com alive in perpetuity, I probably need to accept the fact that once I'm gone, any evidence that I wasted so much time at a computer keyboard will be gone, too.
Which makes me wonder, what will the world really miss? Is the minutia evidence of my life really worth preserving? To answer that question, I climbed a mountain and asked a wizened sage... no, just kidding. I wrote a script that sorted and counted all 550,000 words I've recorded in the past 21 years to see if they gave me any indication of the site's value. (Note that my quick-and-dirty script returned many character strings you won't find in a dictionary, like movie titles, odd proper names, web addresses, and "g-g-ghost.")
The most common word at Wriphe.com: the
No great insight there. The is the most common word in the English language, which is no big surprise considering that it is the only definite article in the whole darn language. According to Wikipedia, it accounts for "seven percent of all printed English-language words." For comparison, it currently accounts for only about 5% of Wriphe.com. Heck, all first person singular pronouns (I, me, mine, my) combined make up only 3% of Wriphe.com! I guess I don't talk about myself enough.
After stripping out the top 50 most common English words (according to the same Wikipedia source), I get the following list:
- my (3,110 occurrences)
- it's (2,045)
- about (1,847)
- like (1,840)
- me (1,769)
Ok, fine. Maybe I do talk about myself enough. Yeah, nobody in the future is going to need all of that.
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| Leave a Comment | Tags: grammar walter wriphe.comTuesday 16 April 2024
Eleven years ago, "friend" Keith predicted that my then-new DC Bullet tire cover would outlast the Jeep. I'm happy to report that he was wrong.
The Jeep is still going strong, and it's time to unveil this decade's tire cover!
Yeah, it's still black and white and red all over. When you find a color scheme that works, why change it?
As for that new url, try it yourself: wriphe.com/poodles
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Monday 4 March 2024
For reasons I won't go into (mainly: vanity), I've recently been re-reading old blog posts. What stands out the most to me is not how damn clever I am (I already knew that) but how I have a real problem typing the word "it's" when I mean "its" and vice versa.
For the record, "its" (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of the traditional gender-neutral singular pronoun, used to demonstrate ownership, as in:
The battle station is heavily shielded and carries a firepower greater than half the star fleet. Its defenses are designed around a direct large-scale assault.
Meanwhile, "it's" (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of the unpossessive, laissez-faire "it" and the present tense third-person singular being verb "is," as in:
The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port.
As you can see, despite the its/it's pair being one of the most common confusions in the world of English grammar, I obviously know they're two different words, and I know how they should be used in a sentence (and I've known ever since Star Wars). So why do I so often type one when I mean the other? Is it a birth defect? A mental illness? Keyboard gremlins? I wish I had a better answer than "I'm too lazy to proofread my own posts," but here we are.
Now let's blow this thing and go home.
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Wednesday 24 January 2024
My obsession with Captain Kirk's U.S.S. Enterprise continues unabated.
If you're a Star Trek fan who has a large monitor and a mouse with a scroll wheel (or keyboard with PgUp, PdgDn buttons), you might enjoy this page I made for my own amusement: wriphe.com/constitution-class/
And if you're not a Star Trek fan, what's wrong with you?
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| Leave a Comment | Tags: star trek wriphe.comTuesday 14 November 2023
Questions from Hannah, part 2:
Why do you like cemeteries so much?
Because they are awesome. You can keep your forests and "grand" canyons. I'll take a cemetery any day.
Cemeteries are a reminder that the world wasn't built for me, that life only has the meaning we give it, that the journey is always more important than the destination. Memento mori!
When built right, the Victorian way, cemeteries are a delightful combination of storybook and park, usually filled with a bunch of spectacularly crafted art. As a bonus, most living people treat cemeteries with a serene reverence you don't find anywhere else, so cemeteries are simultaneously full of people and very quiet.
Truthfully, I think the idea of burying people in boxes in the ground is kind of ridiculous, but I love, love, love the stone monuments left above ground to mark their territory. If nothing else, those tombstones say "I was here," and that sort of yelling into the void of eternity speaks to me. What is a tombstone but a very succinct and enduring blog post?
And why do you call them cemeteries instead of graveyards?
Because that's what they are.
In the modern Western tradition, a graveyard is a type of cemetery that is on a church grounds while a cemetery is a community's common burial ground not necessarily connected to a specific church. For example, my town's local burial ground (established 1833) is officially Oak Hill Cemetery, though there are plenty of churches around here with their own much smaller graveyards. It's my experience that cemeteries are often more welcoming to visitors (and usually contain more delightfully ostentatious monuments) than graveyards, but I've been in plenty of delightful graveyards, too.
Personally, I can't say as I like the word "graveyard." A yard of graves sounds so very bleak, while there's almost something celebratory in a "cemetery." I like both of those much more than I like the euphemism "memorial park." The government should make you explicitly declare if you have a park full of corpses.
Looking at Online Etymology Dictionary, it would appear that both "graveyard" and "cemetery" have historically referred to more or less the same thing, so their use prior to the 19th century probably derives from whatever languages were spoken by a region's ancestors. And I suppose that maybe you live somewhere where "graveyard" has remained the preferred term, which is fine by me. Regional differences are fun!
You often mention the fact that you work at night and sleep through the morning; is your brain really more alert in the middle of the night?
I do think I do my best coding and most often find myself "in the zone" between 1 and 3AM, but I don't know if I would say that I am especially more alert in the darkness than I am in sunlight — I'm no vampire. I really like the late night because everyone else is asleep. For one thing, it's useful for my work: coding is easier without distractions, and it's easier to update websites, databases, and video game files when they aren't being as widely used. But I chose my occupation, not the other way around. I just like being the only person around. It's like the entire world becomes a cemetery, and you already know how I feel about that.
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Monday 6 November 2023
I'm proud to report that Wriphe.com has picked up a new reader! According to her email (subject line: "I like your blog!"), Hannah has followed me over from Boosterrific.com and has let me know that she has now read every single Wriphe.com post going back to the beginning in 2003. She might be more dedicated to this site than I am.
Obviously, after reading that much drivel, Hannah has questions. Fortunately, most of her questions are about my favorite subject: me.
Let the self aggrandizement begin!
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Back in the day — this was before Facebook and smartphones existed, mind you — I was in art school in Athens, GA, and wanted an easy way to keep in touch with friends and family who lived across the country. I do not enjoy A) talking on the telephone or B) repeating myself. So I built a place where anyone who cared to know could come to get critical updates about whatever it was I was doing at the time. I can't say as it worked, really, as only a couple of my friends (and my mother) have ever visited regularly. I still have to answer "what have you been up to?" too often for my personal tastes.
How do you decide what to post about?
At the core, the point of everything that I do is to keep myself entertained. I am very selfish that way.
I come from the land of Lewis Grizzard. (Google him.) Grizzard made a strong impression on a lot of people; many thought he was a real bastard, but my favorite restaurant still has a menu item named after his favorite dish: brunswick stew on a pulled pork barbecue sandwich served with onion rings, I never met him personally, but my encounters with his writings during my formative years led me to believe that one of the best possible occupations was "humorist newspaper columnist." So I generally approach content at Wriphe.com as my own soapbox and diary with a goal of making it an enjoyable read in the (poorly imitated) vein of curmudgeonly satirists like Grizzard or Dave Barry or television's Stephen Colbert or Andy Rooney. (Google him too.) Quoth the Poppins: "A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down."
When it comes to creating individual posts, I start by saying to myself, "Oh, shit! I haven't posted anything at Wriphe.com in the past two days!" I picked an every-other-day schedule because it's just often enough to keep me motivated and just long enough to let me regenerate ideas. I ask myself, "Is there anything on my mind?" Sometimes there is, and I type that. And sometimes there isn't, and I stall (or punt).
And some days people ask me a bunch of questions and I answer them.
How long does it take you to craft a blog post?
I wish I was half as clever as I like to think I am. On average, probably about thirty minutes. Honestly, it's probably longer and I just don't want to admit that publicly. Sometimes it takes a very long time, especially for the five paragraph "college admission" essays in which I want to be sure I've gotten all of my punchlines just right. Grammar matters, but so does rhythm and timing. (The core of comedy is subversion of expectations. And banana peels.)
Hannah had more questions than that, but that's a good start. I have to have something to post later, after all. These posts aren't going to blog themselves.
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Sunday 27 August 2023
This is the 3,606th post at Wriphe.com. Well, actually, there were somewhat more than that; the earliest posts were uploaded via a flat file to be rendered in (now-defunct) shockwave format, and I periodically overwrote the file with updated content for the first 6 months or so. I'm sure that those lost posts weren't particularly noteworthy, and it's important for me to remember that what I am typing right now is just as pointless and ephemeral.
They say that the Internet is forever, but that's far from true. Digital doesn't outlast paper, and even stone eventually turns to sand. One day, my lease of this domain will lapse and/or my web host will stop serving this content. Then all of these 3,606 posts (plus however many else I get around to before then) will disappear. Presumably, when that happens, I won't be in any state to care.
I have never believed that everything (or even most) that I post is deep or insightful. Or interesting to anyone but me. The world should not mourn the loss of my drivel.
It's encouraging to hope that something I've posted will leave a lasting impression on someone somewhere, if only for a little while. But I don't think that really matters. Wriphe should be enjoyed each moment as it is encountered, without regard for the future or past.
So if you think this post sucks, just forget about it. Come back in a few days, and I'll have something new. That's just how Wriphe works.
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| Leave a Comment | Tags: walter wriphe.comWednesday 26 July 2023
Despite my intention to post something here every two days, my last post was on the 22nd. Before that, I slid a day on each of the 14th and 19th. Three missed posts in one month is not a great sign about my desire or motivation.
The question I have to ask myself is "why am I not keeping to my intended posting schedule?" There haven't been any practical obstacles. My Internet connection has been fast and stable since the router changeover debacle last month. (Although, it ironically went out in the middle of my typing this, so I've just come back from taking a shower.) And it's not like I've been on vacation. With all the work I have right now, I'm barely away from my keyboard for any more than a few hours at any time, including sleep!
I'm wondering if that may be the problem. With so much to do at my desk, maybe I'm just not interested in sitting here typing up my frivolous thoughts when I could instead be on the sofa watching a frivolous movie or playing a frivolous video game. I haven't painted or written in months, either. It's hard to find "free" time when all I can think is "I should be coding right now."
On the other hand, blogging is a hobby. If I don't feel like doing it, maybe I just shouldn't do it. But maybe the better solution is to quit the jobs that are taking all my time, even if they are paying really, really well.
To be an ant or a grasshopper, that is the question. Whose is the more interesting tombstone? The ant's is built of more durable stone, but the grasshopper's is a better read.
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Tuesday 27 June 2023
Yes, I know there should have been a post yesterday, but I seem to be having trouble reaching my website. This *may* be because I *might* have accidently triggered what the server thought was a DDoS attack against myself by way of an unintentionally careless code loop. Oops.
This shouldn't be so frustrating to me. Obviously, the site still works. I can reach it via my phone, so there's no cause for panic. And I have other means for testing what I was testing when things went sideways. But gee, whiz, it's really stuck in my craw that it's currently out of my reach.
"C'est la vie," say the old folks. It goes to show you never can tell.
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