Author: Ashley Bischoff

DFWBlogs Cocktail Event – July

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

I attended the DFWBlogs Cocktail Event was last night at the Hurricane Grill. And, like last time, I had a good time.

Since their menu is online, I had already decided beforehand that I’d be ordering the fried catfish. And, the cornmeal-battered fillets of catfish were indeed “white and fresh-tasting”. More than that, though, the steak fries that accompanied the fried catfish were excellent — they were crisp and full of potato flavor.

All was not rosy. For one thing, someone decided that, as a group, we should sit near the front of the restaurant next to the giant sound-reflection panels (otherwise referred to as “windows”). At the beginning of the evening, it didn’t make much difference, but towards the end it wasn’t helping. Especially with the karaoke (?!) later on, the packet-loss on some of my conversations was approaching 80%. To give you an idea, one conversation resembled something along the lines of “ Weezer … Smirnoff … Thomas … emo …”.

So, yeah, I would have preferred a location more inducive to conversation. But, the food was still delicious and, up until the sound-levels reached critical mass, the conversation was good as well :).

blogChalking

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I came across the term “blogChalking” from, of all things, the American Dialect Society’s mailing list. The basic idea is to standardize on a set of keywords/metatags to make it easier to find blogs in your neighborhood.

After seeing this kind of hard mapping implemented by people at NYCBloggers.com and watch to the rise of WarChalking (in my opinion, an idea that best express, today, the beauty of large public networks), I noticed a possible way: if all bloggers mark their sites with a special sign and geographic information, maybe it would be possible to improvise such searching system.

So I mixed up those ideas to create what I call blogChalking. [...]

It sounds like a have-nothing-to-lose idea, so I may just give it a try.

Ballmer ’fesses up to Linux/Windows cost FUD

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From The Register, “Ballmer ’fesses up to Linux/Windows cost FUD”. For quite some time, Microsoft maintainted that Linux costed more than Windows. But, they’ve apparently realized that people just aren’t buying that anymore:

Windows is a lot more expensive to run than Linux, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has finally confessed. Despite Redmond’s heroic efforts to defeat common knowledge with elaborately-rigged total cost of ownership ‘studies’, innuendo, FUD and outright distortions, the rhetorical power of common experience has become too powerful, even for a marketing behemoth like MS.

According to an article by VARBusiness, Ballmer now concedes that MS execs “haven’t figured out how to be lower-priced than Linux. For us as a company, we’re going through a whole new world of thinking.” [...]

British Open watching?

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Though I don’t particularly enjoy playing golf, I do enjoy watching it. As someone that has attempted to play the game, I can really appreciate the skill and talent that the players have. And, of course, the British Open is this weekend. Or, as they like to call themselves, “The Open Championship” ;).

So, would anyone out there in blogger-land be interested in watching the final round with me? It airs on Sunday from 7:00am - 12:30pm CST. But, that's frightfully early, so I was thinking that through the magic of TiVo’s ability to start-watching-before-the-recording-is-finished, we could time-shift that to “start” at 9:00 or 10:00.

Of course, the DFWBlogs Cocktail Event is this evening, so I’ll mention this idea there as well.

It was a dark and stormy night…

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Named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton who originally wrote “It was a dark and stormy night...”, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest is “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” And, the 2002 Winners have been announced — here’s one of my favorites:

The blood dripped from his nose like hot grease from a roasting bratwurst pierced with a fork except that grease isn't red and the blood wasn’t that hot and it wasn’t a fork that poked him in the nose but there was a faint aroma of nutmeg in the air and it is of noses we speak not to mention that if you looked at it in the right profile, his nose did sort of look like a sausage.

Jim Sheppeck
Farmington, NM

(Link from this thread on MetaFilter)