this is life

March 07, 2004 by Eric Richardson

It's hard to complain about life when it's 80 degrees and clear blue skies outside. Standing out on my balcony I have a clear view of west LA, the Hollywood sign, downtown, and snow-covered mountain peaks off to the east. The microwave is beeping at me to let me know that my leftovers from the best resturant in LA are ready. Sure, I've got a midterm and a paper that should be weighing me down this week. Sure, I've got to change up my schedule to get into the health center Monday to get my stitches checked on. But you know, I really don't care. It's too nice out to care.

the damage?

March 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Seven stitches. I was thinking three, but uh, I was wrong. That's why she's the one doing the stitching and not me. I went to Good Samaritan Hospital, which I didn't realize it, but is actually affiliated with USC. I got there about 4:30, got triaged about 4:45, and then got called in at 5:15 or so. I was out by 6, so really the whole process wasn't that bad. The lady who stitched me up (who stitches in an ER? A nurse? A doctor?) and office staff were very friendly. She said I was her third set of stitches above the eyebrow today.

another day another trip to the ER?

March 06, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So I was wakeboarding today. It was great out. I had even skied first. And then I had to go and put a gash right above my eye. Either my knee or the side of the board did this, and I really don't understand the dynamics of either. So now I'm off to the ER for stitches... Woo hoo! Just how I wanted to spend my Saturday evening.

prior art: the wheel

March 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Yesterday Topher outlined features he wants in a future version of the software he's written to run his blog. The first comment echoed my thoughts while reading: why? Why go to all the work of writing your own software when other packages already exist and do a great job? Then I went, oh, wait... I do that.

Granted, my reasons are a little different. I moved this blog to eThreads on April 19, 1999. Movable Type 0.1 wouldn't be released until September 23, 2001. Blogger predated that, but still didn't launch until August, 1999. So there really wasn't much else out there when I first made the changes to customize a version of eThreads to do news instead of forums.

But the core question is one that I still ask myself, a lot: Why should I not port what I'm doing to something like MT and just get in with the trends?

I think really my answer is that I just don't see a reason to. eThreads is for me a perfect platform. Over the years the architecture has evolved into something that's really fun to work with. When there's a new feature I want I can use some nice hooks to be able to plug in and make things happen really easily. A couple weeks ago I wanted support for XML/RPC pings to be able to ping blogrolling. Writing the code to do so in a clean, extensible way took a couple hours.

Were I starting from scratch, I'd definitely get on the MT bandwagon and start developing extensions onto it. I think they're doing some really cool stuff. But I'm not starting from scratch, or even looking at a situation where I need to add a lot of things at once. And in that case, I'm perfectly content sitting where I'm at.

restoring the rings

March 05, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I was sitting in "my office" on the Annenberg patio for several hours yesterday. While there I overheard a Daily Trojan reporter conduct the interview for this story about rings from the 1984 Olympics being restored. Other coverage in the LA Times.