[this is good]

The “Comments I’ve Made” feature on WordPress.com is very nice. It works much like the comment feed we had at Vox.com: leave a comment on a post, and you’ll see all subsequent comments (plus your own) in your feed. You don’t get bombarded with e-mails, and you don’t see the discussion that had already happened when you commented. You aren’t shown posts you didn’t comment on, and you can ignore the feature completely if you aren’t interested.

I really like this kind of thing, because it improves the social usability of WordPress.com. To date, the comment system here has been robust enough, but with few tools to help you find the conversations you’ve gotten into. A usable social platform really needs niceties like this.

Doorknob Monday 6/3/2013

We here at All Loose & Squirrelly state definitively that a gateknob counts as a doorknob.

Accidental Urban Photo Essay

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This fascinating little slideshow is brought to you by accident.

One day I checked a local traffic camera on the monitoring agency’s web site. But it wasn’t showing me traffic at all. It took some watching before I understood what it was doing: going around in circles! Apparently some part of the positioning system had gone haywire—or perhaps someone had inadvertently set their cheeseburger on the controller’s keyboard and didn’t realize it was holding a key down. It didn’t seem like any normal diagnostic routine, particularly in the middle of a workday.

I captured these representative images before the camera went back to showing dull pictures of cars on the Interstate. (I meant to blog these at the time, but ended up forgetting about them; I just now found them hiding on my hard drive.)

Old Post Flood!

Lots of old Vox posts emerging from the cellar this weekend! I hope this will be my last big push, and everything I want public will be public.

Yes, it’s a bit absurd that I’m still curating this stuff two and a half years after Vox closed down. But quite a few of these posts need significant attention to work right, and it’s mostly tedious tweaking. I certainly don’t mind twaddling a bit of markup as part of my day job, but on the weekends…well, you can imagine why it’s taken me this long to plod through it.

Of particular interest in this flood are mementos of a 2008 Vox meetup here in Cincinnati. Several of us got together in an actual physical location and met in person! Holy crap!

Check out the posts, and the voluminous comments from attendees:

• Suggesting the meetup!
• Setting the date!
• Asking for eternal worldwide rights to all photographs!
• The aftermath!

I hope everyone is having a safe and sane holiday weekend (not like the wildly destructive debauchery at that meetup—man, the Parks Department is still trying to get me to pay up for my failed attempt to jump seven picnic tables with my car. If only I had stopped at six…).

Penske Material

Yes, Seriously

He gets points for the USB Jesus Fish!

(Wondering if the car has Rich Corinthian Leather.)

Doorknob Monday 5/13/2013

Here, Comment on this One

For your entertainment, I have dug up some more posts that have been sitting around, bored as all hell, just waiting for me to dig them up.

Among the posts is the startling “I Don’t Think I Have Enough Monitors,” soon followed by its gleeful mutation, “Scott’s Desk.”

Then we have “Drug Me,” a phony pharmaceuticals advertisement incorporating certain keywords plugged in by me.

And in the that-would-have-made-a-better-tweet department, I lamented the news that Vincent D’Onofrio would be leaving Criminal Intent.

In the spirit of not being able to make up my goddamn mind and my basically being kind of an asshole dickface, you can’t comment on these posts—although you can Like them—because I have set the draconian option to turn off all comments a certain number of days after a post’s date. Somehow it seems appropriate to move the conversation to the present day, rather than resurrecting a discussion from a long-deceased blogging platform. At least, that’s my conviction right now. Give it a few days, and I will probably decide everything should be plaid instead. (?)

And happy Mother’s Day in advance to all you mothers out there.

*is pelted by bras and panties*

Doorknob Monday 4/29/2013

Doorknob Monday 4/22/2013