Tag: wikipedia

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I’ll be writing more in a week or two

If you’ve been reading this blog from my web page at www.rynosoft.com/mick, you may have noticed that I’ve been reorganizing things over there. I have been consolidating links to all of the articles there onto a single page, which is available from the “Archive” link on my web page or from the “Archive” link in the “All Things Mick” section on the left side of this page. When I’ve finished putting all the links on the Archive page, the web page at www.rynosoft.com/mick will cease to exist.

I’m doing this because everything I write these days is on my blog and I write very few, if any, website pages any more. I want to keep the old stuff around and I think a single page archive linking to all the old articles is a good way to keep it available without having to maintain the labyrinthian structure of the website as I envisioned it back when I first started it in 1996.

So what does this all mean for you, the reader? You now have a couple of options for viewing my blog:

  1. Replace your www.rynosoft.com/mick bookmark(s) with a bookmark to www.rynosoft.com/blog in your web browser. If you want to view old articles, use the Search field (for blog content) or the Archive link on the left (for older content).
  2. Subscribe to an RSS feed to this blog with your favorite aggregator. I use a dedicated reader called NetNewsWire but Safari, which is free and available for Windows and Mac, also has a fine built-in reader. If neither of those options is appealing, Internet Explorer 7 has a built-in reader (or so says Wikipedia) and I hear that Google Reader is an excellent web-based solution. If you’d like to do your own research, you can start with Wikipedia’s fairly comprehensive list of aggregator clients. WordPress, the wonderful software that powers this blog, supports atom, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and RSS 0.92 feeds. You can also click the “RSS” link at the bottom of the page to subscribe to this blog.
If the second option sounds totally technical and incomprehensible, I apologize. However, you should be using RSS even if my blog is the only blog you read. RSS makes web browsing faster and easier by doing all of the mundane work for you. You can expect a future article here explaining all about RSS: what it can do for you and how to use it. If you don’t want to wait, check out some of the links above.
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Vital Statistics


This is a screenshot from Thomas’ computer last week. It shows the “History” menu in his web browser. Behind the the menu, you can see parts of the article he was reading on Wikipedia: Eroticism. Click the image to open a window with a larger version.

I stumbled upon this information one night because he kept using his computer when he was supposed to be in bed. Tina busted him several times and so I checked on him remotely from my office (all of the computers in our house are remotely viewable/controllable from my office computer). He was no longer using his computer, but I was surprised to find that he was reading an article on eroticism. I told Tina the next day and we agree to talk to him about it.

In the meantime, I pondered how he had even thought to look up “eroticism” on Wikipedia. We considered that he might have gotten some inappropriate spam, but I checked his email and didn’t see anything like that. Then I thought to check his browsing history and obtained this screenshot. The “History” menu shows all of the pages that you have accessed in the order that you accessed them. More recent pages are at the top and go down in reverse chronological order. So you can see that he started at Wikipedia’s front page where he clicked on a link to “relationship”. This took him to something called a “disambiguation page” – a page designed to resolve word ambiguities by summarizing the articles for each use of the word. From there, he clicked on the link to “romantic love” which has links to “free love”, “puppy love” (which has a link to “crush”) and, finally, “erotic love”, which redirects to the “Eroticism” article.

When Tina and I asked him about it (separately and non-chalantly), he said that he just clicked on a link in Wikipedia and then clicked a bunch of others after that. Moreover, he said he didn’t really understand any of the articles. We told him he could ask us about stuff like that if he wanted to know more and he said, “OK.” And that was the end of it. At least for now.

Bike odometer: 201 miles
Current reading: I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, The Prince by Machiavelli
Recent listening: This Is The Moody Blues by The Moody Blues, Coverville, DrugMusic
Recent viewing: Falcons at Saints, Countdown, The Daily Show, The Simpsons
Recent playing: Zuma
Recently accomplished: n/a
Imperative To Do: Refinish deck, hair cut, new rear fender for bike, finish old blog entries, fix toilet (call plumber), rake, install new hard drive for Thomas
Cool Link: Fembot for sale: Somebody is selling an Austin Powers prop and the pictures are quite creepy.