Microdata

After getting a little bit more into the microdata after mentioning microformats it seems to be a lot more complex. There is RDFa as well as schema.org which apparently MS, google and yahoo want people to move it. Seems like it will provide a lot of control, but for this blog, it seems like it won't be needed.

The changes that I have made I think that I'll back out and work on seeing if I can instead just move this into a html5 presentation. I figure that with just the core tags, without needing to use the itemtype attributes, I'll be able to express the blog in a more semantic way.

Microformats

Today one of the things that came up was microformats. When I think of html I don't think "machine readable". Turns out I'm wrong. I didn't think that by just adding some css classes in sort-of a structured way you could create info that was reusable. I assumed that you'd have to set up another view (xml, json, ical, etc).

Turns out that's how you can have a google recipe search and how google can show you (from its search page) customer reviews (4 out of 5 stars). From a website owner I can see the appeal since they have to tweak the markup that they already provide. From consumers of that markup (google, etc) it's good because its more likely the data the users are being show is the same that's being shown to you.

I started adding some span's, css classes, and other containers to the index page to line up with the hAtom 0.1 format. I'll continue to update it since the page neither validates "properly" or using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool from google. More work can be done, but interesting none the less.

Aside: if you ever need to find the ISO 8601 date format for perl, it's "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S". Via dzone.

Vasovagal

Yesterday I had what might have been called in older times "an episode". Laura calls me "vasovagal" which is fancy doctor speak for "fainting". So far I think that I've had 5 vasovagal responses: 1) when I tried to put in contact lenses for the first time 2) when we got to Barcelona from the over night train from Paris. 3) At Laura's parent's place once 4) When I was having some blood taken for insurance for the house 5) last night at dinner.

I think that in all cases it was at the start or right before a meal, and I was probably a bit dehydrated for them all. Last night was one of the worse ones. I felt my eyes rolling back like I was falling asleep and I started to nudge Laura to get her attention. The third time I was finally able to and she and my dad helped me to the car. There is no way that I could walk on my own and probably not with just Laura's help. They reclined the passenger seat and waited for some of my blood to decide to visit my brain again. Not fun. I was actually scared at one point because my left arm was tingling but I figured it was because how I had my arm on the rest and it was cutting off the flow to that limb as well.

Needless to say I'm staying at home today and trying to fully recover. To top it off I'm fighting off a cold. *sigh* Even though people tell me that I've lost my mind, I still think that my body will fail long before my mind does. This is why we should be building cybernetic replacement parts. But that's a different post for a different time.

Kick in the ...

Today is the first day that I can actually say that I've felt our baby girl that we're expecting at the end of November kick / punch. To say that I'm excited and scared would be an understatement - if she can kick like that when she's 300g, what will she do when she's 13 kg.

Someone today asked if I felt "ready". I laughed. I'm not sure that anyone can ever be "ready" to have a baby, not really anyways. I can say that I'm ready to have everything turned upside down. I was once told that what I don't know would fill libraries. This new chapter in our lives will make one of those libraries a tiny bit smaller, and hopefully I won't screw up too bad. When it all comes down to it, I think that's every parent's prayer.

So baby, if one day you're reading this on your neural interfaced holographic augmented reality, please forgive the mistakes that I've done.

Earl Grey, hot.

I decided a couple of months ago to start to purge all the tea in our "coffee" cupboard. We had a lot of tea because people would give it to Laura to drink, but she wouldn't drink it often. A cupboard full of fancy teas and most of the time she wanted red rose.

So I started to drink Earl Grey (hot), mostly because of Jean-Luc. At first I wasn't impressed - tasted too "flowery". Second cup was "okay". Third was "not bad", followed by the fourth "pretty good". Pretty soon the box was empty and I was bemoaning the lack of my new favourite tea. *sigh* My plan to get rid of the tea by drinking it has backfired because now I've added that tea to the grocery list.

But I really do enjoy a cup o Earl Gray, hot.

Hate on for DRM

Up to now I've tried to stick to my guns about DRM. If something had DRM, I'd either return it or not buy it in the first place. I've not been perfect - I've bought things like DVD's and bluerays which are at least region locked. I never bought anything from itunes when they had drm, but I've purchased a metric crapload since.

I'd like to get some non-dead-tree magazine subscriptions (Analog and Asimov), but they are all drm'ed when you buy from amazon, sony, barnes and noble. At this point my only option is to buy higher priced individual issues from fictionwise which is owned by b&n - which could mean that it gets killed off in favour their own competing store. I even emailed the publisher and they told me they "do not have any plans for DRM free subscriptions in the future". *sigh*

Why do I hate drm so much? To me it removes who owns the purchased item. At any time the company can decide not to support the device or (if it calls home) servers that the drm uses. You're locked into the devices which the company decides you can use.

Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem paying for content or using docs that are clearly linked to me like they generate at the pragmatic bookshelf. I know when I download a pdf from them, I can view it on my computer, my iphone, or any device I get in the future.

I know that I can strip off the drm. I could just ignore the law. That's not the point. I don't like being a "good customer" and being treated like a criminal. I'll do the only thing that I can do - vote with my wallet and go somewhere else while letting them know why I won't be a customer of theirs.

First run

Today I went for my first run at lunch in a long, long time. Not that I've been running much at home either, so it's not super easy to get back into the swing of things. Perhaps if I had not decided to go up the stairs behind the Centre Block my chest and head wouldn't have felt like they were going to explode. But I discovered that my old route around there is less accessible since they put up all kinds of security fencing. Now I just have to remember to bring my phone so that I can get an accurate timing (because I'm too lazy to do splits with my watch). My current time was slow and off because being just a couple of blocks away from Wellington means that it's a lot longer before my run "starts" and it is sort of weird when it "ends".

Even with a pounding headache for the rest of the day I felt great. I had forgotten how good the high is.