jotsheet

Periodically, this incomprehensible and annoying icon would suddenly appear on my Nokia 6010 cell phone. Situated in the upper-left corner of the LCD screen, it was a picture of a blinking envelope. Two problems here: (a) I had no idea what a blinking envelope meant (intuitively I would think “new message,” but that was wrong) and (b) I could not get rid of the damn icon. It was probably the single thing I hated most about my phone.

Then I got with the program and did a simple web search. The answer? The message inbox was full.

Kinda wish they would’ve been clearer about that.

If you visit my website regularly, you’ve noticed that the pickings here have been slim lately. I haven’t felt like writing. I haven’t had anything to say. And to tell you the truth, I find this malaise a bit disconcerting.

Less than a week ago, I returned from a two week trip; the first week was spent working in London, the second on holiday in Germany. You’d think I’d have something profound, insightful, or at least interesting to say about my trip. I really don’t. I can’t even summarize it well. What I can tell you is that traveling for two weeks by oneself makes for a lonely time.
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My recent move from underscores to hyphens in filenames has caused me a couple of unexpected headaches, but it’s also taught me some interesting things about Apache’s mod_rewrite. I’ve been buried in .htaccess for hours lately, playing detective to strange behavior on my site. My most recent discovery involves the limitations of Apache’s implementation of regular expressions in mod_rewrite. I think the developers were trying to prevent wannabes like me from screwing up their own sites and consuming server resources, but it’s caused me some frustration.

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I’ve become a little too interested in SEO of late, and I learned that hyphens are preferred by Google to underscores. (By the way, many people erroneously label hyphens as dashes; they are two distinct things.)

It seems that Google actually indexes a URL containing sample_phrase as the text jumbled together, or samplephrase. Therefore, for a searcher to find these terms in the URL of your page, he would have to search for the exact text: “sample phrase”. However, with hyphenated URLs (sample-phase), Google properly parses out each individual word, allowing a user searching for sample or phrase to hit that page.

So, with that in mind, I decided to make some changes ’round here to page names. And create a lot of work for myself on a Sunday afternoon.
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A bit of the shock has warn off. Now it’s a warm glow. Illinois beat Arizona in overtime, 90-89, to earn a trip to the Final Four. Let’s take a look and see what everyone else is saying about one of the most amazing college basketball games and comebacks in recent memory.
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“I can’t believe we just won that game.”

I just kept repeating it. I was in shock. In a way, two hours later, I still am. I can’t believe that Illinois was down 15 points to Arizona with four minutes left in the game and came back to force overtime, then win the game in OT. It’s unbelievable. Holy shit, man. Holy shit.
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Have you been following March Madness this weekend? If you haven’t, you’ve been missing out. And maybe you think UW-Milwaukee, a 12-seed that’s beaten Alabama and Boston College to reach the Sweet 16, is a beautiful Cinderella story. Well, it is, except for the rat at the helm of UWM: Bruce Pearl. He’s going to learn a hard lesson next outing: the Illini Nation has a loooong memory.

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