weblog.masukomi.org

• [Some perspective][]
• [What’s good][]
• [What could be better][]
• [Bugs][]
• [Would I recommend it?][]

Some perspective

I purchased Byword because I think Markdown is a spectacular way to write and was looking for an app that would allow me to create new documents, easily preview them and grab either the formatted preview text or the generated HTML.

Until now, I’d been using Marked for previews while I typed in Vim. Now, Vim’s great. I love coding in it, but it’s really not the greatest when it comes to writing text, and I’m not really a fan of any of the other apps that handle plain text well. So, I went off in search of an app specifically designed for creating documents with Markdown.

Listen, you are an intelligent person, but someone has led you astray, and it is driving me nuts.

When you blog some information for the world to see, what you have created is a “post” more specifically, it is a “blog post”. Sometimes they’re “entries” but that’s more commonly associated with diary style blogs. In some cases a post could be considered an “article”, but those posts are never, ever, a “blog”.

Anyone who’s been following my Twitter feed lately knows that I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Lo-Fi camera apps on the iPhone, and I had a post all written up about them, but then my friend Kirk tweeted:

Gotta admit I hope the whole instagram thing is kind of a fad. Makes all [the pictures look] like those b+w “dress up like Bonnie and Clyde”

The other day the Googlebot swung by to check my site for updates and found Malware. Almost immediately, it seemed, people’s browsers were warning them off from my sites. Malware! Bad Things (TM)! There be Dragons here! and so on. Fortunately a friend dropped me a Tweet shortly after it started and thus the hunt began with one clue:

Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including globalpoweringgathering.com/.

Sadly, that was ALL I had to go on, and when I told the browser I was ok with the risk (Windows malware can’t hurt us Mac folks) I was unable to find any calls to JavaScript to files on my blog. I couldn’t find any that were encoded either. I was stumped. Poking around on masukomi.org, which is just plain HTML files I did find they had all been prepended with an evil script tag, but that was easy enough to replace as there were only a few files. weblog.masukomi.org though… I was stumped. I’m still not sure where exactly it was coming through to the browser, but I did find the culprit.

Tomorrow morning Dachary and I will be climbing on our motorcycles and setting off for an epic adventure lasting nearly four months and over 17,000 miles. The goal is to drive south from Boston MA, USA until we reach the most southerly city on the planet: Ushuaia Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina. I can’t wait. Usually when we tell people their first reaction is “Be careful in Mexico.” Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, rebels living in the jungle… not a concern. But Mexico! OMG Flee. The fact that millions of US Citizens cross into Mexico, shop, and relax just south of the border without harm is irrelevant. Some Mexican citizens have been kidnapped, and held for ransom. Some Mexican businesspeople have been extorted. Some US citizens have been kidnapped but most of them are hispanic and there have been

A brief history of food:

Early man: “So hungry…. *chomp*” Not-so-early man: “I wonder what that tastes like…”

A brief history of cuisine:

“What would make that taste better?”

Honestly, I kind-of like Borders (and Barnes and Noble), and they’re the only ones with a zero BS customer loyalty signup process.

“Do you have a card?”
“No.”
“Would you like one? I just need your e-mail address.”
“Ok it’s _____ "
“Here you go.”

The end. No paperwork. No forms. Thirty seconds. But, that’s the only thing they’ve gotten right in a long time.

Today they sent me an email announcing that “You could win the new American Girl doll”.

We rode the Trans-Massachusetts-Trail yesterday. A series of dirt roads starting at the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts and working its way north to route 2 where it meets up with the start of the Puppy Dog Trail, which winds its way north all the way to the Canadian border (we’ll be doing that one shortly). Near the end of the trip we stopped for a break in the woods to address the “call of nature” and grab a snack.

Yesterday I watched an 800 pounds of chrome, fiberglass, metal, and plastic spinning through the air. Sunlight reflected in movie-like highlights off of the long chromed pipes. The Harley did things other Harleys have only ever dreamed of… in their nightmares.

I saw the whole thing, from start to finish. Dachary only saw the grand finale of flying metal, but her brain came to the obvious conclusion: “That’s a cruiser [spinning through the air]. He was probably wearing jeans and a t-shirt.”

On this past weekend’s test run we encountered an unexpected problem. It took us nearly two hours to break camp each morning which left us no time to relax, or have a nibble, between waking and hitting the road. On my last big trip it wasn’t like this at all. Yes, it took me nearly two hours between when I woke and when I hit the road, but that included a shower, a nibble, and lounging around reading a book. So what went wrong?