jeffcovey.net -- what was new in 2004

ch-ch-ch-changes...
new in december 2004
12/31/2004	a temporary problem of liquidity i've posted my year-end thoughts about my investing project. click here for more...
12/28/2004	all those pictures... at various times, i've taken lots of photos of this and that, and posted them here. now i have vindication and a reason to recommend the practice. my tenants evicted me from my house, so i had to switch from an owner-occupied homeowner's insurance policy to a rental property "fire dwelling" one. my former insurance company doesn't offer such a policy, so i had to switch companies. i was hoping to make the switch on the first of the year. the agent who was helping me over the phone said that normally, the company wants to inspect the house before writing a policy, but that if i had any pictures i could email him, he could try to talk them into accepting that. i assured him i had dozens. i sent him a link to my house pictures. an hour later, he called back and said they'd accepted them. we went through his long list of questions, and he could confirm most of what i said through the photos. when we came to my claim from last year, i directed him to the fall 2003 directory. i could hear him hitting "page down", saying, "ok, there's the damage... hey, and there's the new shed. great." the policy was approved instantly, and i didn't have to wait up to 45 days for someone to come and see the house. i hope he enjoyed leebert's special gift. click here for more...
12/22/2004	zen i've wanted for a long time to digitize my jukai photos and use one in making a short page about zen. i finally have the photos, and the page is up. click here for more...
12/21/2004	creative commons back in 1998, i placed all the original content on my site under the opencontent public license, a license similar to the gpl but not so software-specific. opencontent is no more, and the much better and much better-known creative commons has taken its place. i've switched to the creative commons attribution-sharealike license and put a notice at the bottoms of my pages. i've also added metadata, so if you use the nifty mozCC, you can see what's what at a glance. click here for more...
12/19/2004	more gnuplot fun i learned a little more gnuplot, and my graphs are now a bit purtier and more legible. click here for more...
12/16/2004	netflix friends i like netflix's service, even though they may win the award for worlds... slowest... website.... they just sent me notice that they're testing a "friends" feature which lets people see each other's ratings and comments on movies. i can't think of anyone i know who uses netflix. if you do, let me know, and we can try it out. click here for more...
new in november 2004
11/26/2004	a pair of thanks i want to thank a couple of free services i've found which have helped make my homesite better. click here for more...
11/24/2004	the cost of having a car i did some computations this evening and came up with some very disturbing figures. click here for more...
11/15/2004	correction to bach invention 15 alert reader chris lamb saw that there was a mistake in bar 16 of this bach arrangement. this was something i simply transposed from the mutopia copy and never got around to really arranging. the mutopia copy had a mistake, so it found its way into mine. i've fixed my file and sent a corrected version of the original file to mutopia. thanks, chris! click here for more...
new in october 2004
10/25/2004	spoke too soon i had a nice surprise in this month's mortgage payment. click here for more...
10/24/2004	carulli duet updated ruud van silfhout of the mutopia project wrote me to say that he had updated my carulli lilypond file to work with the latest version of lilypond. i've added his copy to my homepage as well, and regenerated the corresponding files. thanks! click here for more...
10/22/2004	freecycle carpet freecycle has made us look a little less slobish. click here for more...
10/18/2004	mortgage graphs i added two graphs to my ymoyl pages to convince myself that something's really happening there. click here for more...
10/13/2004	the penn belle hotel the last item from "to scan": the penn belle business card (see the two images at the bottom of the page). bellefonte's largest! click here for more...
10/12/2004	jukai photos continuing with the contents of the "to scan" folder, i've added the photos from my jukai ceremony (taking the lay zen buddhist precepts). click here for more...
10/10/2004	portrait for several years, i've had a folder labeled "to scan", filled with things that i wanted to scan into a computer. i finally accepted the fact that i'm not going to get a scanner, and took it all to kinko's today. a cute dedicated machine from kodak scanned it all and burned it onto a cd for me. one of the items in the folder was a portrait of me which a coworker drew four or five years ago. click here for more...
new in september 2004
09/14/2004	photos of san jose i just got around to putting up some photos from 2001. click here for more...
09/10/2004	links to palmos applications' homepages phil! asked that i link to the palmos projects' homepages where possible, so links are now available. unfortunately, many applications were written long ago and forgotten, and have no definitive home on the web. others have gone commercial, and the free versions have been removed from the authors' sites. in at least one case, google says i'm already the de facto authority. :) click here for more...
09/02/2004	three nice palmos applications i recently found three palmos applications i like: ksdatebook, plan-my-day, and "working hours". (and kstodo, for completism.) click here for more...
09/01/2004	powered by google i've decided to stop having my hard drive ripped apart by htdig every day and just join the great washed masses who let google do the work. if you use the search box at the bottom of any page here now, you'll get what google knows about what i know about what you want to know. let me know if you see any problems.
new in august 2004
08/25/2004	freecycle's future i've been a moderator of freecyclebaltimore for a month now, and the experience has bothered me. i've put down my thoughts about it. click here for more...
08/11/2004	handnails now that i have a camera which can take photos at ridiculous-by-web-standards resolutions, i'm getting tired of how ugly my photos pages look with 1600x1200 images wedged into them. i rewrote that section of the site so that clicking on an image from an index takes you to a page with a version of the photo at 800x600 or less. clicking that version takes you to the full one if you really want it. click here for more...
08/10/2004	winter sunrise i looked in ~/camera/tmp/ and found some photos i took of the sunrise behind my house last december. click here for more...
08/06/2004	don't park at d.c. metro stations i used to think washington, d.c. had a great subway system, but the people running it have suddenly gone quite insane. click here for more...
08/04/2004	trip to gettysburg glenn asked me to take my camera with us on a trip today, so i brought back some photos. click here for more...
08/03/2004	natural burial an email prompted me to take a look around the web, and i found it's becoming easier to let your body do what it was meant to do after you die. click here for more...
08/02/2004	more wild goose photos steve and kurt went to wild goose last month. steve brought back stacks and stacks of photos, and i stole my favorites to put here. click here for more...
new in july 2004
07/28/2004	forsale updated a number of items i had for sale on amazon silently dropped from the site. i've updated all my listings; have a look and see if there's anything you'd like. click here for more...
07/18/2004	dad's 80th birthday i spent last weekend visiting family and celebrating my father's 80th birthday. i stole my brother john's photos to put here. click here for more...
07/04/2004	fahrenheit 9/11 i've added my few brief thoughts about the movie. click here for more...
07/02/2004	tall ships glenn and i took a long walk today, and i took a bunch of photos. click here for more...
07/01/2004	how to get (and give) free stuff the internet's providing great new resources for sharing what you have and getting what you need. click here for more...
new in june 2004
06/29/2004	driveway sealant i learned the joy of driveway sealant today. click here for more...
06/28/2004	comments system i decided i wanted to make it possible for people to leave comments again, so i've added a comments system to the site. i looked around for something to use, but was unhappy with everything i found, so i wrote it from scratch. every page now has a "comments" link at the top which you can use to view comments about that page and post your own. i've tested it to the extent my programming skills allow, but it's very possible it could have a bug or two or seven. please give it a try and let me know about your experience with it. it's very simple and is currently flat only, but i'm recording parent-child information, so it could be made threaded later if it turns out that would be a good thing. enjoy!
06/27/2004	t-prot i wrote an article for freshmeat about a handy piece of software. click here for more...
06/23/2004	rss feed and more the frontpage news is now available in an rss feed here for those who like getting news through rss aggregators. in the process of doing this, i made three other changes. first, each news item in a table of news like the one on the front page can now have a link associated with it that leads to whatever it discusses. this is used as the link for the item in the rss feed and is offered under the item on the news table. secondly, i've started linking to specific pages instead of general ones on the frontpage. so, for example, an item about carcassi study 18 links directly to study 18's page, and an item about my driveway links directly to the page with photos of the driveway. i originally avoided this because i use a table of definitions to make it easy to link to other parts of the site and have all references to that part updated sitewide with a change to one file if the part moves. (yes, i could do this dynamically, but statically-generated pages are my story and i'm sticking to them for now.) so, i would just link to "photos" instead of the specific photos i was talking about, and leave it to people to find their way. i've decided to just suck up the eventual broken links and deal with them as the linkchecker finds them. lastly, each item in a news table now has a name anchor attached to it, which means that i can link directly to that item instead of just to the top of the page. you can see this with the ymoyl items, which go straight to the comments to which they refer. i hope you enjoy this. if you use the rss feed, please let me know how it's working for you.
06/20/2004	new photo though i've loved the photo of myself with warren's cat, it's four years old, and it's time for something that looks more like i do now. every few years, my brothers and sisters and i give photos of ourselves to my sister marie, who puts them into a frame to give our parents. glenn and i took some photos today to try to get something usable for the gift. i liked one of them particularly, so it's now gracing the front page here.
06/01/2004	ymoyl update i've finally made an update on my ymoyl page. click here for more...
new in february 2004
02/09/2004	/forsale for a year or more, i've kept a list of things i have for sale in /tmp/amazon/. i may as well move them to somewhere more people will find them. click here for more...
new in january 2004
01/02/2004	hi. no changes. i just thought i'd have two announcements in a row for once. :)
01/01/2004	happy new year! if i made resolutions, perhaps i'd resolve to invest more time here in the coming year. but i doubt you'd believe me. at least the graph has been updated. i hope you're happy and healthy and on the way to all your goals, as well. click here for more...