From time to time (because I’m vain) I like to google myself just to check if I’ve inadvertently gained any amount of internet fame. Doing so today, I learned that I have a doppleganger on google (a Googleganger?). It’s not so odd that someone with the same name as me has a web page, that’s not too unusual. What I do find disconcerting is that apparently we’re both software developers, and both familiar with the same languages. And as if that weren’t odd enough, we both just recently posted items about do-it-yourself TiVo options. All that makes me wonder, what if he’s the regular Will Gorman and I’m actually the bizarro Will Gorman? How would I know?

Comments

Comment by Brett on 2004-03-11 22:15:40 +0000

If it makes you feel any better, I get regular emails from people trying to reach Ben Wilms. I don’t know his hobbies, tastes, or interests, but I do know it’s creepy to get the occasional full length German email.

Bizarro I’m helping!

Comment by Dan on 2004-03-11 22:56:14 +0000

Googleganger? That sounds vaguely pornographic.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-12 01:02:27 +0000

How would you know?

Check your foot for a “Bizarro Co.” stamp or check the assmebly instructions that came in your box.

😀

Comment by Sarah on 2004-03-12 17:51:03 +0000

You are being erased from the internet’s memory as we speak. If you clicked on your website’s link from the link of doppleganger that is posted you would find that it comes back with an error page. On the bright side, should there ever be a lawsuit over your code, you could perhaps point the finger at “The Real Will Gorman”. 😉

Below is the Terror Alert Banana who, unlike a normal banana that inevitably turns browner and brownerer, turns to whatever is currently the color of the Department of Homeland Security’s terrorist threat advisory. Sure, he may be dancing happily now but at any moment he could turn orange or even red, telling us that it’s time to run for the hills, stepping on and shoving past our loved ones, friends, and the elderly in a mad attempt to save self above all else.

get yours now!

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-11 04:38:36 +0000

LMFAO!

Comment by Neal on 2004-03-11 14:07:32 +0000

He’s cheerful, but he has such a chilling purpose. I love it!

And on an unrelated note, I just discovered the rebirth of your weblog. Yay for Movable Type! I bet if you fixed your ampersands you’d even validate! 😛

It looks beautiful.

Comment by Sarah on 2004-03-12 17:43:51 +0000

Makes me glad you live far, far away so I am not in the way of your hill running. 😉

Don Caballero is playing tonight in Lawrence, and I’m sitting here moaning about how I miss all the good shows due to work instead of rocking out like I should be. It’s not that there’s a shortage of good shows in the area by any means, its just that most of them are an hour away in Lawrence and on a weeknight. As much as I want to keep the rock alive, I just can’t see heading out there after getting out of the office and then crawling back in the early a.m. with the thought of another day of work ahead of me. What’s up with these no-good rock and rolling hooligans and their weeknight shows? Why can’t they respect decent hard-working folks who now have to confine their rocking out to weekends? Alright, end of rant.

Comments

Comment by Phil on 2004-03-10 00:03:20 +0000

Maybe it’s cos they think old fogies like us don’t listen to rock music anymore. They think we just like classical or something.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-10 00:03:50 +0000

Poor elderly Will. 😉

Comment by Brett on 2004-03-10 06:00:51 +0000

Have you checked out Elevator Division before? They are from KC, and I enjoyed tham when I caught them last year.

Also, Riddle of Steel, one of my favorite bands currently, will be hitting up KC, MO, on Thursday, May 27th, at the Brick. They have yet to disappoint me.

So there I was just minding my own business at work when I received an email notifying me that the beta version of Visual Assist X, the next version of Visual Assist was available. Visual Assist is a plug-in for Visual Studio that I’ve found to be pretty much indispensable at work. so much so that it convinced me to pony up the registration fee a while back. It makes my life so much easier, and almost makes working with MFC, dare I say it, fun. Naturally, I was excited to find that there was an upgrade in the works and I had to try it out. Overall I was pretty impressed, but it is pretty memory intensive which wouldn’t really be a problem except that my development machine only has a paltry 256 MB of RAM.

Then, when I got home I found out my cable from svideo.com had arrived. This brings me one step closer to building my own TiVo substitute, as I can now hook my s-video & audio outputs of my computer into my RCA-only input TV. The only thing I was a little nervous about is how the video quality would end up after being transferred through the adapater, but it looks fine. All I need now is to pick up a new case to hold all the components I’ve got lying around, move my PVR card into that machine, and its hello near-unlimited storage TiVo clone. I always knew there was a reason that I’m such an obsessive storage hoarder.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-08 20:55:47 +0000

… I feel 30% geekier for having read this entry, you storage whore.

Comment by Phil on 2004-03-09 01:04:09 +0000

A paltry 256MB? Geez, you’d think developers would have more RAM than the system for which they’re designing the software, wouldn’t you?

Bug those IT guys, darn it!

Jolayne and I spent the day in Lawrence, KS yesterday, which is home to the University of Kansas. It was fun to spend some time back in a college town, though it did kind of make us feel just a little bit old. Well, maybe more me than her. It hasn’t been a full year yet since she’s graduated, but I’ve been out of school for 2 years now, which seems hard to believe. We stopped by an art museum on the KU campus and then spent the rest of the afternoon just walking around all the stores on the main street through downtown Lawrence. I picked up one of those old-timey Guinness ad posters, which I now need to find a frame for. We ate dinner at Zen Zero, which was really good but I don’t know if I liked it as much as Lulu’s here in KC. After all that we ended the evening by seeing Monster at a theatre there.

All in all, a good film and about as cheery and uplifting as you’d expect a movie about a serial killing prostitute to be. I’d never really thought much about Charlize Theron one way or the other, but I’d say that her academy award for this was well earned. Her performance made the character simultaneously sympathetic and repulsive, and I’d say that being able to evoke any sympathy at all given the nature of the crimes involved is pretty impressive. From what I read though about the actual story on which this was based, they were actually fairly kind in how they portrayed the events surrounding the killings. I guess that’s just movies for you though.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-07 17:25:25 +0000

Hm … I figured they gave Charlize Theron the Oscar for managing to get the audience to forget she’s amazingly beautiful in real life.

Phil and I gotta come visit just so we can check out Lulu’s … looks like a great place!

Comment by Will on 2004-03-07 17:48:54 +0000

Lulu’s is awesome! If you and Phil come out here, I will totally promise to take you guys there.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-08 19:00:23 +0000

Schweet!

When I decided to switch to MovableType, I had the thought in the back of my mind of trying to get a photoblog set up. What I didn’t realize was that it would just take about 15 minutes thanks to the great tutorial and templates over at Quixotic Pixels. There’s currently a whopping grand total of 1 picture up there now. I’m hoping I’ll now be motivated to start picking up my sadly under-used camera and record my daily life, but I’m not sure how well that will go. I mean, how many pictures of the inside of an office cube can you really take?

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-05 01:08:19 +0000

I mean, how many pictures of the inside of an office cube can you really take?

Exactly 42.

So much for that dilemma. Movable Type it is. It was tough to finally leave Blogger behind, but the power and control MT offered won me over. I guess one of the biggest reasons I did it was to have control over my content (though calling it content may be something of a stretch) and not just the output. Now I’ve got the database of all my entries to with as I like, and wouldn’t be left with nothing but a pile of HTML should Blogger go teats up. Importing all my Blogger entries proved to be nice and painless, too. I’m still in the process of working with my templates to get them set up how I like them, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to let go of the color theme of my old layout. (Boring, I know, but I was actually considering trying to convert that entire template over to MT for a while, but decided I’d had that long enough.) I got the templates and stylesheet over at BlogStyles and I’ve been trying to get myself up to speed on CSS.

Comments

Comment by Phil on 2004-03-04 03:27:35 +0000

Hey, nice layout… But where did your little self portrait go? I thought that was cool…

Is the title for this entry a nod to “A Mighty Wind,” by any chance?

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-04 03:28:04 +0000

Lookin’ spiffy!

I do so love CSS … can’t wait to see whay ya do with your layout!

Comment by Brett on 2004-03-04 08:12:47 +0000

Me likey. I want Movable Type Do you offer training classes?

Comment by Will on 2004-03-04 09:23:07 +0000

Phil –

I thought about bringing over that image, but decided maybe it was time for a change since I was basically just ripping off Metal Steve from DieselSweeties (although not entirely, since I did buy the t-shirt). It may still show up, but I’d like to find some other kind of self-representing icon. And yes, that is an “A Mighty Wind” reference

Carrie –

CSS does, in fact, r0X0r. It’s pretty sweet. I’ve already made several changes to the stylesheet I got from blogstyles, so what I have now will probably be the basic style, plus a few minor tweaks.

Phil & Carrie –

3:30 in the morning?? Is that right? Wow, that’s an hour I haven’t seen in quite some time.

Brett- Absolutely, man. If you decide you want to give MT a shot just let me know and I’ll give you any help I can with the install.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-03-04 18:25:55 +0000

Hey hey now, gramps … we don’t get home from work till 2am-ish, so 😛

…and we’re back. Yeah, how about that. See, I’ve just switched over to a new hosting provider, 1 & 1, and so I thought that would be a good reason to, you know, actually do something with that. They were running an awesome promotion with 3 years of free hosting, but with all the fun stuff (like perl & PHP support and a MySQL database) that wasn’t free at my former host. So far, I’ve been pretty impressed with them. However, this leaves me with something of a dilemma about whether I should stay with Blogger, or switch over to MovableType now that I can run that. I think I’d really like to go to MT, but I’m not sure yet how easy their templates are to configure. I definitely don’t want to put a lot of time into tweaking templates, which is pretty apparent since I’ve had my current template for about 2 years now. Not to mention the fact that haven’t had much time to devote to this lately due to work.

Comments

Comment by Brett on 2004-02-29 01:45:31 +0000

I’m jealous that you could figure out how to use MT. I gave up after a couple of hours.

Testing out MT for the first time…

No, seriously

Wow, there’s really not much better than spending an entire Saturday in the office is there. No, I thought not. At least I had one thing going for me making it somewhat bearable. That would be SLIMP3. Recently (thanks to eMusic) my mp3 collection swelled beyond the limits of my 20GB Nomad3 player. Since I’m somewhat obsessive about having access to my entire collection at once the obvious solution was to switch to streaming for getting my music at work. (Sticking an 80GB drive in the Nomad will probably follow at some point, unless I replace it with an iPod.) I’ve got to say, I’ve been nothing but impressed with SlimP3. It’s got a nice customizable web interface, it seems to be solid as a rock thus far, and it seems like it would be easy to extend its functionality with perl plugins.