cubanlinks

I just got engaged to Carrie Knittel this past Saturday. And wouldn’t you know it? There were fireworks!

more photos of the blushing bride-to-be to come

I knew it was coming, but I wasn’t sure how. It seems my friend Rachel’s account has been compromised, somehow:

Is there a security hole out there? Is anyone else seeing this?

I will not be able to make Al’s annual drink-fest. It just so happens that a little thing called Austin City Limits is happening that same weekend, and my girl is coming down to Austin to boot. Choices, choices.

I am seriously bummed at missing out. I don’t think I made it last year, and I was really looking forward to redeeming myself and reliving the glory of whupping-up on Gavin Smith during the 2006 Poker Tournament or rolling myself under a car to escape a beating in 2005. I have nothing cool to say about 2004, since I pretty much just passed the fuck out.

For everyone who’s making it up to Al’s neck of the woods, dial-a-shots all around!

It is really strange the kind of immersion you experience when you move to a new city for the summer. It’s not unlike the experience I had moving to Austin and starting my MBA program. You’re moving to a new city, you’re meeting new people and you’re trying your best to navigate the terrain of a competitive environment. I think it’s safe to say that the experience here is similar, but more intense. More visceral. The other MBA’s here are top performers at top programs, and you’ve got 12-weeks to make an impression.

But it’s not all cloaks and daggers. The MBA recruiting team has put-on some pretty great events for us, including an “Amazing Race” that involved Lake Union, electric boats, alcohol, lots of clues and a Polaroid camera. Tomorrow I’m hosting a Texas Hold’em tournament, which should be a blast.

And finally, just when I was about to give up on the weather in Seattle, we were hit with the perfect day on Sunday. Mid 60’s, zero clouds, and a gentle breeze. My buddy Tiju was in town, and Emily and I took him all over Seattle. Literally. I probably put 50 miles on my odometer yesterday, and I think we crossed at least 5 bridges. The nicest part of the day was probably hanging out in Gas Works Park and catching some rays. I could definitely get used to these kinds of days.

One of my close friends (Chris Miller) is looking for some more people to join his team for the Ragnar Relay Race (September 26-27, Cumberland, MD to DC).

It’s essentially an overnight relay race where you take turns running, riding in vans through beautiful Maryland in between legs.

Chris has a solid core of runners for the team but is looking for people to fill-out the roster. There are different lengths for all of the legs, so even if you don’t run marathons for breakfast, you can definitely participate and have a good time.

If you’re interested (in signing up, finding out more, etc) just let me know. I’ll put you in touch with Chris.

I’m typing this post from my desk at Microsoft. I’m an MBA intern for the summer in the OSG Live group. I’m pretty psyched to be here and hopefully will have more to say about this soon.

I’ve been in Seattle since Monday. I recently grouped my pictures of the drive up into a set on Flickr. Check-out Carrie’s pictures too. I just took a few shots with my iPhone, she had a lot more fun with her digital camera.

This Tuesday I’ll be hitting the road. Destination: Seattle, WA. I’ll be one of 50 MBA interns spending the summer at Microsoft, and I decided that it would be fun to put some miles on the Jetta and see some parts of America I’ve never seen.

The only stop that is nailed-down will be in Los Angeles where I’ll be picking up Carrie at LAX on Thursday night. We will then road trip the rest of the way up to Seattle together, and she’ll fly back to DC on Tuesday.

I’m really excited about the trip, and will be keeping a running log with my iPhone (pictures to Flickr and notes to Twitter). The best way to follow along would be to check-out my FriendFeed. Everything will get posted there!

[via Deadspin]

Simmons: I still love writing my column and only re-signed last year because I really did believe that we had hashed out all the behind the scenes bullshit and come to some sort of agreement on creative lines, media criticism rules, the promotion of the column and everything else on ESPN.com. Within a few months, all of those things changed and certain promises were not kept. It’s as simple as that.

Wow, ESPN looks like they’re dicking over the Sports Guy. Don’t they realize the power he wields? Easily 50% of my time on espn.com is spent reading Simmons. If he walks, Disney/ESPN is going to have a shit storm on their hands.

I am making a temporary switch to FeedBurner as I try to untangle the issues with my RSS feed. With a simple Lighttpd redirect, all requests for /blog/feed (that are not coming from the FeedBurner bot) will be redirected to feeds.feedburner.com/cubanlinks. I have resisted handing over control of my RSS feed to a third party, but given everything else we surrender these days (links, photos, videos, etc) what’s the point of resisting?

I have no idea how long this has been going on. Maybe all way back to switching to Mephisto as my blogging tool? In any event, it seems that some feed readers (Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc) have been consuming my feed and interpreting the entries in an odd way. Because of some bizarre mis-configuration, the feed was producing entries linked to www.cubanlinks.org even though the requested domain was simply cubanlinks.org (sans www). This caused the feed readers to think there were 2 entries for every post (one for www and one for the non-prefixed domain).

I think this problem has been fixed. If it hasn’t, for goodness sake, please let me know!

I’ve integrated Disqus commenting on this site. What do you think? Disqus amongst yourselves. I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen on other sites (Scripting News, etc) but Fred Wilson’s post pushed me over the edge.

Apparently Obama won “Norh Carolina” with 47% of the vote to Clinton’s 49%. Huh?

After having some problems with Twirl and AlertThingy, I think I’m going to stick with the FriendFeed web app for now. Isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t desktop clients be so much more responsive? Shouldn’t they be able to provide a richer UI? And yet, I find the FF website to be a) more up-to-date and b) more responsive to my clicks and scrolls.

One thing that I still don’t understand is the ordering of entries. Look at my screenshot. Those were all loaded at the exact same time. Can anyone explain this ordering?

Hey Eddie, did you know you can use CSS style you FriendFeed badge? You sure can! Here’s the styling I use:

<style>
/* Friend Feed CSS */
div.friendfeed{
font-family: Arial,Verdana;
background: transparent;
} 

.friendfeed .feed .entry .likes, .friendfeed .header{
    display:none;
}

.friendfeed div.feed{
    border:0px;
background: transparent;
    padding: 10px 10px 0px 3px;
    *padding: 10px 3px 0px 3px;
    _padding: 10px 3px 0px 3px;
}

.friendfeed .feed .entry{
    margin-bottom:12px;
    font-size:12px;
}
</style>

I noticed this with AlertThingy, and now I’m noticing it with Twhirl. I’m curious what other people are experiencing: are Adobe Air applications resource hogs?

Btw, I was using Twirl because I found out (belatedly) that they’ve added FriendFeed support. Thought I’d see how I liked the UI compared to AT. The jury’s still out.