It’s time for Solitude’s first obligatory birthday post! Yes, it has been a year since I ditched the increasingly huge workload of VKPS and started this much easier to manage blog.

What has been accomplished in this year at Solitude? 285 posts (one every 1.2 days), some new toys, a deeper undestanding of this web standards mess (XHTML, CSS, RSS, Atom… I love you all), and a whole mess of mindless link propagation.

So, what can you expect from the next year? Although I’m tempted to shift focus to something new just for the hell of it, I know that I’m going to be knee-deep in code for the next few months. Expect a lot more on web standards, information from an as yet undisclosed project being worked on as part of my course work this year, more fiction (there was really very little there, yet I got a very warm response from what there was), more toys (there are at least 2 in my mind just now), and of course more links.

I think you can also expect shorter, but far more frequent posts, amonst the longer posts I’ve tended towards.

Hopefully, you’ll stick around for another year.

If you’ve been having problems commenting over the last week or so, I’ve just fixed the problem (it has also been stopping me posting). Due to a security change by my host, I had to change the single most important script on this site: the incredibly flexible write_file(). Let me know of any further problems.

Bloods Law Of Weblogs: painfully true, especially in certain idiotic communities (no elbow pointing at LiveJournal).

The real life of an absolute nobody is not the most obvious subject for entertainment. Taking that life and turning it into a comic, less so. But that’s what happened to Harvey Pekar.

Trying to leave his mark on the world somehow, he decided to turn his everyday life into a comic called American Splendor, under the auspice that “ordinary life is pretty complicated stuff”.

Now we have the film of the man of the comic of the man.

Pekar is played perfectly by Paul Giamatta. It is, however, a difficult task to make the average man look more interesting than he is.

Ultimately, the film is mediocre, with a few interesting moments. Perhaps it’s best that way; a true reflection of Harvey’s life.

The first random links post of the year, plentiful in size and usefulness:

• Plink – Just what FOAF needed, a pretty looking parser and search service. Nice.
• Speech Reversal – An article on reversing speech in songs, and human perception thereof.
• Smarty For Beginners – A fairly straight forward tutorial on the Smarty templating language.
• Live Comment Previews – Very cool use of javascript to provide a live preview of comments as they are entered. Could get quite complex, dependent on text processing, but great nonetheless.
• Shrook Intervals – A misbehaving RSS reader? Maybe it should be more polite.
• Banished Words – A list of words banished for 2004. None will be missed.
• Gawsh – Google results displayed by host. Could be useful to someone.
• GoogleSynth – A program that pulls 2 random images from Google and blends them together. Mostly crap, but some interesting results.
• CSS vault – A stronghold of CSS tips. Bookmark it.
• Escher For Real – People creating the impossible designs of Escher for real. Absolutely bizarre.
• Google Spellchecker – Using Google to check if a word is spelled correctly. Simple, but very smart.
• Accept Headers Broken – Almost no browsers do Accept headers correctly. Not surprising.

• **[Quick Guide to C#](http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/quickcsharp.asp?target=Quick

  C#)** – Learn C# quickly, if yo already know Java.

And we’re done.