Based (in part) on advice from the insanely smart Jacques Distler, I made a list of 7 things to do that would improve my commenting system. I had intended on doing at least 6 of them yesterday (the last one being quite difficult, taking at least a day on its own). As should have been expected, I got a little sidetracked. Damn you, Knights Of The Old Republic!

I did, however, get 2 of those features done. First up is comment counts, making it easier to see if someone has commented on an entry on the front page (chances are they haven’t, but hey, that’s life).

Secondly is much better error handling. Rather than outright reject a comment if it doesn’t resolve as valid XHTML, I now redisplay the form with all the fields as they were, with helpful advice on what is invalid.

The other features will probably appear more slowly over the course of the next fortnight as university starts back and I’ve got a backlog of work to do.

Just over a week ago, I experienced some phone woe. While I won’t bore you with all the details (basically Trium people wanted me to send my phone off to get fixed without telling me how much it would cost, which I didn’t like the sounds of), I bought a new phone. A spangly Motorola C350.

This post was originally going to be called “More Phone Woe” because the synchronisation software provided with the USB software is pretty terrible. This afternoon, however, it just decided that synchronising my contacts was no longer reason to crash. Hooray! Now, just need to get SMS messages synched and I can start building a software RSS aggregator for my phone (the plans are done).

I’ve got a back log of links that I want rid of, so I’ll dump them here. They all do exactly what they say on the tin:

• Group Typography – Creating a font based on multiple users ideas of what letters should look like,
• Worst Jobs In Science,
• XSLT Questions And Answers,
• PEAR Primer,
• Mind World Map – Users decide what the world map should look like. It’s starting to take real shape, if only more detail was allowed.

Don’t know how many of them are worth reading.

It be International Talk Like A Pirate Day (via Kryogenix! So be grabbing some grog, ye scurvy bilge rats, while I do a jaunty jig.

You make a plan, a plan in your head, and assume that’s how things are going to happen. They won’t.

Maybe you thought you were going to the cinema for a movie and a quiet night, but somehow you end up with a group of friends you haven’t seen in a while, drinking and chatting until the quiet hours eventually arrive.

Maybe you thought you were going to see an old friend at a certain place at a certain time, but he doesn’t show up in the three hours you wait (with others).

Maybe you really thought you were finished, but you know you’re not.

Plans change, nothing is concrete, people are unpredictable. This is not a bad thing. Life should be about the unexpected.

Maybe you should plan for the unexpected, but you’re probably planning yourself into a corner.