Lance's blog

My boss, my wife -- I have the photographic evidence.

In which Lance reveals himself to be a little bit ADD and a bad leader of bloggers.

Oh, man, what an exciting post it is! Click the "read more" link to have your socks blown clean off!

To go with our new star rating system, we've developed a block that you can add to your pages that shows highly rated pages. As I described elsewhere:

"...if you click on "My account" in the left sidebar, then the "edit" tab across the top of the center column, you'll find a spot on your page where you can enable a block called "hot_stuffs" (which is the kind of stupid development name that amuses me, and which will change to something more intuitive when I have the time to change the code that depends on the current name)."

Here's what needs deciding, and we can discuss these questions here. The questions below are numbered not in order of importance, but so they'll be easier to discuss:

1. What score (expressed as a percent) does a piece of content need to have to be recommended? (Right now, the answer is 75%, but that's kind of arbitrary.)
2. How recent must a piece of content be to be on the recommend list? (Right now, within the last seven days; again, this is just a number that I plucked from my fundament.)
3. How many votes does a piece of content need to have before it can be recommended? (Right now three, but it should probably be higher so that SD and her daughters can't conspire to put a post called "Lance is a Weenie" on the rec list.)
4. What doesn't need to be on the recommended list? (Right now, any post on the front page is automatically not on the list, but posts by people with front-page privileges who choose not to front page the post can still be there.)
5. Should there be a way to keep your own stuff off the rec list? (Right now, any post with the tag "unrecommend" will not appear on the rec list, no matter how many five star votes it gets.)

So what do you think? Don't forget that everything we do here at BlueNC is sort of an experiment, and we can always fiddle with these parameters later if the community has problems with what is making (and not making) the rec list.

I'm working on a "rec list" for BlueNC, but it would be a lot easier if I had some recommendation data to work with. So I put some stars at the bottom of posts, and I humbly beseech you: go vote!

Once we have some votes in the database, I'll try to take this to the next step. Thanks!

Then something is finally working! Man, it's been a rough 18 hours down here in the Blue Mines, but I think we finally have things at least sort of close to normal. There have been casualties, though. Find out more about that below the fold.

[Cross-posted (minus audio) from letters to sg because I thought y'all might find it interesting.]

The popular story of the origins of Monopoly – the bigger-than-Jesus Parker Brothers board game – has become enough a part of American cultural literacy that it has developed an apocryphal (and almost certainly fictive) crust. (For example, I was pretty sure that someone once told me that it was invented by a hobo or something.) But it turns out that the real story is better than any of the myths (and much better than the commercially-acceptable "official" history).

Part of the problem is that the popular story leaves a good 30 years off of the game's history, and part of it is that the official story doesn't feature any Quaker women. But the biggest problem with the popular narrative is that it leaves out the quirky and unique contributions of the individuals and communities who played the game before Charles Darrow "invented" it in 1934. The American Interest gives us a glance at the real story in "Monopolizing History". You really must bookmark the AI piece to read when you have a few minutes. For now, here's a quote that highlights one of my favorite tidbits about the game's original designer and her original designs.

No BlueNC for you on Sunday from 3am until 6am:

We were just informed one hour ago from our building management that an emergency maintenance window is scheduled for this Saturday morning, February 24th, at 1AM PST. UPDATE! The building has just changed the window to be 23 hours later.. it is now scheduled for Sunday morning, February 25th, at 12:01AM PST. This maintenance window involves taking our entire building’s power offline for approximately 3 hours. The word from the building:

It was discovered by ABM Engineering during the power monitoring equipment installation, that a Phase C Conductor Cable on UPS #4 has been compromised to the point that immediate action to repair it is necessary or a ground fault will occur to the building systems.

Very interesting [via Engadget, where you'll find a photo and a link to the original news item] —

While it's no secret that LEDs light up the night in a more efficient (albeit expensive) manner, few locales have given the idea of lighting up the town en masse with LEDs any serious consideration. In a feat that would surely oust Brussles' Dexia Tower in terms of magnitude, city officials in Raleigh, North Carolina are hoping to make the Capital City the "world's first LED city."