So today, along with washing the dishes, vacuuming and other housework I also did some housework on my site. First off, I’ve decided to move all the IT & geek related stuff off of the personal blog, and will slowing be finishing my setup of DotNetNuke over at Pavleck.Net.

Secondly, I updated Wordpress to it’s newest version, got all the little extras working and you may now notice my little phoenix up by the URL - yes, I finally added a FavIcon.ico. After looking around for various way I found the absolute easiest way to do it - check it out. Couldn’t be simpler.

I’ve also installed an OpenID plugin, so from now on when you click to make a comment, you can throw your OpenID URL in the website section and bam, that’s all there is to it.

Don’t happen to have an OpenID? You might be surprised - if you have an account with Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, or one of these other guys you might actually have one¹. Still don’t have on? I use MyOpenID.com, and it’s worked great - highly recommended.²

And lastly on the website update - I’ve been toying with removing my TwitterFeed for my website from my normal twitter feed, and as such I’ve created a new one - Pavleckcom - where all my website updates go to. Feel free to subscribe - if enough people switch over to it, I’ll go ahead and get rid of the updates from the primary feed.

I never thought of myself as being “well-read”. I doubt I’ve read 3% of the titles listed in “1001 Books to Read before you die“. I read what interests me. In my youth, that was a lot of Orwell, Asimov and London³. These days it’s a wide variety of authors and topics, as I noticed when I was cleaning up the bedroom a bit - see for yourself.

As you can see, at the top there is a bunch of Bukowski - my newest favorite author and the fault of Mishka’s father⁴. He gave me “Run with the Hunted” for Christmas and it stoked the literary fire within me. I’ve already read Post Office, am currently reading Women (Not pictured, cause I’m carrying it around with me) and Factotum is next.
After that, you see one of Chomsky’s newest books, “Failed States” - so there’s some politics.
Continuing onward, there is Man Ray’s Montparnasse. Man Ray is my favorite photographer, and his book Montparnasse explores his life with stories and anecdotes about his friends and lovers in Pre-WW2 Montparnasse, France - just when the Dada & Surrealism movements were taking hold. Excellent book, if you can find it pick it up.
And then there’s another pseudo-political book, Stephen Colbert’s “I am America (And So Can You)”. Not much to say about it. It’s a very interesting read, but isn’t meant to be a heavy hitter. I don’t think I’ve actually finished it yet, even.
And finally there’s “Naked Economics“. It’s subtitle is “Undressing the Dismal Science” and it does it well. It lays out the principles of economics in an entertaining and easy to follow way. After reading it I’ve got a much better understanding of why we pay what we pay and how the world in general works. If you have to read one econ book, then this is the one for you!
Not pictured, because they’re on the floor: Spook Country by William Gibson, My 230th copy of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and several electronic and microcontroller books)

And awesome news that I just learned about less then 2 hours ago - one of my photographs sold!
I knew some would sell, but had no idea that this one was going to sell. It was my experimental photograph, “On” seen below. It was printed up at MPIX.com, and since I was there I let them do the matting and framing too. The frame is nothing special, just a basic kit frame with tensioners holding the photo in - there isn’t even any glass to speak of. This was an experiment, not expected to sell. Yet it was the first one. I’m sort of stoked about it, and sort of curious - I always wonder where my photographs go, and how they end up being shown. It’s like a part of me is now with someone else.

And that’s it for today’s update!

1. You really should think about getting one, especially if you use FireFox - FireFox 3 brings strong support for OpenID [↩]
2. If you don’t even know what OpenID is - Wikipedia can help you there [↩]
3. Jack London, that is [↩]
4. Her father taught a class about Bukowski and the other beat poets. [↩]

Yesterday I received an email accepting me into the private beta phase of Skribit.
What’s Skribit? Created during the Atlanta Startup Event, Paul Stamatiou’s software is a way to let people have more control over topics that are talked about in a blog. You suggest topics, and others vote on them - the ones that make it to the top are the ones I’ll write about - usually.

I’ve embedded the widget front and center - you will see it to your right. Right now, there isn’t much in the way of suggestions - how about adding something you’d like to see written about? Simply click in the widget where it says “Click here to suggest a topic”, type in something that interests you, and hit submit - that’s all there is to it!

So how about it? What would you like to see me talk about? I’d love some suggestions so I can properly test drive this bad boy of Web 2.0.