Trying some new things out

....Allright!

back to the occasional blog entry... i've been suffering from the "last post was about a life-changing event, hard act to follow" syndrome... plus, I've got a million pictures from the honeymoon and the wedding I want to show off (hey, pictures of lizards and toucans and Rudy in a tux... that's blog gold)... but I don't want to turn this into the Groomzilla blog, so I'll chill on that.

current mess-around project:
Merlin over at 43 folders wrote a post last week about personal status pages...

The weekend of my vegas bachelor party, i started periodically updating a page (on backpack) that you can find at if you go to ryan-net-slash-where (i don't want that link being spidered)... it's kinda fun, and handy if people frequently ask "where's ryan"? I get that a lot, 'cause I'm always on-call for work, and it annoys me when people tell me they "were hanging with the Rolling Stones last friday at 7B, you should've come, we couldn't find you". Privacy issues don't worry me here... if I don't want to share my whereabouts, I just don't. Using backpack for this (the /where link from ryan.net redirects) makes it handy, 'cause I can leverage backpack's super-easy editing capabilities to make myself more likely to update it. I can edit that page from my Treo phone's browser, or I can email a quick blub to that page's unique email address, and the note with my whereabouts gets appended to the page.

More recently, I adapted my spam-counting image generator script to run on my Macs at work and home, and generate an indicator as to whether or not the screen-saver has kicked in... for me, that's a strong indicator of whether I (or a co-worker, or Maggie, or one of the cats, but usually me) has touched that keyboard in the last 15 minutes or so... see the green-text blobs in the right sidebar.

...more to come!