Monday, the 13th

Oodles of e-mail, lots of work piled up. Quite a few annoyances, though.

• They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Well, sometimes I am not flattered (via and a couple of e-mails), because although Kubrick is Michael's design and free for anyone to use, the site header logo was, until today, unique. More reason to evolve beyond Kubrick altogether, I guess. But - and let me make this plain - anyone who improves upon the whole concept has my blessing. Go forth and make even better (and more original) site headers, and spread the Kubrick meme - but do try to make it your own in the process (I can't realistically stop anyone from using a similar name or site header, but like I wrote, differentiation is best done through other means).
• Since there are still people out there using insanely inefficient news aggregators that do not support gzip encoding or use If-Modified-Since, I have begun tagging my RSS and Atom feeds with a warning. In short, I will block libwww-perl and other aggregators (which request roughly 150K of data at a pop - ten times the average amount) starting January 2005.
• And no, changing your User-Agent won't help, because anyone who requests the full feed twice without gzip encoding will also be blocked. Wise up and if you can't upgrade (I suggest you check out newspipe), at the very least start using the Coralized feed.
• We experienced a minor earthquake (5.4 in the Richter scale). The amusing conclusion was that we don't have a single Portuguese news site able to cope with traffic peaks (with the likely exception of Público, a daily newspaper that at least knows how to whip up a quick static page) and that our emergency and geophysics organizations are a joke. Why else would newspapers call the Spanish ones for information?
• Rumors that the earthquake's epicenter was located under the Parliament building were quickly dismissed (in case you don't know, our government resigned this weekend, soon after the President disbanded the Parliament).
• Last, but most definitely not least, my corporate Exchange server was upgraded, effectively locking Entourage out, just when I had left documents to review. And they're both Microsoft products - you have to admire the consistency of such things.

More later.