Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

On visiting Vanuatu

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! I’m going to be visiting my old friend Dan in Vanuatu next month. He’s thoughtfully provided some tips for me (or any other visitor who might go there):

First set of tips Second set of tips

It looks like I [...]

Handy hint: use lip balm on boo-boos

(If you like, we can pretend this is a life hack, and it’ll make us both feel more hip.)

Today’s useful tip is that you can use chapstick on hangnails and other minor hurts to soften them up and help them heal. I use Burt’s Bees Beeswax Lip Balm on everything from insect bites [...]

Administrivia

A couple of points.

Those who read the RSS feed for Infotropism may have noticed that I started splicing in my del.icio.us links each day. I’ve now stopped doing this, as it annoyed even me. If you really like them, you can go subscribe specifically to the RSS feed for those links.

At the [...]

Weaning yourself off LiveJournal: RSS feeds

Table of contents for Weaning yourself off LJ: a guide for fansWeaning yourself off LJ: Why you might want toWeaning yourself off LJ: First stepsWeaning yourself off LJ: CustomisationWeaning yourself off LJ: More customisationsWeaning yourself off LJ: Plugin-o-rama!Weaning yourself off LJ: Images and videoWeaning yourself off LiveJournal: RSS feeds You’ve probably forgotten this series; I [...]

New Freebase blog

I decided to set up a separate blog for my Freebase blitherings. You can find it at freebasing.org. Points of interest so far:

Thoughts on the cultural associations of location data New tool: RSS feed of new types

Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed.

A quick tour of Freebase

I posted a while ago about my new crack habit, Freebase. Freebase is — to my mind — like Wikipedia mashed up with the LambdaMOO class hierarchy. The idea of creating classes and types for real world things — ships, people, breeds of sheep, bones in the human body — rather than [...]

The Perl Survey, email addresses, and conversion rates

I haven’t mentioned it here before, but I’m running a survey of the Perl community over at perlsurvey.org. If you’re a Perl programmer, or even just an occasional user — modifying the odd CGI script, or writing a quick script to automate some sysadmin tasks, for instance — then please take 5 minutes [...]

Farewell, San Francisco

Murals in Balmy Street, the Mission District, San Francisco.

I left San Francisco on Tuesday full of burrito and Bi-Rite icecream and arrived in Melbourne Thursday to be greeted by a family crisis that has basically managed to erase any cheerful feelings I might have felt about being home. I’m also suffering from a [...]