Purely Random

I’m about a month away from a major change in my life: I recently signed an employment contract. I’ve been thinking about leaving grad school for a long time now, and a lot of my friends have been aware that this was coming. Now it’s official. The company I will be starting at is a startup founded by a faculty member of the School of Computer Science at CMU, and it’s called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition—or just PittPatt, for short.

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I have really started to enjoy using WordPress to host my blog. I was quite concerned about the idea of offloading the grunt work of my blog development to some downloadable tool, but I’m glad I did—and WordPress really is the right tool for the job.

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A few weeks ago, I read a section in Vegetarian Times about dinners that you could make with a microwave and items that you could keep around your (fridge-equipped) office. Though some of the items were a bit of a stretch for making in an office kitchen, they all looked tasty (as usual), and they did require only a microwave. That inspired me to try something a little different when I made a quick dinner last night: microwave-only preparation (with good results, even).

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I’ve spent a long time this evening trying to decide how I might go about creating an OpenId plugin for WordPress for use with this site. The whole point is that you shouldn’t have to sign up for a user account to leave comments. Well, the way I have it set up right now, you don’t actually need to create a user account to post comments anyway. You can always just leave your name and email address. That actually works far better than I once thought it would: after the first time a allow one of your comments, everything else is allowed to pass right through. Of course, that system isn’t the most secure—authentication boils down to knowledge of an email address rather than a password. Then again, I don’t need my comments to be secure; I need them to be spam-free.

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I aquired the purelyrandom.com domain in 2000 when I was a sophomore in college and wanted to create a web site that people would actually read. Most of you will realize that this was right in the heart of the dot-com era, and most everyone was obsessed with this very same idea. In fact, I read a book on marketing for the web at some point and came out from it realizing that dynamic content was crucial to success. When people know a web site will change on a regular basis, they’ll make plans to come back. You need to provide a constant stream of new content, or your site becomes irrelevant. From the perspective of a nerdy college student who works too hard, the problem is actually producing the necessary stream of content. Who has time for that?

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I just created a new page on the site that I will be using to keep track of good breakfast restaurants in Pittsburgh. if you’re confused as to why this would be important to me, you can find all the details on that page. Basically, Sally and I are going to start trying out different breakfast establishments every Sunday morning and reporting our favorites here.