expiration date

This needs to be a rule: Technical articles and blog posts *must* have a date. Always.

I was looking around for articles on how to merge my Twitter feed with Blogger. I found a ton of outdated information, that was, of course, *not* actually dated, making it was impossible to gauge relevance. I think I poked around the internet for about half an hour before stumbling upon something that worked.

(Solution that works as of 2013/02/24: Embed the code snippet generated by https://twitter.com/settings/widgets into your blog layout HTML)

With rapid release cycles and constantly evolving software, blog posts have limited shelf-lives and often only apply to specific versions of the product. It is incumbent on anyone that seeks to document or write about software to understand this. The crazy thing is I've seen this on Wired, Salon and a bunch of other reputable publications. A Google search for "add twitter feed to blogger" yields a surprisingly high number of outdated AND undated results.

Now part of this is Twitter's fault for messing with their API and terms of service. But this is unfortunately the way things are when software isn't completely open. The end user is held hostage by the folks controlling the software. OK - Now I'm starting to sound like RMS. Which probably means I should sign off.

But seriously - software really does need to be open.

apologies for 2012

So I never did post a best-of list for 2012. I listened to a lot of music, but somehow very little actually stuck. In the end I felt like I could throw something together but it would be the equivalent of fakin' it.

There was certainly some interesting music. Fiona Apple and Neneh Cherry put out some pretty cool weird-good records (mad newfound respect y'all!). I mean, you can't go wrong with a name like "The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do".  And Ssion did a wonderful Erasure reprisal.

But ultimately, the record that completely and totally rocked my socks off, and made the infinte-repeat playlist for the year was something that was released in 2011. Wax Idols - "No Future" on Hozac. It made a best-of list completely meaningless because nothing in 2012 came close. Yes - it is that good!

The good news is that 2013 is already starting out pretty solid - MBV, Veronica Falls, Eat Skull, Matmos ... and we're only in February.

<full disclosure>I still haven't properly listened to the Frank Ocean album, and I should pretty much stop talking about music until I do that.</full disclosure>