Driving through Wiltshire the other day, we saw a white horse on the side of a hill.

This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.

I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)

Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.

So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.

Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!

I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.

Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"

'It gives consumers more choice'

Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.

Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.

Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.

Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.

But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":

The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.

Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.

Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.

Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.

So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:

  [09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
    self.finish_response()
  File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
    self.write(data)
  File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
    self._write(data)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
    self.flush()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
    self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
    self.finish_response()
  File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
    self.write(data)
  File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
    self._write(data)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
    self.flush()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
    self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')

Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.

Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?

I think the word "fiasco" might be a little strong for this particular event. When I think of fiascos, I usually think of Newtons, Zunes, and Battlefield Earth.

Leave it to Apple: The only company in the world whose customers form a lynch mob when they lower the price.