Recently I helped prepare a Passport application for an upcoming trip.  This form can first prepared on the computer, and then taken in to an actual goverment office to file.  The process was wonderfully well explained and made easy, and actually works.  But I found myself wondering why an insignificant mistake in the online form hadn’t been fixed yet.

On the form, where it asks for your phone number, it formats your phone number as if it were a social security number instead.  The number is still readable, but just looks a little strange.  No big deal at all.

All the same, at first I was a little shocked.  The U.S. Department of State is a big time operation.  Was this ignored mistake a sign of our “outdated and crumbling infrastructure?”  How many millions of people have encountered this tiny mistake in the online application since they first provided it?  Does no one take pride in the details of this most auspicious task?

About two seconds later, I realized one (of many) obvious answers.  They have much bigger problems to fix.  And this experience brought a new awareness rapidly to the surface.  Had I temporarily applied a bizarre expectation for my buraucracy to provide a flawless consumer experience to every single person that interacts with it?

What an embarassingly childish thought to have had.

Dang it!  And I thought Santa was at the bottom of the map. :)

Yes, I’m working on a technology upgrade for this blog.  Basically, I’m trying to integrate my Google Reader (RSS feeds galore) with the blog.  The way it will ideally work is that I will read something interesting, comment on it, and embed my comment as well as the original post (media intact) along with a link to the full item.

Unfortunately, the built-in self-installed WordPress “post by email” functionality doesn’t support “fancy HTML” emails.  So every time I’ve tried to send something to this blog via the post-by-email function, it strips out everything but the title of the post because it’s HTML.

But that won’t be a problem for long.  You see, WordPress is written in PHP.  That PHP.   MY OWN PERSONAL EDITABLE (bwaaah haaah haaaah) kind of PHP.  (Did you know I was a computer science major before a business major?)

So I’ll get this working soon, and then the blog post count will explode.

At first it will be like a tribble population.

      Later, it will be like tribbles eating alkaseltzer.

            Picture the carnage of posts:  fuzz…. munch…. fizzz….. boom!

So if you ever wanted to know what kinds of things I think about, these are things that are possibly interesting even without my commentary (which is easily scrolled past to the good stuff)…

So quit reading my blog before it’s too late, before you get any of it on you.

Otherwise it is all coming soon. :)