Archive for February, 2006
Posted: Tue 2.28.06 @ 10:51am EST in Blog News
Mike over at Simplenomics got himself tagged, so now I’m tagged. I’ve had this happen a few times before but never participitated, mainly because the questions were a little too sensitive (ie: I didn’t want people to discover what a weirdo I am), but the ones below are fairly benign, so I’ll give it a shot…
Four Jobs I’ve Had :
1) Drywaller (Plaster & wallboard)
2) Electronics assembly technician at IBM
3) Customer Service at an ISP
4) My own business
Four Movies I Can Watch Over And Over :
1) Ronin
2) Goodfellas
3) The Shawshank Redemption
4) Toy Story II
Four TV Shows I Love To Watch :
1) La Femme Nikita
2) Star Trek Voyager
3) Mythbusters
4) Girls Gone Wild Infomercials 
Four Places I’ve Been On Vacation :
1) Palm Springs CA
2) Cincinati OH
3) Rice Lake ON
4) St. Johns NF
Four Tunes That Play In My Head :
1) AC/DC’s Who Made Who
2) The “Jaws” theme song
3) Greenday’s Time of your life
4) Pop goes the world (don’t ask)
Four Favorite Dishes :
1) Lasagne
2) Coffee
3) Coffee
4) Coffee
Four Websites I Visit Daily :
1) Digg
2) Slashdot
3) My own sites
4) Google
Four Books I Really Love :
1) Freud And Beyond - Various Authors
2) Darkfall - Dean R. Koontz
3) The Bachman Books - Stephen King
4) Anything by Michael Crichton
Four Places I’d Rather Be :
1) Palm Springs
2) Riding a Harley
3) Mosport Racetrack
4) Spain
Four Bloggers I’m Tagging :
1) Teli Adlam
2) Lynn Terry
3) Andre Chaperon
4) Alice Seba
Phew! That took longer than I thought it would.
Anyway folks, you’re it!
Posted: Fri 2.24.06 @ 2:34am EST in Blog News
…up for air. Phew!
Is anyone else sickened by the dot-com-bubblish social-networking two-point-oh! sites popping up lately? I mean, come on all you Ajax fondling code jockeys. It’s been done to death! Well, memetrackers have at least.
I thought Ajax was supposed to expand things? It may in terms of cool stuff you can do with pages and backend to frontend interaction, but everyone seems to be copying the same old stuff and making it look different.
Where’s the imagination? Where’s the creativity? Where’s the next thing that’s going to make the Yahoo!s and Googles want to part 8 figures of their investors hard earned money?
Sheesh, I’m seeing 3 year old scripts over at hotscripts.com that have the potential to do more than what some of the former art majors turned valleywag headline-fodder wannabes are doing, or at least making public.
Anyway, I’ve had my bloodshot eyes superglued to some php scripting and java (both the code kind and caffinated kind) for 3 days now. I’m even thinking about cranking up an old computer I have here and installing a scripting and development enviroment on it (apache, php, etc.).
The testing site is online behind a password and it’s looking like the core functionality is working. And if it doesn’t fly in the media world I’m fretting not, ’cause I can always strip it down and sell it to the internet marketing crowd as the next big AdSense/web page builder.
I may do that anyway - sell 500 copies for $297 and use the $150,000 or so to fund the development of the real thing
Hmm, now there’s an idea…
Posted: Wed 2.22.06 @ 3:16pm EST in Blog News
CNET News reports that a federal judge has ruled Google’s thumbnail image search is likely copyright infringement.
Back in the day when I used to do SEO for clients, especially clients who sold retail products via their web site, I would optimize all the pictures on their sites.
One client in particular who ran a gift basket site had an increase in overall sales as a result. 31% of all sales resulting directly from search engine traffic came from image search results.
My only conclusion was that people would actually use the major search engines image results like a storefront where they’d do their keyword search, find a picture of a product they wanted, click through and purchase it.
If the major search engines have to go and change all that just because of a couple of complaints, the search engines will become less useful for searchers.
Do webmasters not realize that all they need to do to limit what content ends up in a search engine is use a robots.txt file?
Don’t want undesirable people in your basement? Lock the doors and windows.
Posted: Wed 2.22.06 @ 2:14pm EST in Blog News
Just when you think you’re speaking in a private forum, this happens.
He’s wrong about my views, but he’s not the only one (I was forwarded some email from a private mailing list where some of the participants skewered me in the same way that Blog Herald just did but in a more personal way — all because I want full-text feeds). — Scobelizer
Edit: Anyway, here’s some advice I’ll be following from this day forward - either state your opinion in public for all to see, state them TO the person personally, or keep them to yourself. Anything else just ain’t worth it.
Posted: Mon 2.20.06 @ 9:40pm EST in Personal
Posted: Fri 2.17.06 @ 10:51pm EST in Blog News
I’ve been diversifying my reading lately and revisiting a lot of sites I used to, way back when dinosaurs roamed the web and I found this » CliqueList.com.
CliqueList lets you create private, invite-only email discussion groups. Sort of like Yahoo Groups, except new group members need to be nominated by someone already in the group, and the rest of the group has to vote on each new user.
It looks kind of interesting. I haven’t dug deep into the site yet but it’s run by FuckedCompany.com and MarketBanker (AdBrite) founder Philip Kaplan, so you can pretty well bank on it being good for something.
Posted: Fri 2.17.06 @ 10:22pm EST in Personal
I’ve been struggling with this for two days, wondering if I should post about it or just leave it be. So here we go…
I’m diabetic.
For months now, my vision has been progressively deteriorating, I’ve been having dizzy spells, drinking a LOT of water, numbness in my feet, etc. Wednesday I got the test results back from the doctor and he confirmed it. It’s in the early stages right now and he assures me it can be controlled with a healthy diet, exercise and medication, which is comforting.
My Mother has it so it runs in the family, and I’m at that age where I have to start thinking about such things (38), but that stuff isn’t real until it actually happens to you.
Anyway, I have to talk with some people and read up a lot more about the condition. It’s common and lots of literature is readily available - but I still feel like a ton of bricks has fallen on me; bricks I’ll remove one by one until I get used to the fact that I’ll have this condition for the rest of my life.
This confusion is also affecting other people, like family, friends and a few others. I’ve also made a few enemies lately who really shouldn’t be.
What else could possibly happen?
Posted: Fri 2.17.06 @ 5:30pm EST in Blog News
Jack Of All Blogs (JOAB) was down when I checked a few minutes ago. I dropped by there about an hour before that and left a comment welcoming the new author. Funny…
I wonder if they got lynched?
Posted: Fri 2.17.06 @ 5:03pm EST in Blog News
About my post below: The blogosphere is getting worse.
On one end of the spectrum we have people gaining recognition for twisting facts more out of proportion than your grandmother’s pantyhose. On the other we have self proclaimed blogging activists whom, in their futile attempts to look intelligent and/or authoritative, try to bestow words of wisdom upon us as if those words were copied from the works of Shakespeare - after they were blown out of a wood chipper.
My point? It’ll soon be time to do another RSS feed purge.
Posted: Thu 2.16.06 @ 4:36am EST in Blog News
(insert huge toothy grin here)
The blogosphere is a mess lately. And that’s all I have to say about that!
