Blatant Promotion
Category: Writing and Poetry

For some cool stories, be sure to check out "A Short Tail" Where you'll find some great short stories.  One of my favorites so far is "Burgers In The Dumpster".

I've been doing a bit of writing of my own in something different from my usuual style.  You can get the beginning of the story here

9:23 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

grrrrrr

I stopped in here tonight because I had another couple of emails from MySpace saying that so-and-so had requested to be added to my friends list.  As usual, I go to check these alleged people for mutual friends and find that there aren't any.

I don't suppose that anyone behind such obviously spammed requests will read this but just the same, if you hit the friend request and you're not somebody I know or ther aren't people I do know in the 'mutual friends' listing, then that request is going in the bitbucket.

While I'm here, I'm also going to point out that I've just released a new version of a program I wrote called "Mixminion Message Sender".   It's a GUI that I wrote for Mixminion because I got tired of typing long, often complicated command lines in a DOS box.  MMS does the "grunt work" of creating the messages and passing the needed command lines to Mixminion.

As for exactly what Mixminion is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion is worth taking time to read.  Basically Mixminion is an anonymous remailer, a program that allows specially formatted and encypted messages to be sent through a chain of servers, each one removing a layer of encryption and then sending the message, without any headers that identify the source, on to the next hop in the chain.

While writing this I thought of something else that bugs the snot out of me.  Video or Music players that autostart.  Frankly, I think it's bloody presumptuous of people to decide that I want their idea of music to suddenly start blasting out of my speakers when I load their site.  This is especially true when I happen to be listening to MY music.  Trust me, My Mozart and Beethoven beats almost any "music" from the last twenty years or more.  And if I have my speakers turned off as I frequently do, your autostart is just taking up bandwidth and cpu power to handle something that is NOT going to be heard.

As for the autostart video thing... consider your viewers, think about the fact that you have ZERO idea if they have enough bandwidth to handle your video stream.  And then again, maybe they just don't want to watch it.

Solution?  Go ahead and embed your video and music players, but make sure that they DO NOT AUTOSTART!.  Autostart is rude, obnoxious, and just plain thoughtless.

Got another gripe (full of it I know)... This thing tells me I can't leave the subject line blank.  WTF does this think it is?  UseNet?  Hmpth!

8:54 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

past time

... way past time for me to have written something here seeing that it’s been nearly a month since the last post. (I really need to get something up here a little more often)Fortunately, I can actually think of a few things my wife’s written that are well worth spreading some links to.

To start with theres "Gas Prices Too High..Too Many Problems", which is, you guessed it, about the growing crisis of extorionarily (is that a word?) high prices for fuel.  A problem that is going to hit absolutely EVERYONE if Big Oil isn’t called on the carpet and forced to amend their money worshiping, greedy ways.

Another item, "What’s A Fee Harvesting Credit Card? Do I Want One?", is a must read for anybody that’s thinking about taking up that credit card offer that came in the mail.  Odds are good that you could be getting a lot more than you bargained for.

Next up is "Home Equity Loans New Thing On The Chopping Block", is related to the mortgage / home loans mess that’s had Wall Street in a tailspin and people everywhere losing their homes because of it.

Finally, I actually got a post done on my Blogspot blog that introduces a series of articles I’ve written about A Collection of anonymity tutorials that starts with anonymous web browsing, proceeds to anonymous email and will eventually conclude with how to write an anonymous blog that cannot be traced back to your real-life identity.

Now to see if I can get another of these done before the month is out!

1:06 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

shameless promotion time again

I've got another couple of sites that I want to introduce people to.   They're both relatively young blogs and could use all the new inbound links they can get.

The first one I'll talk about is "TwoTon Tilly", it's loaded with Tilly's opinions about litterally everything as well as a good sprinkling of Tilly's humor.. cat humor, husband humor and plenty more to boot.  TwoTon Tilly promises to be an entertaining read

The second new-ish blog I'm introducing here is called "Blog Hunting".  This is where "Ribbit" talks about interesting blogs and blog entries discovered around the Intenet.  You'll get a sense of what a reviewed blog is about in general and a post (or more, you never know) that are interesting or particularly good for whatever reason.  Anyone looking for interesting blogs to check out would do well to browse "Blog Hunting".  It *is* a new blog, but I fully expect it to become a wealth of links to interesting blogs and posts as time goes by.

Ok, that's the promotion part.  Now for the "shameless" part.  This is where I ask readers to not only visit these blogs and have a look at them, but also to ask that you put up crawlable links to them on your own sites and blogs.

That's TwoTon Tilly (http://twotontilly.com) and Blog Hunting (http://bloghunting.com).

Thanks in advance for the links and I'll be back again in a few days with a couple more interesting blogs

11:42 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Another Mistake in the Making
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: News and Politics

I just wanted to mention a blog entry I read on Off The Cuff recently that I think makes a really good point about a really bad idea that's being adopted in more and more school districts and that is the idea of paying kids to take tests at school.

I know, it sounds like a good idea when you first look at it, but the problem comes when you look a bit closer at the message that this kind of incentive is sending which is basically "pay me or I'll not produce anything".  I can understand a certian amount of this in a business world or in an employee / employer relationship but when it comes to kids going to school it's a different matter entirely.

Whatever happened to the idea of simply doing the best you're able to do becasue it's the right thing to do?  I've seen this kind of thing in elementary school classes all the way down to kindergarten.  This sort of thing never used to be even an issue, teachers didn't have to bribe students with candy, money or anything else to get them to perform.  There was no negotiation, no arguing, no nothing. you go the assignment, you did the assignemnt.  If you didn't do it, you got a zero.

That entry is worth taking the time to read as well as Stumble, Digg, Etc.

4:54 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

How Do I Remove Zodiac from MySpace Profile?
Current mood: disgusted

I've asked this before but since I've not been able to find any way to do it I'm going to ask again.  Simply, I'd like to know where in my MySpace profile or settings I can find a setting to change that will turn off the display of "Zodiac sign" in the "Ed's Details" part of the page?

As a Christian I don't believe in Astrology and I don't want any part of it on my profile.  So I'm looking for help in getting that turned off.  I don't care if others want to have that enabled but *I* want to turn it off and I'd really appreciate being able to do so.  I've been all over all of the settings and options pages that I can find.  I was able to turn off display of the zodiac sign on the blog, but apparently there isn't a way to turn it off on the profile...

...Somebody please prove me wrong

9:20 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

What’s Buzzing?

...Blogbuzz of course.

Blogbuzz is a new blog that is primarily about blogs and blogging.  In it I'm going to be doing reviews of blogs from all over the "blogosphere" (I'm still undecided whether I like that word or not) about all manner of topics.

These reviews will not only cover what the blog in question is about and how it's being said, but I will also be rating blogs based on standards (that I'm still deciding on some of).. such as readability, font size and color, use of graphics, how fast it loads & so on.

For now, I'm just doing basic elementary reviews.  Over time as I develop the standards I want to use, I'll be assigning a "BuzzRank" score to each blog that I review.  That will probably wait until I can come up with a graphic to use in a "BuzzRank" Badge that a blogger can put on their site if they like.

11:17 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

I wonder....
Category: MySpace

Why the link for posting a new entry says "Post New Blog" when it's not a new blog that I'm posting. It's a new blog entry that's being created.  If I were posting a new blog, I would be doing something like this:

Hey folks, I've got a new blog project going, the whole point of which is to learn more about Adsense and how to make it profitable enough to be worthwhile.  As such I think it's got the most appropriate name of "BlogDoofus" and you can find it at http://blogdoofus.com.

That is posting a new blog.  This entire thing you're reading now is a blog entry.  I know it's a teeny little difference to most, but it's still a difference and not so small really if you think about it.

8:06 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Couple more links
Category: Blogging

Y'know, I'm going to have to write on this thing more often.. but then there are so many that I need to keep up with its no wonder some of them fall behind.

Another one I haven't touched in a long time is my tagworld page, and then there's a blog on wordpress.org that I ended up with in order to get an Akismet API key.  And a new blog that I just got started, called, "Our Walk In The Word", that's going to be dedicated to Bible studies, devotionals and such.  Oh, almost forgot to include another of my latest efforts: "Tinfoil Chef", which is where I'm going to go on about how much I love good food.

Then on top of that, I need to do an updated version of the list of family blogs because there's been a change or two and some additions since then.

2:18 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

it’s been busy out
Current mood: tired
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

I probably ought to have posted here a tad more, but it's been getting busy out lately.  Earlier this week I finished changing one of my wife's blogs from it's old software... Install wordpress, import the post data from the old software and then do the editing to customize the theme.  The result looks good if I do say so myself but don't take my word for it... have a look at Topshelf for yourself.

Once that was finished I got started on converting another one, Comments From The Total Peanut that's starting to look pretty good.  It's not finished yet, but it's getting there.

9:51 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment