BunkBlog

Now, this is unexpected. For the first time in over a year, the “Lianna” directory isn’t getting the most traffic on my site. While I have a directory dedicated to storing the pictures of naked people from last Christmas, that only got 3.29% of the traffic in the past 2 weeks. The directory holding the userpics I’ve designed for and , on the other hand, has served up 36.61% of the bytes this fortnight.

Who would have thought: people want animated pictures of Gwen Stefani more than they want nekkid boobies. Amazing!
current_music: Prince – Pope
current_mood: surprised

Darnit! While looking for new effects to play with, I ran into Relique’s Brushy, a great site devoted to brushes for Photoshop. I only grabbed two of the packs, and went back today to find the dreaded “Bandwidth Exceeded” error. Hope the site returns tomorrow…
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I realize I can sometimes be a bit short in my speech. This is due to my belief that one should not waste words if what you have to say is simple. With this in mind, I’m occasionally told I’m being rude when I am just getting to the point.

An example is here, and I’d like my “friends” opinions. Was my original reply angry or otherwise containing some tone I can’t detect? Seriously, I thought I was just pointing out some other resources. Free country and all that rot.
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I rearranged the Icons page, adding a frameset for ease of navigation. The pictures are still in the same places, but I plan to move them next week to subdirectories.
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Now, earlier I posted a note telling people who make userpics what to do and not to do.
Here’s some ideas for those who are making requests for userpics:

• 100 pixels and 40 kilobytes are smaller than you think. We can’t put an entire episode of Buffy in an icon.
• Know some of the terminology that you use: Flash is a file format, not an icon type, etc.
  • Corollary: The “ART” format is ugly and non-standard, do not attempt to post ART or BMP files on webpages.
• If you have a specific image or set of images in mind, point to them or send them
• Use proper capitalization in your requests
  • Corollary: use reasonable English skills
• Some of us are older than 12 and don’t know who the heck Justin et al are.
• Please stop asking for userpics of Nsync, Britney Spears and the cast of Buffy. There is no shortage of those damned things already.
• Be polite. Nobody owes you anything.
• Don’t claim a picture and then not use it. Someone else may have wanted it.

That about covers it for now. Anything I’ve missed?
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current_mood: giddy

I think I’m going to be running out of paid bandwidth this month:

Can you tell when I put up the Icons page?
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I’d just like to say a few things about designing userpics, for those who want to try their hand at it.

• 100 pixels is smaller than you think
• If you need to put text on an image, make sure you can read the text before you deliver the final design
• They’re animated GIFs, not “flash icons.”
• Blurry is rarely a good thing
• Google Image search is your friend.
• Be polite and reasonable.
• Perhaps you should re-think hosting images on Fotki or Virtue.nu, since they seem to fail so regularly.
• Sometimes several people post a userpic simultaneously. It’s not an insult to you.

That is all I have to say. Good night.
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Just to check on the progress of ‘s meme project, I went to the meme tracker today.

Doesn’t look like a significant number of folks linked to Liz’s Site…
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Still popping out icons for folks over at . Want something for a userpic? I’m on a roll lately. If you’ve got a challenging morph, that would be fun…
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LizVang is a self-promoting doofus.

Not that I’ve ever enticed folks to vote for my tshirt or anything. hehe
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New Page of icons. Here’s a central place to view all the icons I’ve made for folks so far. I’m pretty sure the Strawberry Shortcake one was a request, but I can’t find for whom. The morphing Jack-to-Sally ones belong to as soon as she picks one of them.

Oh, and that page is freakishly slow to load on a dialup, since most of the icons are just barely under the 40k limit.
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In case you didn’t know, I’ve been volunteering over at lately, making a boatload of icons for folks. If you want something weird, let me know.

Here’s the ones I’ve made so far, but they’re all spoken for (except the Gwen Stefani one).
current_music: Outback – Camberwick Green
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WELL I had another conversation with someone about Microsoft V Linux
I would love to know why I get into some many conversations about it, it much be because I am willing to stand up for companies that many people put down Namely Microsoft.
I wish people would just realize that companies are not out there to give you everything you want on a silver plater.

Um, let’s see how many English errors we can count, and then subtract that from the level of seriousness with which to take the opinions expressed therein.

Again I say – If you want someone to take your opinions seriously, spellcheck, proofread and then re-think the entire posting. After you’ve thought about it and run it through “ispell” or some other such tool, then go ahead and post. Your views might still be stupid, but more people will listen to them anyway.
current_music: The Vandals – Christmas Time for my Penis

OK, as threatened earlier, the Andy Social Antisocial paraphenilia emporium is now open for business. So far, we’ve got three shirts, and that’s just because I’m on vacation prepping for my upcoming nuptials, so I’m away from keyboard bigger than shit this week.
current_mood: accomplished

According to the new stats page on my site, the most popular search term is Rachbomb, finally beating out “smallest penis ever seen”. Bunch of damned perverts, I swear…
current_mood: amused

Anyone have a good webhost suggestion? Mine (Virtualave) seems to be a little flaky at times. Currently, any externally linked file returns a 403 (Forbidden) error, although no such error was in evidence yesterday.

This may seem reasonable, if there were banner ads on my site that subsidized my bandwidth usage. There aren’t. I pay for my hosting, there are no ads that I’m circumventing by posting a picture of a cake on my LJ, and I even pay for excess bandwidth usage (3 bucks last month, a bit more this month).

So, I’m considering moving to a different host, if the spurious 403 error becomes a corporate policy instead of a bug. Let me know what’s a good, relatively cheap host. I’m paying about US$100/year now.

Update: Virtualave, with no email yet in response to my (quite bitchy) query into the reason for this random failure, has now resumed functioning normally with regard to external links. Whatever.
current_music: Tricia typing
current_mood: annoyed

New section on my site, which will soon be filled with cool stuff. Photo album

I’ve posted the latest and greatest statistics for my website this weekend. Big news: folks from C|Net downloads are hitting my site more lately than folks from LiveJournal. Hmmmm…

In other web-building news, I’ve added a new Random Meandering Thought, this one a little anecdote about a really ballsy guy I knew a while back.

Enjoy.
current_music: dead batteries in RioVolt
current_mood: bored

Even as the Microsoft breakup ruling has been nullified, MS still makes some entertaining news. One of the long-time Microsoft-backers, David Coursey of ZDNet, has been bitten by the registration bug/feature in Office XP, and now can’t even use the legal copy of Word he needs to do his journalist job. Love it.

So, working for DISA, the information systems folks for the military, we send many documents around for review to various bosses (I’ve got 8 bosses, Bob – Office Space).

These documents are 40 pages and longer, and we print them out single-sided and hustle them around via sneakernet throught this 5-acre compound. After we print a couple copies for different folks to review, we make more copies of the changes and then of the changes to the revisions to the updates ad nauseum.

Why aren’t we sending this by email? Because “it’s easier to mark it up on paper” they say. And these are the IS masters for DOD? Hi, I’m a revision mark and comment in Word…
current_mood: amused