BunkBlog

_Tuesday_

Weblogs, blogs, online journals – all the same thing, different ways of referring to the same phenomenon. This phenomenon is not new, although you’d think it was invented in 2001 by the sounds of the media coverage of the blogging revolution, the traditional media way of describing nearly anything they don’t really understand but feel may be destabilizing their way of business. In my opinion, weblogs are part vanity site and part content management.

Like most personal websites, mine has long had a series of personal posts from me to the adoring public. My adoring public tends to be geeks, and not very many of them either. Nor do they seem to adore me too awful much, but I digress. The entire purpose of a vanity site, as personal websites were once called with derision, is to tell the world about yourself, to stake a claim to a tiny piece of the electronic zeitgeist. To that end, we old-school webgeeks painstakingly worked on webpages that looked like parts of a whole, building our own menus of links in text editors with exciting names like vi and notepad. It is a tedious way to update a site, and so many vanity sites tend to fall into disrepair. Fortunately, nothing actually decays online, so long as your host stays viable. There are a plethora of dead sites out there, with “last updated” dates in the last century.

Businesses which publish frequently-changing content online need a way to make that process simple, as well as accessible to the vast majority of their employees who are scared of that whole cyberspace information superhighway thing in the magic box. So, some clever folks came up with content management systems (CMS). The author of a document doesn’t have to know anything about HTML, CSS, tags, links, and other such exciting geek stuff. The author just writes up his story in whatever (usually proprietary but sometimes web-based) interface the CMS uses. This separation of content and format is usually based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which kick serious butt in general.

So, we had serious tools for businesses, costing thousands of dollars, used by CNN and CNet and other big news sites. And, we had the personal users typing away in their text editors, hoping they didn’t miss a closing tag and hose their layout. Along came weblogging tools. The best-known tool is Blogger, and others include Movable Type, Greymatter, PHPNuke, and Livejournal. Livejournal was started in March 1999, Blogger in August 1999, and Movable Type in October 2001; I can’t find authoritative start dates for the Greymatter and PHPNuke projects. For most people, the two big players are the two oldest: Livejournal and Blogger. I’m a big LJ fan, and I’ll try to explain why.

All weblogging tools allow comments, although many users may disable that capability. Although I had a decent number of people coming to my site with my old manual system, I had no way for them to comment aside from email or a guestbook. The guestbook, like most guestbooks, has been largely stagnant for years; almost nobody emailed me from my site. So, interactivity being the hallmark of the web, weblogs allow a discussion to occur centered on any comment you put on your site.

I wanted a way to keep my website looking fresh, without the pain of editing a full page of HTML each time I had something to say. LJ has been very effective in fooling people that come to my site, making them think I actually have new content almost daily. LJ embeds into the HTML of my homepage, allowing me to use it as a CMS for my own page. But, the great thing about LJ is the community.

When you join LJ, your comments are on their servers. This is often a problem, as their servers have issues due to expansion beyond the founder’s wildest dreams. The architecture of the LJ code, some have said, is not really capable of handling the load to which it is subjected, and the servers slow down too often. These are valid complaints, in my experience, but I’m still sticking with the service. The good thing about a central repository is that every LJ user is findable in some way. It may be a tedious way of going through every user, which number is approaching a million, but it is possible to find anyone on LJ. It’s easier if they want to be found, as LJ has “interests” to search, as well as having regional searches. If you want to find everyone in your town that has a journal, you can. The immediate outgrowth of the searchability of LJ is the Friends Page. Rather than visit 10 different blogger sites, you can just go to your own Friends Page, which is in a style you specify, and view all the entries written by people (or communities) that you find interesting. No need to search with Google or wander around Blogspot, you can just hit the Random button on LJ. Or, look at the people that others find interesting. Many times I have added friends that were friends of older friends. Very goofy-sounding, I know, but the web of connections is the big draw to LJ.

When people join LJ and then leave to start a blog on their personal site, I just look at the single line of code it took me to embed my journal on my homepage, and wonder why.

Livejournal – because you like to think people care.

Every few months, I get involved in an exchange with someone online that makes me wonder if it’s possible to have a reasoned discussion with people below the age of 26. I wonder if I was as resistant to rational thought at that age, and as incapable of responding to a counterpoint with anything more intelligible than “yeah? Well you’re old!”

I know that people in their teens and early 20s have always felt they knew everything and that whatever time they grew up in was completely different from every other period of history, but I swear I was not as self-important and arrogant when I was 20.
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From Fred On Everything this morning:

The function of psychologists is to serve as secular priests for an irreligious age. They provide comfort for people who want reassurance from insipid hand-holders who smell slightly of some inner truth. They form a vacuous clergy relentlessly certifying the obvious. Talking to one of them is like being patted on the head and having your face wiped with a warm moist rag. It doesn’t accomplish anything, but you feel attended to.

Asked to characterize the sniper, [the psychologist] said, “Well, I think we can say that these killings are the work of a disturbed individual….”

Oh.

I received this insight with gratitude. It was comforting to learn that serial snipers weren’t normal. It is well that we have psychologists to study these truths.

Somebody must actually follow those links, or they wouldn’t keep sending the stupid things…
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Entertainment Tonight is really reaching for news items. They are promo-ing the sexual escapades of Bob Crane. Um, how can that be anything shocking? Everyone knows he was a perv who died in mysterious circumstances after making lots of home porn with John Carpenter. What could possibly be shocking now?
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The Cafepress site now has even more options, including ski caps (the Ninja ski cap is up now), and – most amusingly – thongs. The thongs have only 2.75 inch squares to print on the front and 1 inch squares on the back, so I’ve got to come up with some new graphics. I have, of course, already put up a SGT Slut thong, but I doubt it will sell. None of the SGT Slut line has sold so far. Yeah, it was a joke, but c’mon – doesn’t anyone know a military girl with a sense of humor?

So, go to the store and see what you like. And, if someone has an idea for a new design, I’ll make it, set you up as a storeowner, and we can both try to make a profit. I’ve made next-to-nothing so far, but then I don’t have usurious pricing and I don’t actually expect to make ANYTHING on it. It is just fun.
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FAA Considering Passenger Ban

WASHINGTON, DC–Seeking to address “the number-one threat to airline security,” the Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday that it will consider banning passengers on all domestic and international commercial flights.
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Just for Lysa.

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” – Sir Richard Steele
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Updated the templates page on my site. I added a couple new types of images that are quick and easy to make, as well as adding a description of what is customizable in each type.

C’mon, you know you need a new icon!
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Citibank has got to have the most annoying automated systems on the planet. I know they are a large company, and therefore need to use automation to make their workload manageable, but come on!

In February, we moved into the house and we somehow misplaced the Citibank bill and so missed a payment. They automatically kicked in the “penalty rate” which meant our 9% card went to 24.99%. In the old days (like 1995), you could call a company, they’d say, “Well, you have a perfect payment history and a six thousand dollar balance, so we’re making all kinds of money from you. We won’t fuck you after all.” When talking to these chuckleheads, though, they said there was nothing they could do. FMITGA.

Now, after much financial legerdemain, I ended up with a balance due which is larger than the credit limit. This is, of course, partially due their arbitrarily lowering my limit by 600 dollars, but that’s not important. The statement is dated 14 October, and it is two days later. It says the due date is 7 November. I got a call today from their automated collections machine telling me to call them. I call them and ask, “Is it past due?” No. “Then I’ll pay it when it is due.” This resulted in much back-and-forth in which the idiot on the other end claimed my statement (which is all-electronic now so I can’t refer to it when I’m on the phone with moron-girl) was dated 4 October, and that my two payments in this cycle actually paid on separate bills, so I need to give them money now. I ask again, “Is it past due?” The answer is still no, so I tell her that I have nothing more to say, and she says the automated calls will continue until I pay the bill. Well, I’ll pay it when my budget says I pay it, and that is in November, when the damned thing is DUE.

I’ve since looked at my online statement, it shows two payments on this statement, both applied to this billing cycle, and the statement date is 14 fucking October.

I have only one prejudice – I hate stupid people. I hate them with a passion not infinitesimal.
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Amazing what blocking just a few domains does to my spam load.
More »

It’s at least a few weeks old now, but the Mozilla-based Phoenix is new to most people, I’m sure. It’s on version 0.3, so it may not work for some things, but it’s fast, simple, and has a couple cool features.

Selective pop-up blocking – by default, all unrequested popup windows are blocked, but you can add specific sites to your “whitelist” of sites that you will allow popups from.

Selective image blocking – rather than the usual all-or-nothing approach to image loading, you can specify certain servers that you don’t want images from. Saves a lot of time when you block the advertising.com server, among others.

Of course, it also has tabs, like every browser but IE, and it allows you to set a minimum font size, also like everyone but Microsoft. I want my mouse gestures, though, so I’ll probably stick with Opera for now. It’s nice to see browser development is not stagnant, though.
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Dan Quayle
“[It’s] time for the human race to enter the solar system.”
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How is it possible for there to be so many Canucks on LJ, yet my site (which gets most of its hits from LJ) only has 2% users coming from .ca domains? Do Canadians usually use .com domains? Don’t you have ISPs that use .ca besides Sympatico?

It’s all very weird, and I don’t want to work so I’m going to pursue useless crap like this. 🙂
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I think this is cool, but I’m sort of weird.

Nutrition Action Health Letter has a section called “Right Stuff/Food Porn” that is amusing as hell. That’s where I discovered that the Pecanbon from Cinnabon, although a taste treat, has 890 calories. Yes, one roll has half your daily calorie intake. And you really don’t want to look at the fat content of that bad boy.
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You know that Don Henley song, Boys of Summer? There’s a line in there about a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. I recently saw the 21st century version – a No Fear sticker on a Jaguar. Of course, the Jag was being driven by someone who appeared to be 15, so I’m assuming it was a lieutenant that had used his commissioning loan to buy an overpriced car.

Another weird car I saw this weekend – a Dodge Stratus with a double-decker wing bolted to the trunk. Ranks up there with tricking out a Geo Metro for “WTF” factor.
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Sorry to the two people I told would get userpics Friday afternoon. Make that Monday.
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Yeah, I took one of those silly quizzes to wake up this morning.

Which Personality Disorder Do You Have?
brought to you by Quizilla
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Just ate most of an ultimate bacon cheeseburger and all the fries from a Gag-in-a-Bag meal. Oh, me so torpid!
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Watching “Just Shoot Me” tonight, it occured to me that Rena Sofer should really never try to fake a New Jersey accent. It comes and goes.

Also, if there were ever a doubt who is the star of that show, one merely needs to look at Laura San Giacomo in a tight sweater. Wooh!
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