April 2007 Archives

There I was giving Eric a hard time about using up all of his bandwidth for the month and I get home and can't get to my own site as I have reached my bandwidth limit. Damn that sucks.

They have fixed it for me within minutes of arriving home, but it is certainly humbling to look like a dumb ass.

This is pretty cool. Engtech has come up with a program that you can use and will automatically add to your favorites anyone that has favorited any of your blogs. Since I have been trying to increase mine to where it shows up in the top 100 favorited list, that is a sweet deal, as being on the list helps to bring in more traffic. You can find the program and engtech's blog here.

This has been cross-posted at Shadowscope, theapp.net, and Miles Business Blog.

This Post is Sponsored by Adventure11.

...but this one is for surfing websites. Adventure11 is an Internet surfing game that allows you to win prizes for surfing websites. If you are one of those folks that surfs the Internet aimlessly looking for good content do so with a purpose and take home a bit of cash as well. Might as well make a bit of money for doing something you would already be doing for free, and get excited about it.

As a free member up to $1000 a week can be earned just surfing the Internet. Basically you win cash by finding "surfing surprises". You sign up for Adventure11, activate your account, and from the members area click on the "Go Surfing" link. The system automatically takes you to eleven different websites and during that time a Surfing Surprise might appear. If it does you click a link and see if you have won anything. Pretty simple, no?

Any payments are made within 49 hours and as with most contests taxes are your own responsibility. Once you have activated your account you are eligible to start winning the next day, you can only surf 30 websites a day, and you can only have one account per person with Adventure11. You can check out all of the legal disclaimers and whatnot at the link.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but each of my posts going down the main page is progressively smaller and smaller. I am using tables, but I have my MTEntries stuff INSIDE each table, so it shouldn't be duplicating those. I may end of switching back to a purely CSS driven page after all. I am just not that good at coding it. It worked fine on my test site, but here it is starting to look extremely weird.

I guess I need to break out that CSS book and take a look at it or something. I have a couple of computers to look at today and some posting to do, as well as the fact that I want to go outside (imagine!) and work in the garden but maybe this evening I can fix it up. It only took me a couple of hours of fiddling to actually get the comment posting fixed, so maybe it won't take too long to get this right as well.

Even though I am very much into gadgets and home theater, our setup is very "retro". My cabinet is this huge hulking behemoth of wood with doors on the top with the TV and a few IR inputs behind it, and doors on the bottom that hide my HTPC when it is hooked up, my receiver, DVD player, VCR, wireless router, and a few others. I really like the setup.

Along with the theater cabinet all of the furniture is heavy wood, big wooden tables, and lamps to match. The only thing that I really want in here that would complete the setup is a grandfather clock. Clocks are just one of those things that no matter how much technology changes and gets better (and in some cases worse) they pretty much stay the same. They do their job. Might as well have something attractive as well as functional.

What do you know, I am #7 on the search for "Custom Hookahs". Perhaps I should go into business for myself. Yesterday WAS 4/20 after all. That's kind of what I figure all of the hullabaloo at the schools was about. Some stoner decided that he had enough and needed a bit of smoke so started some rumors to get school shut down for the day. It worked too, at least until the catch him.

Here's what the new site design is going to look like once I finally get all of the bugs out. Let me know what you think.

I am getting a new template ready for the site as I have been fairly unhappy with my design for quite some time. It is not 100% complete as it is from a normal web page template, and I am having to code it to work with my blog platform, but I would like some feedback if possible. It is currently located at http://www.shadowscope.com/gothtest/testindex.php. Don't leave any comments there as I have only gotten started on the main index page thus far, but any feedback would be appreciated.

I've been having problems with my cell phone for about a year now. I'm on my third battery since I got the LG and it is starting to get real irritating. The last one would go dead after a couple of hours, but this one just shuts my phone off at inopportune moments and I don't realize it until several hours have gone by. Rather than dealing with Verizon this time I may just get a couple of extra batteries from the place where I got my last cordless phone battery. They have replacements cheaper than I can get them at Verizon, at least the last time I checked. I only have a few more months and I can get a new one anyway.

This Post is Sponsored by Data Deposit Box.

I'm glad that I came across this because it's been a couple of months since I made a good backup of my computer. That's one of those no-brainers that a lot of people just don't seem to do as often as they should. Sometimes the things that are easiest to do are the hardest to do and backing up data is one if those things.

If you've ever had a system crash where you lost all of your data, you know what I am talking about. It sucks to lose everything that you've worked on for months. I'm sure for some people it would even be longer than that. There are several different choices when making backups. Now that I am running Vista it is even easier, but most people still run Windows XP or something older, or perhaps a Mac. Backing up data is not that easy, and restoring it is even harder. I don't trust anyone else to do it for me either. There are places, "Geek Squads", that you can take your computer and have them back up your entire computer, but they won't give any kind of guarantee that all of it is saved or even accessible for that matter.

Backing up over the Internet is one more option. Online backup is easier than you think. Usually you can get set up withing five minutes or so and it's pretty cheap. Generally speaking it's pretty cheap as well, about $2 per gig of data. That's particularly nice if all you are backing up is documents and really important stuff. That's generally what I do. The operating system and everything else I can restore from DVD and then my docs are kept in a separate backup as well.

I am getting ready to make a backup of my web site as well. I have most of my blog entries archived, at least up through the 1st of April but the mp3s and pictures are not. I should be able to save most of the site offline so that if there is a system crash I can get up and running again pretty easily.

If you don't make regular backups, you need to ask yourself what would happen if your hard drive were to die right now. What would you lose?

I had this all typed up and ready to post but never did, so here it is.

That was weird. My site's been down for I don't know how long. I guess that was my Friday the 13th surprise. It did give me some time to take care of a few other items though. I have one more girl to do taxes for once I finish this. I guess she decided at the last minute it was time to file. Whatever.

One of the three district manager with my company out here is leaving. Monday is apparently going to be his last day. I just found out about it today. Since I've turned down the last few promotions that they offered me I don't know if they are even going to talk to me about this one, but if they do I think I am going to take it. It's three stores that are local to me. I think the farthest one is about nine miles from my house. It means more hours but it's also about a $20-30k increase in pay. That would help out nicely right now. I don't think they'll make any changes for a couple of weeks anyway as my boss goes on vacation Tuesday. They aren't going to leave a store without a manager and a district.

If the site happens to go down again, it is on the same server as my other two sites, so I generally post on a myspace blog. I think I have maybe posted about 15 times there in a year. It's nothing particularly spectacular but I set it up initially to keep an eye on my son. If you have a myspace account stop by and say hello. My main space is http://www.myspace.com/shadowscope.

I received a call earlier this afternoon from my Internet provider. Automated of course, but cool nonetheless. Charter will be doing maintenance in my area from midnight until six AM tomorrow morning, so if you email or post a comment it is very unlikely that I will respond until tomorrow evening particularly since Thursday is my meeting day and I might not get home until late.

I received my proofs from Wallhogs via email today. They look like they are going to kick ass. I think once I have approved them (I have already) they print them out and it takes about three days or so. I guess if I went over there and looked I could tell for sure, but that sounds right.

The original post I did is down the page a bit, here they are with the background removed. I have done that stuff in Photoshop before and it is extremely tedious to get right. This is going to be pretty cool.

I think I am going to stick them on the bathroom wall so I can think about them while I am taking a dump.

Technorati : Wallhogs

I found this somewhat interesting. I occasionally track my traffic (although not as much as those guys at iTalktoomuch think) and found this stuff out tonight.

I am #1 in searches for the blogger's choice Awards right now and #3 for Youtube Porn. I am also #14 on Yahoo for Watch Deleted Youtube Videos. So what's it all mean? Not a damn thing. I just found it interesting. Unless you are into SEO and rankings and all of that junk none of it means anything. It does to me obviously because I have been making a little bit of money off of the site, so getting hits from Google on some of my older posts is a good deal. I have also found that occasionally I get a new reader or two as well, which is particularly nice.

Technorati : Blogger's Choice Awards, Google, Pornotube, SEO

I am so tired of having slow loading times because of other people's crappy servers that I will spend some time this afternoon copying any images that are supposed to be hosted remotely to my server and host them here, with just the link to the other site, and then remove some of the items that are holding things up at load time. Some of the code I have to keep unfortunately, but it still should help out.

I can keep several of the items such as my blogroll on a separate page and then have them load via a lightbox so that you never leave the page. That should help things out a little bit anyway.

I put together several of the posts for today first thing this morning, and scheduled posting seems to work OK except for the fact that when Movabletype publishes the post it doesn't bother re-indexing the site and so the post doesn't appear until I have done another one or someone comments on a previous post. Very weird.

Updated - OK, I just needed to add a cron job in my cpanel to run the periodic tasks. I've never done that so it was sort of weird.

Since the actions that I took concerning trackback and comment spam didn't work, I am using a plugin called Spam Firewall to curb the spam load here. Actually the comments and captchas worked just fine, but I got too many complaints from people.

Renaming the trackback script worked for all of about 24 hours before it was back to business as usual.

I don't know how well Spam Firewall is going to work with trackbacks and the open trackback alliance, so if there are any problems, please let me know. In theory it should be just fine, I know it does what it is supposed to but I am concerned that it will block legitimate trackbacks as well.

I am also using a plugin called Blog Janitor (how fitting after the last post) to close all comments and track-backs on entries that are over 45 days old. I still get the occasional comment on the Natalee Holloway posts, but that is just not worth the hassle.