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A Friendly Message From Central Services
I broke some of my rss feeds with an unfortunate .htaccess file edit. Everything is fixed now, but you might want to check if you missed some of my posts, especially if you are a Livejournal subscriber.
“This is your receipt, and this is my receipt for your receipt”.
Web 1.0
I am not suffering from writer’s block. Oh no. I have many, many, many things I want to write about. There’s a couple of dozen back-burnered posts in my Writely account, many with photos already uploaded. It’s just that I’ve been busy…
I was chatting with Joe Grossberg recently, an he said that my excuses are so Web 1.0. What do I have to say to that?
In other news: the steady supply of links, which it seems to mostly be an aftershock of the BoingBoing link to my Starbucks Mermaid post, has lifted deadprogrammer.com pagerank to 6. I wonder if all of my hotlinked and uncredited images going to myspace.com count towards pagerank.
I’d like to thank you all for your past and future links, as well as submissions to digg, BoingBoing and other fine MLP sites.
I am probably going to disclose my secret (well, not so _particularly_ secret) identity on “about me” page. I am still hesitant, but I’ll probably do it anyway.
Also, my posting frequency will go up. I’ll try for at least 4 posts a week, maybe as many as 7. I’m workin’ on it.
See No Evil
I don’t care what Sergey says; I think that google.cn is evil. Writing about this in a blog that runs Adsense advertising would be more hypocritical than I usually am, so I removed all Adsense advertising and replaced it with my own ad.
There. Look at me. I am claiming a slightly higher moral ground.
I guess I’ll continue using google.com and gmail.com since I am nothing but a drain on their resources anyway. I can’t recall when I clicked on an ad there last time when and it wasn’t a “pity click.” My guess is that they are making their bajillions of dollars from clickbots .
State of the Blog
As you might know, a PageRank reshuffle is happening, or already happened. The good news is that thanks to all the links from you, deadprogrammer.com ganed an increase of a point, from 5 to 6! Even my linkblog, which had no PageRank at all got a 5.
According to Feedburner statistics, my readership hovers at just under a thousand.
Bloglines seems to be the aggregator of choice for my readers.
The Copy and Paste Culture
Lifehacker is writing (I mean copying and pasting, or “remixing”) about eating organic food on the cheap: “Raise your own meat, if you can.”
I don’t see how that’s going to help.
Do You Remember the Fear?
By force of an old habit I read Livejournal blogs through the website instead of Bloglines. I immediately regretted that because once again almost made a mistake of writing about a private post. Livejournal marks private posts with little locks, and I once very stupidly discussed some non-public information about an LJ user without realizing that it was from a locked or “friends only” post. Eeek, I cringe just remembering that. Anyway, this time I got permission to post about this (even though I will try to keep away from “locked” posts as much as possible). Upc747 was very kind to let me use this photo of an old newspaper that he took:
The Soviets are gone, but Iraq and Iran are still troublesome. And you know what? I’ll take the War on Terrorism over the Cold War. It seems like all the Generation X-ers and Boomers suddenly forgot the terrible, paralyzing fear of the global atomic war. Not the fear of North Korean or terrorist nukes or conventional attacks, but the dark gut feeling, the stomach churning certainty that the Soviet Union and the United States will annihilate the entire world in one final showdown.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at seven minutes to midnight in 2002. It seems that in the years when the clock was at 9, 10, 14 and even off-the-scale 17 minutes everyone seems to have forgotten all about the fear of World War III. Do the people that say that the world at the turn of the new century is crazier than before remember the ominous 1984, when the clock stood at three minutes to midnight? The time when few people thought that the arms race will result in the collapse of the Soviet Union, but almost everyone was certain that the end of human race in nuclear inferno was almost assured?
Three Years of Poor Grammar, Bad Spelling and Procrastination
I started this blog in May of 2002. I got my first digital camera around this time as well. So, it’s time to look back at my 3 years of blogging and 3 years of digital photography.
My mostly backed up (is yours?) photo folder holds about 27 gigabytes of photos, which translates into about 16,500 files (I use Picasa to organize them and a usb drive for backup). That’s about 458 rolls of 36 exposure film. At 5-6 bucks a pop for film and then a couple of bucks for processing that’s a lot of mon-ay. Of course I print a lot less and mostly show pictures in the blog, but still this is a huge economy.
In three years of blogging I wrote 824 posts containing 117,274 words. Considering an average of half an hour per post that’s about 50 eight hour work days. That is a lot of time, people. Considering that I do not write posts at work, this is a very sizable chunk of my free time. I could have written a book in this amount of time.
According to Feedburner my current readership is puny. 47 (a special number, isn’t it?) livejournal readers, 8 from Bloglines, and a couple of others, some of which are probably bots. When I hosted my site in Livejournal it seemed like I had about 250 readers, but as it turned out most of those were just “you added me, I added you” kind of deals. Even then I was far behind Ripley the Cat (and I find it very hard to get over this fact).
So, sob story about the number of readers aside, now I am a member of the elite group of bloggers who have been doing this for 3 years. How elite, you might ask? Let’s ask Mighty Google. Here is a graph of how many results come back to “x year(s) of blogging”, where x is “one”, “two”, “three”, etc. This, of course has just a slight correlation with the number of years people have been blogging, as “hundred years of blogging” brings back three results.
My website that hit the Information Superhighway back in 1996. It helped my future wife find me and gave me some rudimentary skills for my first web job. The blog hasn’t been so useful or popular, it seems. Maybe back then there was less good content on the web, and now there are shite waterfalls of it. Or maybe I need do something to market it. Like asking my staunch 47 + 8 + x readers to link to their favorite post or two (all of the old posts are searchable from http://www.deadprogrammer.com). Right?
Deadprogrammer.com is Moving
Once again instead of writing something good for you to read I am changing my blogging software. Movable Type was a little better than Livejournal, but looks like WordPress is the right tool for me.
It will take some time for me to fix the feeds, lins, etc, so bear with me for a while.
Tring Flickr Bloggng Featurs
What is it with the naming of websites these days? The harder to type it in – the better? http://del.icio.us and http://flickr.com are just as hard to remember as dastardly regedt32.exe
The photo is Hotel Pierre at night from Central Park. Everybody’s favorite billionaire tyrant recently bought himself a humble apartment there.
ruperts_house
Originally uploaded by deadprogrammer