Announcements
General announcements and administrivia, grand or otherwise
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Friday, September 08, 2006
Call for Topical Entries for the 9/11 Edition of CotC
Joshua Sharf, host of the upcoming 9/11 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, is particularly interested in entries connected to the obvious anniversary, from the CotC‘s business and economics perspective.
If you are entering anyway, you might keep that in mind. If you weren’t planning to enter but have something that fits, send it on in. Even if you don’t blog yourself, but see an entry that lends itself to inclusion, go ahead and submit it.
Donate to Dean or Buy His Book
Dean Esmay is unemployed and as a result is having only his second pledge drive in all his years of superlative blogging. You might consider helping out.
Alternatively or additionally, you might consider purchasing a copy of the newly released novel by Dean Esmay and John Eddy, Methuselah’s Daughter, which I am assured remains available as a signed, limited edition hardcover first printing. I was lucky enough to be one of those getting advance installments to review as they were completed. It’s been edited and modified since, but I liked what I saw and look forward to reading it all in one not-on-screen pass. If the special hardcover is too costly for you, despite its special nature, the paperback should be available Real Soon Now through typical bookseller channels.
The blog of Methuselah’s Daughter.
An excerpt
Another excerpt
Testemonials
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Busy
This will be a busy weekend, attempting to migrate a network while nobody is using it. You may not see much of me here. Then again, if I am in hurry up and wait mode, or sitting at the computer with a meal, or need to vent, it’s possible I might post, generally busy or not. Just don’t expect it. Not that anyone is reading anyway, on a holiday weekend.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Pictures!
There are mass quantities of pictures of the family, including Sadie, Valerie, and most of their 16 first cousins and my three grandnieces, over on my brother’s front page currently, specifically in this post, this post, and this post. They are significant as these were two “must bring camera” events for which I idiotically forgot it entirely.
I’d hesitated to point them out earlier, as the original two posts had “straight of the camera” files sizes of give or take a megabyte for each picture, so it was noticably slow even with FiOS. They and all the new ones have been shrunk to more standard web page file sizes, so page load shouldn’t even be that horrible with dialup.
Go see!
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Carnival of the Vanities
The 203rd Carnival of the Vanities is up at Humantide.
Carnival of the Vanities has a new home page, at FirstCarnival.com.
They need hosts! It’s a good bit of work, depending how fancy you get with it, but it can be cool to read all the entries, including stuff you’d never have sought out. And while some miss the concept of quality being what you have vanity about, most of it’s pretty good. Anyway, see Carnival of the Vanities home for details, and e-mail host -at- firstcarnival -dot- com to sign up.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Weirdness?
If you notice anything not-quite-right with the site, could you drop me a comment? I updated to the newest release of EE last night, and as far as I can tell, it all works...but you never really know.
Thanks.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
A Special Day
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
CotV
It will be up eventually today. I’ve read most of the submissions, but when I went to start compiling the post last night, a severe thunderstorm hit right overhead. So I shut down the computer for the night and went to read and go to sleep instead.
So I’ll work on it during today between, you know, real work, and try to have it up by tonight.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
It’s still freaking hot. Dammit.
The cool front that was supposed to have come through by now is nowhere to be seen. Thank God we’re stranded someplace air conditioned! Seriously, according to the Weather Underground page, the heat index is 107 degrees at the moment. That would be 92 with a dewpoint of 78, which is just totally absurd.
I was hoping the front would be on time and we could go home soon, but I’ll just be happy that we’ve got someplace cool to hide, instead.
Speaking of which, John Cole completely cracked me up with this:
Invariably, by posting it is hot as hell, two things are going to happen. The first is that a long and tortured (and usually wildly inaccurate) debate about global warming will start, and the second is that, inevitably, someone from AZ/NM/a place in the desert surrounded by sand, will state “You think it is hot there, you should try it here!�
The comments are hysterical.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Acidman Memorial Carnival of the Vanities Will Be Here Next Week
(Updated to make this post stay at the top. New entries will be below this one for the time being.)
I will be hosting the next edition of Carnival of the Vanities here.
Two things distinguish it.
First, this is carnival number 200! Not exactly the 4th anniversary edition, but a significant round number that’s getting up there and shouting out that we’re close.
More importantly, this has been planned as the Acidman memorial edition of Carnival of the Vanities, which he once hosted in its early days.
What does this mean?
You may enter any superlative recent post you want to show off, as usual. However, you may additionally or alternatively enter a post, recent or not, in memory or celebration of the late Rob Smith of Gut Rumbles.
Such posts might be about Rob himself, even just pictures. Your memories of him. How he pissed you off. How he helped you out.
They might be on topics Rob often covered or would appreciate. Boiled peanuts, grits, and other southern specialties. Red toenails. John Prine and other music. Guitars and performing. Jawja. Life in hillbilly country and the south in general. Bionic dicks. Family. Humor he’d appreciate. Politicians and their antics he’d disdain. Evil exes and the games they play. Guns. You get the idea. You might write something inspired specifically by one of his posts, or following up from it, or responding to it.
If you can’t write something, or have nothing you’ve written in the past that fits the bill, I’ll even take selected “best of Acidman” posts that people might care to submit from his own collection.
How to enter? Entries get e-mailed to cotvmail -at- gmail.com, and should include blog name, blog URL, post title, post URL, entrant name, author name if different, and a brief description of the post. Please specifically note if your entry is an Acidman-related one, if it’s not glaringly obvious.
Entries are due by 6:00 PM eastern time on Tuesday, July 18, and I will attempt to publish the CotV post before Wednesday, July 19 is out.
Outage
Anyone who might normally e-mail me at an elhide.com address, you might want to try something like jay at this domain here instead, or the address I use at the business domain. Elhide.com has been down for at least 3 and a quarter hours, which apart from DoS attacks or such that have taken out all or most of Hosting Matters is I think unprecedented. I use that heavily for e-mail because it’s traditionally my most reliable domain.
Stay tuned for an update when it’s back.
Update mere moments later:
It’s as if posting about the outage was the signal for it to be fixed. Probably a server problem that took time to fix, or to swap and restore from backups. Anyway, it seems to work now. Yay!
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Rest In Peace Jim Baen
Via Glenn, the news that Jim Baen has died following his recent stroke.
It’s a sad day in the world of science fiction.
David Drake remembers his friend.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Music By Rob
Never got a chance to hear Rob “Acidman” Smith perform? Courtesy of Catfish, we don’t have to miss out. This is just one mirror copy, using spare bandwidth for as long as it holds up. Please right-click and save to your own computer before playing My Door Is Always Open.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Wishing Savannah Were Closer
Arrangements have been posted for Rob’s memorial service over on Gut Rumbles. Aw heck, I’ll quote the whole thing here; make spreading the word that much more complete:
Rob’s Memorial Service
Rob’s brother Dave has posted in the comments about the arrangements for Rob’s Memorial Service:
This is Dave, Rob’s brother. I just wanted to let somebody know that the arrangements have finally been made. If somebody has the ability to get the word out, please go for it.There will be a memorial service for Rob at 4 pm on Thursday, June 29th, at Fox & Weeks on Hodgson Memorial Drive in Savannah, followed by an after-service celebration (can’t be a wake if it’s after the Memorial) at our parents’ house. Pickers will bring instruments, everybody else bring voices and any Rob stories you can tell for everybody else to hear while they lift a glass to him. I’m going to miss my big brother, but I’ll do my best to send him off in style! There’ll be directions to the place at the service, or you can email me: dsmith [at] brannenlaw [dot] com. Thanks, everybody!
Arrangements are also being worked out for a way for those of us on the web to participate in the memorial for Rob as well. Details will be available in the next 12 hours or so.
There is also an addendum:
Dave asked that I mention Rob will be cremated as per his wishes, and that in lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to the American Diabetes Association.
There is an obituary that contains specifics on the last bit:
Remembrances may be made to the American Diabetes Association, 5105 Paulsen St., Suite C-236, Savannah, GA 31405
There is a guestbook you may sign or view as desired.
If we were close enough, you can be sure we’d go out of our way to try to attend.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Rest In Peace My Friend
Today we shed tears for a friend and stranger. An odd thing, losing people online, yet no less poignant. Sometimes we know them better than family, and of course we choose to know them.
Rob Smith, Acidman, has died, leaving a gaping hole in the blogosphere and our hearts, and our wish one day to meet him in person unfulfilled.
It’s not entirely unexpected. It’s clear he’d been in rough shape. I’d fervently hoped for more time and much happiness to fill it. Alas, it was not to be, as it so often isn’t.
Rob was a major mover in getting my original blog noticed as well and quickly as it did, for which I will always be grateful. His writing could be, often as not was, brilliant. He dared to be abrasive, even if all that meant was honest. His heart of gold shone through any amount of acid talk. I will forever have the imagined memory of visiting him with our kids, of him playing with them, of them being utterly taken with him. I fully expect that’s how it would have been, because that’s Rob.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Birthdays
I finally got around to creating a category specifically for birthdays, which I’d previously placed under announcements. I even went through the tedium of changing the catgory on all previous entries, since I don’t have more useful or remunerative things to do. Nope, none.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Hire Sean Hackbarth
We have thought for a long time that Sean Hackbarth needed to get out of his job in retail and into a proverbial real job.
He has finally reached that point of departure himself. There is even a separate blog to keep track of his progress.
His blog is unusually old, having started in 1999. I’ve read it since around the time I started blogging in 2003, and would love to see him find an excellent, meaningful job, or set of jobs that meld well together, amount to one full job, and keep things all the more interesting. It’s increasingly common not simply to have “a job.”
So spread the word. Let’s get Sean Hackbarth a future!
Monday, June 12, 2006
Dear Californians for Schwarzenegger ‘06
You are spammers.
Yes, spammers.
Do you really think a person in Massachusetts needs four e-mails in a day with statements from you regarding the race for governor in California?
We did not ask to be on the list. Yes, each of us in the same house get the same e-mails. You’d thinking it might have something to do with our increasingly distant connection to the Bear Flag League, except a blog group such as that would know better than to share out member e-mail addresses unbidden.
The e-mails don’t offer a means of removal from the list.
They aren’t even from the same address each time, but instead from varying addresses such as advisory@joinarnold.com, cfs06pressoffice@joinarnold.com, TypicalPhil@joinarnold.com, and FactsOnPhil@joinarnold.com, plus not doubt other that were on previous e-mails I deleted out of hand rather than razzing.
Why not name the group accurately: Spammers for Schwarzenegger.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Weekend Pundit Backup Site (Updated: They’re Back)
The original Weekend Pundit is now being used as Weekend Pundit Backup Site, so look for posts over there as long as Blogmosis is down.
Update:
Weekend Pundit is back! As is Blogmosis more generally. Woohoo!
Hackbarth, Sean Hackbarth
Sean has something he wants everyone linking him to know.
So be sure to comply. It’s not like he went and adopted an unbloggable symbol by which to be known and linked.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Weekend Pundit Outage
It seems that the entire Blogmosis family is down, including our friends at Weekend Pundit.
Chan asked me to let the world know.
Depending what happens, there may be a temporary revival of the original, February 2003 (what a good time to start a blog) so four years ago Weekend Pundit BlogSplat site, or a new blog, but the latter will take time. If so, likely at weekendpundit.net weekendpundit.org, since an imposter snagged the .com version. Perhaps there are so many names in the world and it’s hard to get good ones - you start ending up with crazy combinations like Accidental Verbosity, or weird invented words like Jotzel that aren’t catchy at all - but still, you would think people would want to fire up Google or whatever and try to be unique.
So hang in there. Weekend Pundit is down, but not out.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Light Blogging R Us
Please pardon the lightness of blogging today, despite there being so much to say, and so many pictures I could post. Sadie has been on a roll lately, and appears to be ready to more or less self-teach the potty.
We’re cleaning and organizing the apartment in preparation for the Verizon crew to come install FiOS tomorrow. I planned tomorrow off, but today it worked out I was able to stay home for this and help people remotely. Once I e-mailed the office manager instructions how to access documents on the AS/400, between that and memory of back when she used to use the system, she ran with it and spent most of the morning looking for what they needed. It would have been interesting had she found it, because the thing has a 4 1/4” floppy drive, and I have floppies and a drive I could throw into a PC in my office, but I have no idea whether the AS/400 would use the same format and 1.2 MB capacity, or whether the format would be different or it would want old single-sided floppies. Well, then again, I have some of those too. See what happens when you don’t throw things away?
Maybe later tonight when we have done what we can do for the day, I’ll be back. Tomorrow, who knows. Depends when they arrive and what we continue trying to do about cleaning and organizing. I’ve emptied boxes here in my office that were never unpacked, repacked some stuff, and organized the closet where we are going to put unpacked or not regularly used items.
And here goes, back to it… We also still need to run to the store, or I do anyway.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Happy Anniversary
To my nephew Ryun and his lovely wife Sharon.
Friday, May 12, 2006
The Carnival
The 190th Carnival of the Vanities, the original blog carnival, is at the skwib this week.
The 191st Carnival will be right here next week, hosted by us. See Carnival of the Vanities home page for more info.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Online Integrity
Via Glenn Reynolds, this Online Integrity Statement of Principles makes sense to me, and as far as I can recall is something I have always inherently followed.
I see no reason not to be counted in. Especially as one of those who sought pseudonymity initially, and still is largely identified that way.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
The Hunting of the Eggs
We’re leaving momentarily to attend the annual Easter egg hunt at my grandmother’s house. Yay for good weather! This should be a lot of fun for Sadie, and people can stop complaining about never seeing Valerie. Indeed, it’ll be nice having a big crew of people - I am told they are expecting 26 of us - to keep Valerie entertained. This can be a bit of work, as she is a people person to a degree Sadie never dreamed of being.
I expect there will be pictures. If I remember the camera.
I made up for some of my lack of writing here by responding to an invitation to write something for another blog. It was great fun! I don’t think there are many people I avoided offending. More on that later when it is up.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
I Preferred When DOS Only Meant “Disk Operating System”
Why yes, we’re here. Yesterday morning? Not so much.
There was a Saudi-based denial of service (DoS) attack against Hosting Matters, where we are hosted, yesterday, lasting a few hours. I’ve seen mention that it came back for a while after 9:00 last night, but I didn’t observe that and have no idea if it’s true. There was rumor that the attack was aimed at a specific blog, then point blank denial from HM that the particular bellicose blog was the target. Be that as it may, if you go around goading a bully to punch you in the stomach as hard as he can, and the bully punches you so hard you lose your lunch all over your neighbors, don’t be surprised if your neighbors aren’t unhappy with the bully exclusively.
Anyway, this made things interesting, as I was working from home and couldn’t get work e-mails. This is going to lead to changes in how I have things configured. Any internal e-mail to me forwards to an elhide.com account I can get anywhere. That’s on HM too. Along with the business site and thecotc.com, which is supplied hosting directly by the business site, a couple of client web sites, and one client’s e-mail. My new business sites I’ve been too busy to pursue are hosted in elhide.com’s space, which meant they’d have been down too had that mattered. For me the e-mail was the main thing. The big client’s MX record points inside the building, so even as their web site was down, e-mail worked fine.
Apart from any notions I may have of diversifying my hosting, and apart from having made sure people have Gmail and Verizon e-mail addresses as backup, I think I will switch it so internal client e-mail (to clarify, my office is on their network and I am directly on their internal e-mail, which is great when I am at the office) forwards to Gmail instead. In turn, the Gmail forwards to my primary account, so it would look the same. But if elhide.com were down, I could go to Gmail and have complete continuity.
I almost went and blogged at my original backup site yesterday: InstaJay. That was meant as an “if Hosting Matters is down” backup to my old blog, but after I set it up, HM got more reliable. I may setup something else as an AV backup, but you might bookmark the one I just mentioned so if I do post “we’re down, here’s what’s happening” someone will actually see it, even if I don’t create and publicize another backup site.
Michelle Malkin took it upon herself to be the reporter of record regarding the outage. She offered to list and link all the blogs that were affected, so I sent her ours as an experiment. I guess we don’t count.
My old cell phone also chose yesterday to act up, spontaneously rebooting itself, and being found to be off completely as it sat on the charger. That made me say “well, time for the cell upgrade project like NOW,” until I discovered the back cover was loose and letting the battery disconnect randomly. Doh. I had been thinking I’d try to get a mixed-use portable web and e-mail and phone device as part of updating the cell situation, but maybe it will make more sense just to get a family plan with two or three basic phones (me and Deb, and possibly one to leave at the office), then later do something about “e-mail anywhere” (and web if possible). We’ll see. Just because it’ll officially be a business expense doesn’t mean I don’t want to do the whole thing as reasonably in cost as possible.
Okay, enough digression. This was supposed to be just an obligatory “we were down and we’re back” post. Oh, and I meant to note that from my perspective we’re loading even slower than ever, as if things atill aren’t completely right in host land. Hope that goes away.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
No Comment
When I try to comment here I get “Unable to receive your comment at this time.”
Would anyone else care to test it for me? If it works I’ll see it, and if it doesn’t, you could drop me an e-mail to let me know…
Update:
Apparently the problem is a security feature that disallows the posting of a comment identical to an existing comment. Thus my attempts to comment “Me too” and “Same here” and “test” failed. Perhaps I’ll modify that setting…
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Pretty Cool
We’ve been linked by Melissa McNamara in her Blogophile column at CBS News.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Innovation Survey
Erin J. Easter writes:
I’m a student in the MBA program at Illinois State University, and as part of a research methodology class I am working on a project regarding innovation and the factors that affect personal and organizational innovation in the corporate environment.
We lost our corporate sponsorship for this survey, and we are currently trying to drum up respondents using blogs. Would you be willing to post a link to our project on your site? Our blog is located at http://innovationsurvey.blogspot.com, where any participants will find a brief description of our research and the link to enter our SurveyMonkey website. It takes about 10 minutes to complete.
If this survey would be relevant to you, or you have suitable readers who might be willing to participate, please send them along to help out Erin and her team. Innovation Survey is the blog, where the one post for now is the survey introduction.