Posts from — January 2004

{{venting ensues}}

a bunch of stuff about how exhausting this work week was that I deleted

{{venting ends}}

Wow! I feel better now!

Somehow I made it into the second round of the Blogmadness tournament. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get beat in Round 2 though, because (last time) I only got about 20 votes. So, I really, really need your votes. I could try to be a good sport and tell you to (at least) consider voting for my competition, but that's really not my style. Vote for me! Please?!

UPDATE: Voting is ongoing through the weekend. You can only vote once. I would really like to win, but I may not - and that's OK, too. If you have a moment and haven't voted…. Thanks, y'all!

Congratulations to Camille & Josh on their new house! I'm so happy for you guys. New house, baby on the way, a terabyte of data storage…. I'm telling ya! Y'all must have got in the luck line twice!

Congrats! Looking forward to some really great times ahead!

Blogmadness is up and running. The brackets are all set and it's time to vote. As I've mentioned previously, I'm in the tournament with this entry (I'll take 'Torment My Wife' for $1,000, Alex) and I'm up against "Wrapped Up Like A Personality Test" in the SPORTS bracket. (All the brackets have names - they mean nothing - stay with me here, people!)

So, go vote for the better entry. Or, I'll just save you the time of reading them and say vote for me. I've read both the entries and, most humbly, mine is indeed better.

To find my entry, I'm in the #5 versus #13 bracket here in the Sports listings. If you're voting for me, I appreciate it. If you want to vote for the other guy, click here. (Just kidding!)

Adam @ Frontburner posted that the Dallas Stars have spiced up Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part II" and combined it with the Howard Dean campaign scream. Absolute pure genuis.

If anyone has this on mp3, shoot me a link.

• No good idea goes uncopied - MSN Toolbar
• Ping Yahoo for Blog Updates
• Kottke is having MLK hangover or he's stopped updating status alltogether
• Gesture computing a la Minority Report
• Selling ads in RSS feeds
• Tivo gets a Strangeberry

I've mentioned this to a few people in passing, but I'm going to try to jump in full bore shortly.

Since I wasn't the genius that came up with Dogster (where all the cool dogs have their webpages, of course!), I'm starting a new blog specifically geared at my profession - resort & hotel sales. It's in development stages right now, but I do have a domain (which kinda makes it seem more like something I'm "doing" versus something I "plan to do"). While it won't be that interesting to most folks (heck - it probably won't be that interesting to me!), the aim is for blog to be step one in writing a book on the subject.

Since there aren't really a lot books/websites specifically geared towards resort sales, I'm hopeful that someone will recognize the hole in the market and sweep up my book/blog with a big advance! It's probably a pipe dream, but we'll see. It's just as likely that you'll see another small announcement in a few months saying this idea sucks and I've abandonded it to become a famous shrimp boat captain!

That is all - resume normal life.

With the new corporate headquarters of Brach's Candy opening in Richardson this week, I'm saving all my nickels in hopes that they will have a sample area right there in the lobby.

Then I started thinking that, despite all the nickels I've saved for this occassion, I can probably count on one hand the times I've actually remembered to put a nickel in for the samples I've stolen tried. How do they ever make money on this scheme?!

All I know is any company that can make a candy orange slice and have the guts to make it look like legitimate fruit is OK by me. With 100% props and respect to Cindy, I think I'm going to download some wallpaper in honor of the new, local candy geniuses.

Today is my grandma's birthday. I have to go work at the Dallas Bridal Show for a little while today (manning the booth), so I won't get to call her until later tonight. Hope she'll be home and not out partying too late!

Y'all wish my grandma a happy birthday if you see her!

Happy Birthday, JoJo!

Today is turning into a "pretty nice little Saturday".

Merrin went to work this morning, so I slept in until about 9:00a. Then I got the new Mountain West Conference Football blog setup at Fanblogs. That left me about seven minutes to shower before meeting Merrin for lunch. It's cool to pick your wife up from work for lunch. I got a haircut and later I think we're going to hit Lowe's for some home improvement.

What else is new? Robyn get's a mention in Self Magazine's February 2004 issue for the BoobieThon. Awesome! … There's a moving fan in front of the Coopers future home, so that is indeed a great sign that Josh & Camille & Mini will be here soon! … The Outkast/Charlie Brown "Hey, Ya!" is still cracking me up. … Fanblogs has a new Mountain West Conference Football blog, so fans of Colorado State, Utah, Air Force, et al can rejoice. … Dasme has me thinking that maybe Mars isn't the Red Planet after all. … Virginia is helping to expose the dirty liberal secret that taxing the rich doesn't always work out. (Duh.) … Despite the fact that she could log in and post from anywhere in the world, I still have no idea if PT has hit the big one or not. … Pete is soliciting opinions for his new haircut. I'm personally thinking he should go with a 70's era Don Henly afro or perhaps he should bend it like Beckham, or something. Or, maybe a really short clip like this dude. … LoneAggie and the wife are now homeowners. Congrats.

That's about all I know for know. Have a great Saturday, y'all!

This is exactly the kind of kick-ass, awesome uber-tool that I just drool over. The Philips desXcape is a wireless monitor. In a nutshell, it's a flat screen, tablet display without all the drives & overhead that come with a tablet pc or laptop. Imagine being able to pick up your monitor from the dock and carry it with you to the couch. It has a stand, also, so you can use it in the kitchen or wherever.

The really cool thing about this is that you don't have to reinstall software on a laptop or tablet. It's just your regular desktop PC instantly converted into a 5 pound portable. (photos) Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!

While it's new to me, apparently these suckers came out in 2003 (PC Mag Review). Amazon has 'em for $1200. Froogle says they're selling for $800-1300, which is just a little too high. Maybe by mid year that price could get down to $500 or so…I'd get one in a heartbeat. Where is that Santa when I need him?!

Burningbird has given trackbacks the boot for the time being because of the rising tide of trackback sp@m. I'm starting to read about tb sp@m at more and more sites, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time before the problem becomes exceptionally widespread.

The thing with trackback sp@m that makes it more dangerous (in my opinion) is the same thing that makes it great — the sheer number of tools that support trackback. With comment sp@m, the majority of the affected sites were run on MovableType. With trackback, it's basically the same format across all blog tools. Scary.

Burningbird makes a pretty good plea to the "blog gods", and I would certainly echo these sentiments:

Stop screwing around with Atom and RSS. Stop playing with OPML. Let the politicians kiss the babies by themselves. Forgo the next conference, you've been to enough of them, and stop talking about social software and lets do something about it.

Help us fix these damn holes, once and for all. I will plunk down what few bucks I can spare, or just point me to a module, and tell me what you want me to code and I'll code it. But one solution, only, that will work for everyone.

Why do spammers target blogs? The presumption is that blogs are getting great search engine placement. I can understand that (in general) as most are timely, updated frequently, and offer a lot of content on some pretty specific topics.

My question is this, why wouldn't a spammer just start their own blog? Then they could point to whatever miracle organ enhancing drug they wanted to straight from their site. Duh.

When I first thought about moving my blog to a new host, I thought it would be a piece of cake. Getting the domain moved, server working, and MovableType installed were a cinch because I've dealt with all that before, but I did run into one hurdle that I didn't expect: Redirecting MovableType archives.
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If you're reading this, then the site move should be complete. (At least the first half of the move, anyway.)

Leave some comments so that I'll know you're seeing this in your neck of the woods and –just in case I didn't squish all the bugs– at least we'll know that the comments are working.

I know, I know - my server load times are attrocious. As I told Josh & Camille yesterday, it might be faster if you called me on the phone and I hand delivered a copy of the page to your doorstep.

Well, I'm working on it. As soon as my registrar transfers our finished, we'll be up and moving to new servers. The blogs are already working in the new location, so I hope to have zero downtime in the transition. Sorry for the slow speed - thanks for the patience.