Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Ok, I think I figured out the problem with the site. It wasn’t Blog City as I previously thought, but rather the Google Adsense ads I have on my pages. I’ve tried going to other sites that have them and things are seriously sluggish. I can’t even get to the Google Adsense site, so something’s definitely up. If anyone reading this has been having no issues with the ads on their site, let me know – maybe it’s an issue with my local network… So I’ve removed the ads for now and will try again later. I’m sure everyone’s really upset that they won’t get to see ads on the site for a while!

Update: well, it seems I can’t get to Google at all now. I wonder if this is a local problem or if Google is actually down. I don’t see anything on Yahoo or other news sites about this. Hmmm, is it just me? Surely this would be front-page news as Google has become an institution of sorts!

Update again: It looks like Google is back up, at least for the moment and for me.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

I decided to do a bit of site maintenance today for a change. I removed some dead links, added a subheading to the title at the top of the page, and mostly just updated the “About Me” page. In addition to a reworked bio, there’s also info about the blog itself, how it came to be, what I’m trying to do with it, and stuff like that.

On another note, Blog City, my blog host, has been having some technical issues today, so I apologize if you are trying to read this on the actual site and things are really slow or buggy. Hopefully they will get everything resolved soon.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

As I become more and more addicted to reading news from a collection of blogs and other sites, I have been trying to come up with ways to get more of this reading done faster.

Newsreaders have been a favorite tool for some. It’s a program that one downloads and installs on a computer and lets you subscribe to and read just the content of each entry of each feed without having to navigate to different addresses. This blog is actually a default syndicated blog for one such newsreader, called Project DU.

While such applications serve their purpose and do make things easier, I haven’t quite taken to them yet. This may be simply because I haven’t really played with many, and I might find them to be much more useful than the alternative I list below. But the main problem I see with these is that they are somewhat proprietary, meaning that I can’t just use them on any and all platforms I want. They are usually designed for the PC, or for Mac, or for a mobile device, but not all of them. Plus I don’t want to go around installing programs on a friend’s machine and I’m not supposed to install any programs on my work machine either. Finally, I have a Treo 600 Phone that theoretically could serve as a way to read some of these feeds, but the Treo newsreaders I’ve played with so far have left me wanting.

I want something that I can access from all the platforms I use, be they my home computer, work computer, phone, or a friend’s computer. With this in mind, it seems, the perfect solution is something along the lines of a web-based newsreader. My Yahoo! has a beta that incorporates RSS feeds, and it’s probably only a matter of time before Gmail supports them as well. But so far the site that has been most useful to me is Bloglines. The features make reading news very flexible. I can wade through the dozens or even hundreds of messages and check off the ones I want to come back and read later. Those will stay until I tell them to go. It remembers what I’ve read and what I haven’t. It just makes managing the reading a lot easier. And I just found out that it has a mobile version, woo hoo! Of course, the mobile version seems to be lacking some of the main feature I find the most useful! Hopefully, though, they will be added it soon.

I’m not stuck on Bloglines by any means, but currently it suits my needs the closest. I think in the future I may start downloading “podcasts.” Currently podcasts are primarily audio content that is normally listened to on the net via streaming audio – internet radio programs and such. But I see the potential of this idea combining with the popularity of newsfeeds and weblogs to compel bloggers and others to actually create audio versions of their content so that they can be listened to in addition to being read. This would tremendously increase the amount of feeds one could keep track of, especially for those who do a lot of driving and/or exercising, or other activities where reading simultaneously is an impossibility. There does seem to be so much development in this area that it will become easier and easier to find ways to manage and keep up to date with your favorite feeds almost anywhere.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

I’ve heard of the Slashdot effect. I’m not sure if it still exists, but I remember a coworker of mine mentioning this way back maybe 5 years ago. Apparently people who were mentioned on Slashdot.org with a link to their site often experienced the effect of tens or hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers clicking on that link and subsequently crashing their server!

Perhaps this isn’t quite the same, but after Joel from the always excellent and witty Gizmodo.com posted a link to my comparison of the Treo 600 with the Color Sidekick this morning, I’ve at latest count gotten over 1800 hits! Holy Cow! Before this I’d gotten less than 13,000 hits in the lifetime of this blog – over a year! So far, in probably less than 6 hours I’ve gotten the equivalent of what I would normally get in almost 2 months of blogging! I’ve looked at the logs and still so far most of the links are coming directly from Gizmodo, but it also looks like a few people are posting links to it elsewhere – like on their own blogs, which theoretically could accelerate things, at least for today, I’m sure over the next few days things will ramp down rather quickly, but it is interesting seeing how the traffic evolves and modulates over time…

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Today I come to work and for the heck of it try to check to see if I can access Blog City and wouldn’t you know it, I can get to it again, along with my exchange host. No one knows why I couldn’t get to it earlier, the network folks denied any responsibility and the base’s network people as well. If it went higher than that, according to one person I talked to, they wouldn’t have all of a sudden unblocked things. Oh well, at least now I can actually post stuff from here. I had written something up last week but then couldn’t post it, so I’ll post it today. I may just be able to post a lot this week since I’ve got a bit more material after over a week of not writing!

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Well, last week my access to my exchange host (read email) was cut. Today I came to work and found I couldn’t even get access to my blog! I work on an army base and they often clamp down on security stuff for no good reason. I talked to the network people in my organization who said they didn’t do it, they contacted the base’s network people who said they didn’t block anything. So I am thinking it is army wide or something! It just so happens that the server for my exchange host is in Germany and my blog server is in Scotland, so I am thinking that they just started blocking non-US-based machines. Ack! This cuts out a lot of sites. Really unfortunate. Hopefully I can get to the bottom of it soon, but for now, I’m stuck accessing email through my phone. I guess I should be happy I can access it at all.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Am I the last to know about everything? I just found out that Wil Wheaton, the infamous Wesley Crusher from Star Trek The Next Generation, has a blog! It’s actually a pretty good one. Or at least there’s some very honest info about his experience as an actor both on Star Trek, before, and later. It seems pretty honest, both about himself and about others. Somehow I always thought he was a lot younger than me but he’s only 3 years younger and has kids and stepkids. Apparently he was on some shows on TechTV recently, but since I haven’t had cable in over a year, I never knew. Hopefully with the move to the new house I can convince my wife to get it. He also just wrote an autobiographical book of short stories which has gotten some excellent reviews on Amazon.com. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Wow, I hadn’t realized how long it had been since my last entry. Things have been a bit busy on the personal front. We have been trying to cart off half our cluttered condo to a storage unit so that it looks like it’s not the tiny place it is. Then my sister decided to finally give birth to her first daughter, so we were up in NYC for four days helping out. While doing this, I learned that my brother in law actually has a blog of sorts, but it’s not really a blog. It’s really just a website where he posts random thoughts. There are some good rants about airline and theater security as well as the whole Janet Jackson debacle. I’m trying to convince him to actually make it into a blog which I think makes it a lot easier to post on a more regular basis (although my current lag does not give a good argument for this!). Anyway, check his site out – http://www.10025.com/.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Yes, I am still alive! I apologize for the long delay in posts! Many good excuses have I to explain my absence (in addition to the simple truths of laziness and mood). Here’s the deal.

First off, I had a fender bender that actually totalled my car, so this threw me for a bit of a loop. I finally bought a friend’s car and dealt with all the registration stuff, so that part of my excuse is now through.

Secondly, me and my wife started looking at houses a couple of weeks ago. We have been planning on looking for a while as our 750 square foot one-bedroom Condo in DC is getting mighty cramped! This search, both online and in person, has taken a considerable amount of time and energy. However, a bid that we put down on a house in Vienna, VA a couple of days ago was accepted and loans and such are just getting finalized. I would like to say that this excuse is now null and void as well, but we now have the task of fixing a few minor issues with the new place, replacing a couple of appliances, and then starting to get our current place ready to go on the market, so I’m afraid we still have our work cut out for us. Moreover, although I’m very excited, there’s a certain sense of dread lurking in the back of my mind that I am trying to keep at bay. This dread is for the tremendous amount of information that I don’t even have the faintest clue about regarding home repair, renovation, upkeep, gardening, landscaping, furnishing, etc., etc.! I’ll post more about the new house with some picutres soon enough.

Thirdly, my blog host, blog city, upgraded their system a few weeks ago. For a good week or so we simply could not post. Even after that one-week period, there were glitches that had the system down more than it was up. Things seem to have stabalized lately, so this hopefully should no longer be a problem.

I’ll leave you with a couple of shots I took in Northwest DC on 13th Street and I believe Irving Street. We often come down 13th street from Maryland and it’s at this spot that I always marvel at the view. These picture’s don’t do it justice, but it’s just a unique spot because DC does not have any real high-rises, so this natural summit creates a view that’s unique.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

A quick reminder for those of you out there who like to read this blog. Blog City, the hosting company I use to create and maintain my blog, has a very helpful feature that I’ve included that lets one “subscribe” to a blog. I’ve placed this on the left side of my page under the calendar – at least that’s where it is right now. If you type in your email address and then hit the button titled “>> >>” you will be updated every time I post a new entry. I thought I would mention it specifically because currently the number of subscribers are pretty minimal compared to what I see in my traffic reports, so I think perhaps a lot of folks just don’t know it’s there or don’t know what it is.

A couple of words about this: I get tons of email myself, both spam and mailing lists, and actual persona email, so I know some people’s resistance to signing up for things where one might be signing on for potentially more spam! From everything I have seen, Blog City is extremely responsible in trying to combat spam and would never sell email addresses. I myself can’t even see who has subscribed, that’s how serious they are about preventing spam! Also, I know that you can unsubscribe as easily as you can subscribe, as I’ve unsubscribed from a few blogs that I felt were starting to spew stuff that I had no interest in.

So please, for those of you who read this blog on any kind of regular basis, let me know by subscribing so that I don’t feel like I’m just, as my grandfather used to say “talking to the wall!”

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!