Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Sorry about the dirth of entries recently. I’ve been a bit preoccupied as of late. Namely, we were expecting our first child early in August, but she just didn’t want to come out! She was finally born last week and since then I’ve been burping, changing diapers, and fetching things for my wife. On top of this work has become a bit more hectic recently, so all this means that time is even a more pretty precious commodity than it is normally. One day I will get back to posting here on some interesting tech or diet/nutrition-realated topics. But things need to calm down just a bit first!

While our birth adventure was underway we were somewhat dead to the outside world and so only learned a bit second hand about what was going on in New Orleans, but we still haven’t watched any TV for over a week. Just hearing about it on the radio occasionally or from friends is bad enough! We know some people who moved to New Orleans just two months ago. They got out with some essentials, but lost everything else, including a car. Another family friend’s family is from New Orleans. They got out safely, but their houses are gone. Another friend’s family is from New Orleans and he hadn’t heard from any of them as of a couple of days ago. I’m not going to bother to put up another link for donations, as these are everywhere on the web these days, but I will just say that my heart goes out to all those who were effected by this tragedy and I will be trying to help out in some way myself.

Back to blogging.

After the longest hiatus in months, I’m finally trying to get back to posting a bit more. Not that I’ve suddenly got a lot of time on my hands, but after a pretty hellish week where I was doing some work for my old job and working at my new job for a total of somewhere around 70 hours, I at least FEEL like I have a lot more free time! I’ve actually gotten some things around the house and yard done I’ve been wanting to do for WEEKS! My new job also has had be a bit busy, but now that I’m finally starting to get used to the new environment and develop a rhythm, I’ll actually get to take a short break once in a while and maybe not write per se, but at least get some things done that I otherwise would have put off till after work.

I’m sorry about the quietness here over the last couple of weeks. It’s one of those times in my life when real-life events are superseding a lot of my time online. Damn you, real life, damn you to hell! To be more specific, I’d been searching for a new job as my current job’s contract is ending, and I found one, so I’ve been trying to wrap things up at my now old job – my last day was yesterday. In the mean time, me an my wife are expecting and we’re starting to approach the home stretch. With that comes lots of business with juggling decisions about birth attendants, pediatricians, and childcare providers, as well as taking childbirth classes, figuring out what we need to buy (or ask for) for the baby, etc., etc. I wish I could tell you there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but that light seems like it might be a ways off. My new job will require me to learn some new programming skills, and my old job wants me to come in on my “spare time” at least until the contract is officially over in a couple of weeks to finish a couple of projects. And then of course there’s the baby, which will probably preoccupy most of my free time once she arrives! But, I will at least try to steal 20 minutes here and there and post something interesting. Indeed, I may look into ways of posting quick links and very short comments, since that should be a lot faster. I fear my days of the epic-long treatises may be behind me – at least for a while!

Well, it seems that my blog host, Blog City, is finally releasing the next version of the software. This is the first big overhaul in a year or perhaps a bit more and was originally scheduled for the beginning of the year, but I guess BC wanted to make good and sure that everything would work with little or no problem. For the last big release I remember that we were down for around a week, give or take! But this time it’s only supposed to be for a couple of hours early Monday morning, June 6. But you never know, there could be some additional downtime.

From what we hear, this new version is going to be chock full of all kinds of cool new features and enhancements, and I hope to implement a lot of these as well as do some redesigning of the site to improve legibility. Thanks for your patience if this takes longer than expected. In the mean time you might want to check out Blog City yourself if you have a blog or are thinking of creating one. Like Blogger they have both a free version as well as a subscription-based one, but the subscription fee is pretty nominal especially if you sign up for a year. And their features, as far as I can tell, are much more even with the current version, than what Blogger offers.

Of course you can also host your blog somewhere that sets you up with Moveable Type or something similar as well. While I do web development professionaly, personally I opted for something where I didn’t need to get into all kinds of config files and template files to tweak something. BC is driven by a set of adminastrative tools which don’t necessarily involve any coding. However, it’s not quite as easy as a program built from the ground up which hand-holds you through everything. You can also get into the code, but at least with the current version you can’t customize everything you might with something like Moveable Type. In any case, Moveable Type isn’t their competition, I don’t think as much as Blogger, since they similarly treat the user by allowing them to do a lot (but not everything) with an interface that isn’t to cryptic.

Well, this blog has officially just turned 2 years old today – at least according to Blog City, my blog host! I had a few blog posts over at Blogger before I switched to Blog City, but I might as well consider this the birthday for the blog. It’s been an interesting two years. The first year or so was fairly slow as I didn’t have a real focus on what I wanted to blog about. It was really anything and everything. If you look back in the archives, many of the entries are pretty short, especially considering the mammoth posts I tend to write often these days! Things really started getting cooking last August after I posted an article that garnered a ton of traffic. That was a comparison between my T-Mobile Sidekick and the Treo 600 that a friend had sold me. I found that I really enjoyed writing in-depth reviews, and have done this at least a couple more times with a review of the Humax DRT-800 and another comparison review of two GPS navigation programs for the Treo, Mapopolis NavCard and TomTom Navigator. Last September I was picked up by a new venture called Project DU that is part of SBC. They selected a group of bloggers to sponsor and syndicate as the default feeds in their custom built “Project DU Blog Reader.” Project DU “hired” me to blog about gadgets and tech, and so that has definitely been my focus over the last nine months. Of course I will occasionally rant about something regarding health and nutrition, or other random topics as they may strike me, but for the most part Twelve Black Code Monkeys is now really mostly a tech blog. Along the way I also got my own domain name for the blog so that instead of being at http://twelveblackcodemonkeys.blog-city.com, I can be accessed at the slightly shorter http://twelveblackcodemonkeys.com.

I want to specifically thank the guy that got me into blogging in the first place, Eric McErlain of Off Wing Opinion. I still remember at some party him mentioning to me something about his “blog” to which I dumbly replied “huh? What is that?” This was back in 2002, and I felt ashamed for not knowing about this incredible phenomenon that even then blogging had become when I considered myself somewhat of a guru when it came to the internet – having first gotten involved in grad school back in the early 90’s. I also want to thank all of those in my Friends section of my blogroll (to the right), who I’ve gotten countless ideas and help from over the last couple of years!

What does the future hold for Twelve Black Code Monkeys? I really don’t know! Part of that I guess is up to you! To those who read this blog (or even those just visiting for the first time), I ask you how can I make this better? Would you rather I tone down on the length of my entries and concentrate on providing a greater number of articles about different things? What other subjects outside of those I’ve been a bit obsessed about recently would you like to hear about? I already know that the layout of my blog is not optimal. Blog City is about to come out with a new version, and so I have been waiting for it before I try to redesign anything, but I do plan on doing some redesign soon, making things easier to read, less cluttered, etc. In the mean time, of course, if you haven’t been doing this already, you can always look at the plain text of my entries via your favorite news reader.

Oh, I guess I should also thank you, my readers! While it’s nice to just write and get things off my chest, or share some cool stuff with a few friends and family who I know read my blog, it’s awfully nice to hear, especially when I put tons of effort into writing something, that it’s actually helping people out there. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on the reviews I’ve written, as well as a big piece I did comparing mobile data plans. According to my stats, I’ve gotten 369 comments, or more than one every other day over the last couple of years. It’s also a little more than the 362… er, 363 blog entries I’ve written. Of course a bulk of them are concentrated in the very popular entries that I’ve mentioned above, but still! It’s been great to know that I’ve done something that has helped others. It’s also great to get feedback when I mess something up and assumed something I shouldn’t have. You’ve definitely made this a much better blog by keeping me honest (and being awfully nice about it too)!

Ok, I’ve been writing this blog for almost two years now and I thought it was about time to get an impression of how my users are accessing the content here. I know that some of you read entries on your web browser as I get traffic reports from Blog City as well as SiteMeter. I also get a sense of how many people may be subscribing to my RSS feeds, at least those who use Bloglines, because it tells you how many subscribers there are for a given feed – in my case there seem to be 28 at last count, excluding myself and counting all the various RSS feeds that I have set up. I also apparently have a whopping 4 people who have signed up with Blog City to receive email notifications when a new entry is posted (note: see below if you want to subscribe to this list).

As many of those who write blogs know, except for Bloglines, it’s very difficult to get statistics on how many people are subscribed to your blog via a news reader. This is due to the nature of RSS and aggregators which collect the content and distribute it, kind of like a middleman. So unlike a website, you are not getting people to come individually to access your content and so have no idea how many people may be looking.

So, with that said, I thought I would ask all you folks out there to fill in my visitor poll in the upper right corner of my site. If you’re reading this via a newsreader, just follow this link to my site. I’ve made it so that you can specify more than one method. For example, while I use Bloglines a lot to read content, I also use the newsreader software for my Treo 650 phone, QuickNews.

Don’t worry about filling this out if you just happened across this site today but don’t subscribe to one of the feeds or otherwise check the site every once in a while.

I really appreciate your taking the time to help me figure out how my readers are getting the content. In the future I hope to have other polls that will be a little more interesting and will let me get to know you better.

* If you want to get email notifications, you can do this by entering your email address in the text box on the left next to the “?” button, under the “GetFirefox” Button and “Mailing List” banner text. After typing in your address, click the “>> >>” button.

I just wanted to post a quick note to let readers know that my blog host, blog-city.com, is going to be upgrading their software to a newer version on Monday. Similar upgrades in the past have left this site unavailable or at least unupdatable for days, so fair warning! However, from what I hear the new version will have a ton of great added functionality, so hopefully this will allow me to add more to the blog that might be helpful for readers.

While I’m writing about this, if anyone has any suggestions for what you would like to see here, either content-wise or design-wise, let me know. Anything bug you about how the blog is formatted? Or do you just read it via a newsreader? Speaking of which, if you are reading the RSS feed in a newsreader, which one are you using?

Update: Well, it seems like there are still some issues with the new version that they are working out. No word on when we may see it, but I’ll try to warn you when it does finally go forward…

A few days ago, I posted a list of states in textual form that I’d lived in, visited, etc., which was generated from a script I found. As I wrote, I have long wanted to keep a kind of visual record of where I’ve been. I love maps, and so I always had the thought of creating one that was color-coded based on where I’ve been – at least in the U.S. to start. I finally created such a map which you see below. It is at least a start. I figure this is something that I can work on building up, but it is at least the beginnings of something that represent my travels here. It’s color-coded based on three main divisions – where I’ve visited, where I’ve lived, and where I’ve driven through or had a layover in.

To describe the division a little better, I would say that “lived in” is if you stayed there for more than a couple of months. For example, many people go to camp for a couple months when they are young, but I don’t count this as “living” in a place, rather you are just “staying” there for a while. I know, it’s not the best choice of words, but I suppose that will be in the next draft. “Visited,” I think, requires an intentional visit to a place. I’m not sure whether sleeping there is necessary but I think in all my “visited” states, I’ve slept over. Anytime you were simply in an airport in a state as part of a layover, or if you had to drive through a state in order to get to your destination (even if you got off the road and had a bite to eat or visited some place of interest), these would count as the third category.

One thing I’m a bit unclear about is my stay in California. I was apparently very young – probably about 1 – so of course don’t remember it at all. Does this still count? Or is it yet another category?

Also notice that I am colorcoding with a neutral green – too many damn red and blue state maps have gone and ruined those colors for maps! You start thinking that the color-coding has something to do with politics, which in this case it doesn’t!

This is a static map which I edited in Photoshop. Other than doing this yourself, there’s another tool out there, but it only delineates whether you’ve been to a state or not. You can’t really customize it. And the map it produces in not all that great in quality. I’m still looking for something similar that is dynamic and lets you create graphical representations of this sort but haven’t found anything yet. I think it could be programmed in Flash, but not knowing Flash very well, I would have to spend large amounts of time learning Flash and playing with it, something I don’t have time to do at the moment. Perhaps a Flash wizard out there could punch something out in a couple of hours?

I apologize to readers out there who’ve been tryin to get to the site over the last couple of days. Apparently my blog host, Blog City, has been dealing with Denial of Service (DOS) attacks because of the elections. They indicated that the sites that were being attacked specifically were pro-Bush, so I guess that means Kerry/Edwards has the hacker vote! Which could come in handy if those voting machines are as hackable as some suspect! But really, such attacks are completely idiotic if they are indeed substantiated. Blog City is based in Scotland, hardly a bastion of conservatism, and hosts blogs of all political leanings. Cutting them down is hearting everyone and goes against the whole idea of the internet – everyone should get their say, no matter how much you disagree with them.

Update: Well, it does seem that Blog City isn’t the only site having problems right now. I’ve had issues getting to Boing Boing for some time now. Boing Boing, although not completely political in its subject matter, does lean to the left when it does express political viewpoints. So I wonder if there is just some general traffic issues with the net on a day like today or if there is indeed a movement by partisan hackers to take down sites they don’t agree with. Blah!

A Domain Name, that is! Yes, I’ve finally decided to get my own domain name for this weblog. I figured it was time. I’m being syndicated by DU Project, developing relationships with companies as media entity, even getting linked to by some pretty popular weblogs. For those who subscribe to my feed, you shouldn’t have to do anything. The Blog-City address is still valid for feeds and for viewing the site directly, but now you have the option of saving a few keypresses and typing in just “twelveblackcodemonkeys.com.” Now all I have to do is come up with a logo!