Blog Archives
Well, damn
In all the crazy busy rush yesterday I totally forgot to blog. I actually have reminders set up, but they can’t help if I’m away from the desk all day.
I will try to catch up with proper posts, but if not this will have to count for one.
I think it’s safe to say that the party of Lincoln is gone now.
This video of Rick Santorum has been circulating recently, and it led me to this, which then led me to this.
Ladies and gentlemen, this person is one of the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination.
I’ve heard it said that both parties have strings being pulled by the same big money interests, and this is the sort of thing that makes that look really plausible. Put on a show to keep the voters distracted, have one side try to take away various civil rights so that people have to fight them, and have the other side “compromise” on various money deals. It just keeps looking less and less like a crazy conspiracy theory.
It’s also depressing as all hell, so here’s a wild west mardi gras zombie attacking me.
Well, I suck.
So apparently if I take one day off, that means I’m useless the next day. Not feeling great right now. Try to do better tomorrow.
Goodnight.
Brief vacation.
I’m taking today off. Technically I could leave it at that and fulfill my quota for the day, but that feels a little cheap. So tune in tonight at 9:00pm (US Pacific time) for a bedtime story.
We search for things. Things to make us blog.
It’s the 15th again, so today we’ll be looking at my search stats for the last month. Haven’t you always wondered what people type into Google that might lead them here? Now you’ll know!
As usual, the search terms are in bold while my commentary is italic. Read the rest of this entry
Fucking Perfect.
Spent pretty much the whole day on a bus or a train, and I’m beat. I’m back home where the air is brown, now. I’m feeling pensive, the way you get after a journey when you’re tired and putting off unpacking, and a friend sent me to this video. And since I don’t have anything interesting to write about just now, I’m going to share it with you.
Each and every one of you.
Sorry, I suck today.
Busy day and network issues, so you don’t get anything interesting. Sorry about that, but I’m sure glad I wrote the rules to accommodate days like this.
Something more substantial when I get a chance to catch up to the world, until then you get crap like this. Yeah, I’m not happy about it either.
Traveling
At this time tomorrow I should be on a train approaching misty San Francisco Bay. Since I have lots to do to get ready for that, I’m not going to post much right now. I’ll try to have something more substantial up tonight if I can get everything done early enough. If not, well I’m sorry but this will just have to do for today. I’ll probably write tomorrow’s post on the train.
It’s a little sad that I’m so excited about this short trip. In days gone by I more than once left for other time zones on an hour’s notice, sometimes with no clue how I would get home. Once I called a friend who I heard was visiting a nearby area to ask for a ride back.
That’s all for now, though. Too many things to do to spend time reminiscing. Have a great day everyone.
Post a Day update
I got this in my email yesterday, telling me that site badges for the Post A Day challenge are now available for 2012. I’ve decided not to put such a badge on my blog, since that would be tempting fate and I’d probably never post again.
They also announced that the official Post A Day tag is now postaday, which surprised me. When I started posting again after the new year, I started using postaday2012 without a second thought. Having considered it, I’ve decided not to change that, though I will tag this post with the new approved tag. Partly this is ’cause I’m too lazy to go back and change the last thirty posts, but mostly it’s because having to check the year when I tag a post forces me to think about how I’m tagging it. Let’s face it, my poor mind needs the exercise.
Yeah, I’m phoning it in today. They can’t all be winners.
Spam
I just realized I still haven’t written anything today. I’ve been loving the weather, cool but not cold, slightly breezy, and going from billowy clouds and sunshine to light rain all day and just sort of forgot. I’ve also spent some time reading archives of Clan of the Cats, a webcomic I used to read some ten years ago. Funny how different it seems now. Looking through the archives, I see that the comic’s comments have recently been infested by spam.
Not to be confused with SPAM, the surprisingly versatile canned meat from Hormel, spam is one of those irritating things that we sort of work around and put up with. I’ve heard claims that anywhere from a third to almost three-quarters of the internet’s bandwidth is wasted on this crap. It’s a classic example of the tendency of people to find a way to make any good thing suck.
Seriously, if SOPA stood for “Spam Offenders Punished Accordingly”, I’d probably be cheering the stupid thing without even looking twice.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today, some tepid grumbling. Probably because most of my internet time today was spent in a world of witches and werewolves that could cross-over nicely with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. See you tomorrow!
Technical difficulties
Hi folks! Apparently the new Linux kernel broke something, and my network doesn’t work from the desktop computer anymore. Not sure how long that will take to fix, since I don’t have the faintest clue what’s wrong. My laptop still works fine, though, so I’ll see if I can’t find out what’s going on.
And even if I can’t fix it, I should be able to keep posting. It just won’t be as convenient for me.
So sorry there’s nothing interesting here, and have a very good evening!
In search of
It’s the 15th of the month again, and that means it’s time to look at my site stats for the last 30 days. Of course when I say site stats, I really mean the search terms, because everything else, while useful info, is a little boring.
So here’s what people searched for that led them to my blog over the last month. As usual, search terms are in bold, while my comments are italic. Read the rest of this entry
Post stealing!
I wanted to blog about Jessica Ahlquist today, but it turns out that JT Eberhard already said everything I wanted to say, and more.
Funny thing is, if I’d written about it, and then seen Mr. Eberhard’s series of posts, I wouldn’t have minded at all. But somehow knowing those posts already exist completely takes the wind out of my sails.
So I guess this will do for a post unless I suddenly find something else to talk about.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 23 trips to carry that many people.
Click here to see the complete report.
This is probably the laziest post I’ve ever made. Except for this paragraph, I didn’t have to write anything! But it is interesting, and I wanted to get it posted well before I do my search term roundup on the 15th, so here it is. I’ll be back with another post tomorrow, or maybe late tonight. See you then!
Since I have nothing to say for myself today
Instead I’ll drop a link to Life Before the Dinosaurs, a blog about paleozoic life run by a very talented seven year old. Awesome stuff.
That blog got me thinking about geological time, and how very much of it there is. I like the clock representation found on Wikipedia here. That little green bit is the dinosaur era. The tiny orange part represents the 65 million years since then. Amazing. For about the first quarter there wasn’t any life at all.
I was considering making a series about the history of Earth, divided up by geological eras, or maybe periods if I felt like getting into detail. I might still do that but really it would be for my own learning, I couldn’t tell you anything you couldn’t find out on Google and I’d have to make an effort not to just copy stuff out from my sources. Come to think of it, my primary source would be Google, since I don’t have any books on the subject less than 20 years old and my local library is underfunded. Huh.
Anyways, that’s all I’ve got for the moment. Now I’m torn between researching the dawn of the Earth and taking a nap. Decisions, eh? What a pain.
Happy Perihelion!
That’s right, tonight we’re as close to the Sun as we get. Tomorrow we start the long six month slog back to Aphelion, three million miles above us and a hundred and eighty-five million miles below us. It’s statements like these that make it clear that English was not developed with orbital mechanics in mind.
What’s the appropriate way to celebrate perihelion?
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 