Today was my last day at my fulltime employer. It was harder than I expected to walk out the door, but I still truly believe it’s the right decision for me personally.
I’ll be focusing my energy fulltime on my own business now, and all that entails. Part of that will include doing some contract work on the side to help pay the bills, but it’s all part of Business [tm].
Onward….
Author: Dave Shevett
A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.
Switched blogrolls, and a recommendation
I’ve changed where I pull my blogrolls (displayed as the ‘other blogs’ section on Planet Geek’s main page. I had been using Blogrolling, but I found their interface cumbersome, and their features lacking.
I’m now pulling the roll from Bloglines , a great site run by the same fellow who originally founded eGroups, (now Yahoo! Groups).
The other advantage is BlogLines is an online Aggregator, which can summarize multiple websites and blogs into a nice browseable form. Feel free to add Planet Geek to an account on Bloglines, and you’ll see postings show up there.
The LiveJournal ‘Friends’ pages are an example of an aggregator, though they’ve tailored the concept considerably to LJ’s particular view of the blogging world.
Between your own LiveJournal friends page and Bloglines, you should be able to read virtually all the news / blogs / comments sites on the net.
Old geek humor
Remember the days when people wrote long involved wonderful stories and posted them on usenet? One just showed up on the slashdot archives:
An apocryphal story from 1987 regarding DEC VAXen, IBM server rooms, and large financial organizations.
Make sure you read the comments below it for full attribution.
I’m sure ya’ll have seen this, but…
USA Today Poll (we all know how accurate these are, but gotta fight ’em…) on whether Congress should amend the constitution to ban gay marriages.
Thanks to Pookfreak for the pointer.
[corrected on 3/9/04 5:24pm – the attribution was incorrect. Sorry! -dbs]
A good argument for those pesky anti-gay activists…
Seems to be the day for me to post links to other blogs and the like. However, I make it a rule to, every couple days, check into Snopes.com and check out the ‘Whats New’ section, which covers the current rumors, blatherings, and other joy that tends to circulate on the net. I don’t know how many times people have sent me something in email, only for me to reply with “That’s an urban legend, here’s the link to snopes…”
Today I saw a great blurb, purportedly to be an open letter to Dr Laura. I’ll reproduce it here, though the original authorship is unknown (the Snopes article refers to a “Kent Ashcraft”, but it’s certainly not definite.
Continue reading “A good argument for those pesky anti-gay activists…”
Careful with that cellphone, eugene!
Found via Boston-Online. When yer out having fun, make sure you DON’T drop your cellphone in a creative location, because someone will pick it up and call your wife.
I spoke too soon.
Did I say spring? Fool that I was. It’s been snowing for the last 5 hours. We have about 2 inches of snow on the ground, and it’s still going.
An interview with George RR Martin
There’s a book series I’m in the middle of reading called “The Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin. It’s one of the best things I’ve read in a VERY long time.
Only problem is, it’s not done yet! GRRM is still writing book 4, and there will most likely be six books. This 4th one is taking FOREVER, but it’s going to be worth it.
There’s an interview available where he talks about where the current book “A Feast of Crows” is, and how far along he is.
One other bit is there’s a sample chapter from the new book on his site. If you’re reading the series, and waiting for the next book, check out the interview and the sample!
Spring is here! Geocache time!
Today is was absolutely gorgeous in scene Bolton, MA. So much so that Zach and I decided to go out for a hike. After running an errand or two, I checked out Geocaching.com to see if there were any new caches in the area. A few, but because we only had 2 or so hours, we decided to hike a trail very near the house.
This was called the Powerderhouse cache, which was along a trail in some town-owned land behind town hall. Unfortunately, the antenna for my Garmin GPS III+ is missing, so I couldn’t take the unit with me (it normally lives mounted to my dash in the VW).
Fascinating article on skr1pt k1dd13s.
This is an interview between RobLimo (who interviewed me a while back) and a fellow who got fairly into the hacker community. (for the uninitiated, in the security community, folks refer to younger kids who don’t really understand the systems they’re hacking as ‘script kiddies’. They just download a tool and run it, and it hacks the systems for them)
Anyway, this fellow really lays out how the community operates, and how they network together.
Check out the article on newsforge.
A very productive day.
Wow. What a day.
After feeling pretty grim last night, I slept in a little this morning, getting up around 9:30 to Cat making breakfast. The Zachster had slept in with me, but somewhere during the morning had gotten up and left. The joys of the barrier means I got a decent night’s sleep, and really didn’t notice Zach getting up and leaving the room.
Rick and Gabe spent the night, so I assumed that Zach was off playing with Gabe.
Breakfast was very yummy, and helped me get started. After a quick shower, I got started on the project of the day…
Opinions on ‘adwords’?
So it costs bux to host all these websites at Homeport. Our T1 is through Cambridge Bandwidth Consortium (great bunch of guys, lemme know if you’re in the Boston area and want Good Bandwidth [tm]).
So how do generate some revenue? First thought is of course advertising. The least noxious of all the adserver networks I’ve found is Google’s AdWords program. (A good example of what pages look like with AdWords ads in them is Google itself – a few snapshots are here.)
Has anyone had experience with these folks, good or bad?
Course, the second possibility is paid hosting, but that market is _so_ crowded now, and the costs are so cutthroat, we’d need tremendous volume just to break even, and we just don’t have the time or money (though we do have the physical resources in bandwidth, servers, and infrastructure 🙂
Curious about all the stuff we host on our line? I’ll throw that into the extended link… lotta neat stuff 🙂
If you don’t read Dork Tower…
Always neat to poke fun at the LJ community 🙂
A quicky survey, if you please…
So I’m trying to get a little bit of feedback on the blog. Been at it now for a couple weeks, and I’m enjoying it. But what I wanna hear from is you folks – could you take a minute to hit this survey? I’ll post the results when things are done:
Take the Planet Geek! readership survey…
Thanks!
It’s MISTER FUSION!
Remember that cool device on the back of the deLorean labelled “Mister Fusion” in Back to the Future? The concept that a fusion reactor producing virtually unlimited power could be brought down to the level of a coffeegrinder was whimsical, but gave that ‘gosh the future’s gonna be cool’ feel.
Well, we might be one step closer. Far from the Cold Fusion whoop-tee-do from the 80’s, these folks seem to actually be on to something.
As Reported in the Purdue News:
Evidence bubbles over to support tabletop nuclear fusion device
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers are reporting new evidence supporting their earlier discovery of an inexpensive “tabletop” device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions.
Whoah. 🙂