Category: Weblogging

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Mike Sanders has joined the conversation about anger. In particular, I found the following comment to be quite fascinating:

Much of my blogging about terrorism has been negatively affected by anger. The feelings were “How dare that blogging friend not care about innocent Americans and Israelis getting slaughtered?”. Of course their views are not aimed directly at me and most of the time are the result of believing false information or not thinking things through.

Mike – what an interesting way you have about you. I’ve never been beaten by the carrot that was held out to entice me before.

So much anger – perhaps a little humor, too? I have a really bad joke for you all (and my sincere apologies in advance):

As the woman crawls out of her wrecked car, the local sheriff asks her what happened.

The woman began, “It was the strangest thing! I looked up and saw a tree, so I swerved to the right. Then I saw another tree, so I swerved to left. Then there was another tree, and another and another …”

The sheriff thought for a minute and then said, “Ma’am… I don’t know how to tell you this, but the only thing even resembling a tree on this road for thirty miles is your air freshener.”

BTW Mike – congrats on being the number one Mike in Google. After reading this, I did a Google on myself and found I’m now the number two Shelley in Google.

Guess weblogging is more interesting than Frankenstein.

Noah Grey is back with his incredibly elegant weblog, and his beautiful photographs.

I am just now dipping my toes into the Black & White photo world. I’ve long been held by the rich hues of color photography, enamored of bright blues, vivid reds, sunny yellows. It was only in the last year that I realized that B & W photography allows one to portray thought and feeling, form and opinion without the distraction of color.

However, I have a sinking feeling that my B & W photographs are going to quickly demonstrate the flaws in my photos, as well as my lack of skill and experience.

Still, one can’t grow from the rooftops; one has to be in the basement with the rest of the fungi.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It looks like the evil email spam bots have discovered my little virtual neighborhood. Tom Matrullo received a junk email seemingly addressed by me today, at the exact time I also received an email from me with the same subject. Well, since I didn’t send an email with the following in it, I knew it was junk:

I AM JONATHAN KANU , A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF RWA AGENCY. WE ARE EMPOWERED TO ADMINISTER TRUST FUND WELL OVER TEWNTY FOUR MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS (US$300,000.000. 00) FOR THE PROVISION OF RELIEF MATERIALS TO TROUBLED SPOT IN THE WEST AFRICAN SUB-REGION.

I wrote the following to Tom as likely explanation of what happened:

You have people who link to you that also link to me (we’re only 1 degree of separation apart in the loosely joined pieces game). It would be very easy for a spam bot to grab these links and follow them back to our respective weblogs. Both you and I also embed our email addresses directly in our web pages with the mailto hypertext link. This means our email addresses are easily scrapped from the page.

The very nature of weblogging makes this type of spam bot activity easier, because we all link to each other – we provide a web of opportunity for these nasty little critters.

What we’ll need to do is send our agents in South Africa, Mike and Nithia, out to beat the crap out of this JONATHAN KANU.

Show him not to mess around with webloggers.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Euan of The Obvious? has made the move from Blogger to a new MT-based weblog in a new location (time to update links, folks). Congrats on the move, Euan. And remember – if you need help with MT, all you have to do is holler. Since you’re having template – and most likely CSS – problems, I won’t be able to help you, but I’ll commiserate nicely.

Speaking of MT, it sounds like Ben and Mena’s server is being overwhelmed and they need to make a move, themselves. I’m not exactly rolling in dough at the moment but I’m finally plunking down a bit for my MT installation – especially since I’ll be extending my use of MT throughout all of my websites.

I was going to send a well done to Dorothea for duckling rescue when I realized it was David who did the rescuing. So – well done, David!

AKMA’s thinking about creating a U Blog gift shop. There’s a problem though – we have no school colors. We have no school motto. (We have no school, but that’s besides the point.) Life’s issues may march on – the good with the bad, the happy and the sad – but everyone knows a school needs school colors and a motto. Something Latin. What’s Latin for blog? Now, what’s Latin for blog that doesn’t sound like a disease?

A quiet thanks to my favorite songbird, Shannon: Smoochies, girl – you made my day yesterday.

And now, this blog will self-destruct in five seconds: one, two, three, ….

Sheila Lennon is celebrating both her birthday (Happy Birthday!) and her two-week vacation by creating a new, experimental weblog, The Reader. And folks, I’m telling you – Sheila has a Voice.

How’d we get from bragging about 2.6 readers per newspaper sale to newspaper websites that demand personal information about each reader to get beyond the headline, go ‘way if you won’t pony up?

Sheila, I can already hear your boss back at the ‘paper pop the lid on the Tums bottle.

This ought to be an interesting two weeks.