Oh, and by the way, the title of the blog post contains a 3 in cuneiform: 𒐈. If it’s not displaying correctly for you, you can use this awesome site to help yourself out.

That is, of course, if you give a damn about having cuneiform display correctly on your computer. Which you probably should.

It didn’t work properly for me at first, either, but since I use Ubuntu, setting it up was as simple as typing in “cuneiform” and clicking a button.

Oh, free software, how you delight me!

Jesus.

Oh, and please keep in mind that I am posting screenshots and not text-based lists because I don’t want a Blog Vanity entry to skew my results. That would be cheating. And it would get me more creepsters.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/27/blog-vanity-ii/feed/ 2 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/16/blog-vanity-welcome-to-the-greatest-blog-in-existence/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/16/blog-vanity-welcome-to-the-greatest-blog-in-existence/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:06:39 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=529 From time to time, I like to scope out my WordPress stats pages and see how this site is faring on the Intarwebz. Monitoring traffic is fine, and sometimes there are a few surprises when I realize who’s reading this blog and not commenting.

But what keeps me coming back to this is the list of search engine terms leading to this blog. As if I didn’t know already, I write about weird stuff, and that brings weird people to this blog. Thank god they keep their mouth shut, too, because I wouldn’t want to talk to any one of these freaks. (Although, to be fair, it does look like we have a lot in common.)

I think it’s official: I have the greatest blog in existence.

It’s become more urgent because I was offered more hours tomorrow, so I’ll work a double shift then, too. At the very least, I’ll have all of Sunday off! Holidays are grand, no?

Till soon.

Pretty 1337, huh? I’m so glad someone was googling “beer pong in German.”

Also, keeping in the spirit of the title of this post, are you confident you know what “pong” means?

pong  [pong, pawng]
–noun
1. an unpleasant smell; stink.
–verb (used without object)
2. to have a disagreeable smell; stink.

[Origin: 1915–20; of obscure orig.]

Interesting! Found it out by searching for “beer pong” on LEO, and getting “miefen” back for “pong (Brit.) [coll.].” The entries reference each other, which pissed me off, but fortunately Dictionary.com came through and now I know what “miefen” means.

You mief, dude.

Really.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m supposed to pick up a Christmas tree for my dorm floor for installation in the kitchen. Should rock.

I’ll be back online posting all sorts of wonderful news I didn’t get to tonight.

Till then.

I’m getting tons of “File does not exist” errors regarding a “404.shtml” in the root directory of this domain. Very bizarre.

Today I altered some mod_security filters, but I’ve since undone those changes, and no improvement in performance. I think what may have broken it is that I was trying to sync my blog with some new software I got. I’d read that perhaps WordPress was being cautious and a bit overzealous in blocking requests, and so I tweaked the mod_security stuff. No go, the software didn’t work.

Now I’ve got some additional research to do, but I wanted to make it clear that I’m aware of the problem.

UPDATE: Pretty sure I have it under control now. I’m tired and I don’t feel like going into details now, but I’ll make a post later for posterity—as well as anyone Googling for blog speed tweaking.

Please comment if it’s still slow for you. You shouldn’t need to clear your cache or anything, it should just be magically snappy again.

And watch that damn Viking.

I have several large blog posts which I haven’t had the connection to post yet. In a few moments I take off to travel across town (on Thursdays, I have classes on a different campus), where I should have a fantastic connection. If I can manage to show up a little early, then I can get some stuff up before class starts. That’d be great.

There will come a time when I’m posting again.

I have no idea when the dorm will get internet installed in it, but I’m sure it’ll be later rather than sooner, if past evidence is to be considered. And it is. I’ve thought about scooping up a router to boost the signal in my room, but I can’t find any quite cheap enough to really make it worthwhile. I shall yet deliberate. I can’t last much longer, living disconnected.

So I leave you with a lolcats picture.

Full story here, in case you’re not familiar with the headline. I of course wasn’t, because I don’t have internets. Sigh.

Coming to the homepage of the blog will always work fine, and display the site regardless of the state of the various accoutrements like RSS functionality. That said, I’ll try to give a bit of warning or at least test beforehand if (or when, I should say) I do anything like this in the future.

For those of you not viewing this blog using RSS, please look into it! (Judging by the number of hits on my RSS feed versus the number coming directly to the homepage, it appears most people are using a bookmark.) RSS is a much more convenient for browsing frequently updated sites like blogs. Look up in the address bar of this site, and you should see this icon:

Anytime you see that, the site you’re looking at has an RSS feed. You can then use that button to set a “Live Bookmark,” which dynamically updates itself to show the latest headlines (blog entries) each time you click on it.

Also, if you have a lot of feeds, please check out Netvibes. It is far and away the best feed manager I’ve ever used, as it allows you to view the entire site to which the feed belongs, rather than just the entry text, as some readers (Google’s, for instance) restrict you to looking at.

The second great choice in my mind would be Thunderbird, which I think everyone should be using for e-mail anyway. But its RSS support is also very strong.

I’m pretty pleased by the new version. There’s finally integrated tagging, so I can uninstall the third-party plugins I’ve been using to tag posts for content. Hopefully the site will load snappier, too, as there were tweaks to database calls.

From here on out there are some layout changes I’d like to make to the site, starting with how tags are displayed. Maybe I’ll add a tag cloud for the heck of it, though I don’t think I’ve enough entries yet to make that worthwhile.

Suggestions welcome.

Here’s hoping.

The good news is that I’ve finally registered with the wireless campus network, as I matriculated only this week, meaning I’ve newly gotten my login information in addition to a really snazzy student ID. I get a terribly weak signal for the wireless in my room, but if I sit out on my balcony, it’s pretty respectable. This is way better than hunting hotspots in the wild.

As usual, everything is coming up Conor.

I’ll post about my solid weekend shortly, as I first must throw up an album to document the antics.

This is the kind of thing I have to troubleshoot with an internet connection, which of course I can’t do here. I’ve applied for registration with the campus wireless, and that should be activated for me this week. Then I’d be able to go to a campus building and plug in and compute to my heart’s content, rather than freeze my ass off outside here, finding hotspots.

Now I’m going to wrack my brain for ways to get in touch with my friend Mark, who is probably wandering around the city somewhere.

I won’t even have a chance to pull pics off my camera till tomorrow or so. Its batteries are dead and I can’t even find my battery charger, let alone my spare set of batteries. So give me a while on that. My room is kind of messier than can be imagined.

Oktoberfest was, is, and shall continue to be, seriously badass.

For the time being it suffices to say that Aussies do way more than Americans to encourage the belief that English-speaking people the world over are stupid pigs.

Till later.

This morning I read a headline on Slashdot that mentioned an interesting milestone. It appears that the cybercrime racket is now more profitable than drug trafficking globally. Who knew? Or rather, who didn’t? From the article:

McAfee CEO David DeWalt, said that cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide. Despite the increase in government compliance requirements and the proliferation of security tools, companies continue to underestimate the threat from phishing, data loss, and other cyber vulnerabilities, DeWalt said.

[...]

But law enforcement’s ability to find, prosecute, and punish criminals in cyberspace has not kept up: “If you rob a 7-11 you’ll get a much harsher punishment than if you stole millions online,” DeWal remarked. “The cross-border sophistication in tracking and arresting cyber-criminals is just not there.”

Anyway, it’s neat to see moments like this when priorities are shifting to follow possibilities.

That last statement refers entirely to the quoted article.

Carl’s pretty much the freaking man. I relate to him best of the group, as he’s unabashedly geeky while being cool. He doesn’t have a problem combining the two, and that’s probably my favorite characteristic of a person. (This explains why I am my own favorite person.) He studies Computer Science and Mathematics at Penn State, but is extremely well cultured. I haven’t asked for details, but I know he’s spent time in Scotland, and somewhat recently he was in Africa for six months. Given the latter experience, he’s obviously quite well acquainted with open source culture, and runs various distros of Linux on the two or three laptops he has with him here.

Today on the way back from the grocery store—one which I heard from my new Mechanical/Aeronautic Engineer friend Ke, who is fluent in Mandarin, German, and English, is even cheaper than the Penny Markt!—Carl and I struck up a conversation about technology education and future prospects relating thereto. Neither of us are happy with the schooling we’re getting in all things technological, and both are making good headway toward understanding a new system of instruction.

The conversation quickly shifted track, as you can all likely predict, to open source and its economic implications. Turns out Carl has burgeoning plans to get into hardware supply and repair in Africa, as he sees it an industry with minimal investment in US dollars, yet relatively high returns if he does it right. More important, he thinks he understands how to ensure longevity in his business model by manipulating the low cost of overhead to allow for long-term special maintenance for returning customers, for little or no charge.

It’s ambitious, yeah, but completely workable, in my opinion. For this guy, a lot of things are completely workable. But where we disagreed was whether he could leverage the same rates for an industry that is already very well developed in Southeast Asia, translating them to the African economy. He was of the opinion that hardware costs what hardware costs, no matter where you are in the world. Artificial factors like government taxation aside, one pays for the material goods, the transportation, and whatever the markup is for profit. Shipping to Southeast Asia from the U.S. is comparable to shipping to Africa, I allowed for the sake of argument. But I don’t yet believe that the international market is completely globalized, that regional factors in cost don’t exist.

But I suppose I should defer to the more economically well versed among my life partners in understanding this matter.

Also, for anyone interested, I found a really bitching HFS+ driver for Windows. I’ll test it out tonight and if I have nothing more interesting to talk about, I’ll blog about it, too. Heads up.

Turns out this blog is more of a daily journal than it’s ever been.

Regardless of whether I syndicate this blog really simply (something I’ll likely implement for friends and family to keep in touch with what’s up in G-town), my post titles are gonna rock some socks. I’m serial. In fact, I’m only writing posts in order to justify the creation of titles. I already have three months’ worth of titles sketched out, and I intend to use them. Buckle up.