Quote du Jour

It’s been over 3 weeks now since I last felt I had anything in me worth blogging about. Not entirely sure why that is, but I want to change that and get back to blogging.

I use Google Chat to keep in touch with friends, and I tend to leave a “status” up far longer than it is relevant. Like the common and rather unimaginative “TGIF” that tends to pop up of Friday and linger until Tuesday when somebody harasses me about it. To this end, I’ve been populating my status message with quotes this week. Most quotes are quite old to begin with, so they won’t go stale…

I used to have a huge collection of quotes that I hand-picked from the internet and some dead-tree sources. I had an old-school website before blogs became the de facto standard, and I wrote a Perl script that would display a random quote when you visited my site. I also started a Quote du Jour mailing list, and wrote another script to send a random quote out every day (and remove it from the to-send list so there would be no duplicates).  Somewhere along the way, I lost all of that.

So today, I’ve decided to start building up my collection again. The past month-ish of my life hasn’t been all that great, but with a little work and a little positive attitude, I’m enjoying life again, and I like to share my attitude with others via these quotes. I may or may not put one up daily, but it’s something to get content back into my blog, at any rate.

No time like the present to get started…

“Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.”

~Walt Whitman

Don’t sit around waiting for good things to happen to you. Make good things happen.

Neat!

Checking my stats page today, I notice the top search leading to my blog yesterday was “worship me or i’ll torture you forever”. So I just had to go see… I copied and pasted that into Google and I’ve got the top two results on the query. Awesome.
What’s even more amusing is that the post in which those words appear, I linked to the site I got it from, and the site he got it from… but I beat them both out in Google.

So… you know… worship me, or I’ll torture you forever.

Getting frustrated with ScribeFire

The Firefox extension I can least live without (next to AdBlock Plus) is ScribeFire, from which I do all of my blog posts. Problem being that 2 of the last 3 posts I’ve made from my Linux-based Firefox/ScribFire have shown up on the blog completely blank. What’s the point of having a blog posting utility that you can’t trust to actually post content to your blog? Makes me look bad if the headline hits the RSS feed (and by extension LJ and Twitter), and there’s no words for people to see. Enough grumbling… time to post and see if this one goes through successfully.

Unbelievable numbers

The second unbelievable number is 8. The Detroit Red Wings finished their sweep of the Colorado Avalance in Round 2 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs last night by a score of 8-2. Franzen got his 2nd playoff hat-trick, the first coming just a couple games ago against the same team.

The *first* unbelievable number is 1,201. This is the number of hits for today in my blog stats. As of roughly 6AM. I’ve been Reddited. Can’t wait to see the final number, and welcome to all the new folks who decided to look around and might stay tuned in.

Leftovers: yum!

Checked the stats on my blog today, and the numbers were… not quite “through the roof”, but a very respectable “almost double my best day of the past month”. The number one post being hit: Genbuntoo. Getting traffic mostly from “today’s leftovers” on tuxmachines.org

Who knew leftovers could be so popular?

Two weeks gone?

I got hassled yesterday by a friend of mine for not blogging anything for two entire weeks. Two weeks? How is that possible? And yet, it’s true. I didn’t even post for Photo Friday. I am such a slacker. In my defense, life’s been busy. Two weekends ago I spent an entire day at the Detroit Institute of Arts. One weekend ago I spent an entire day at the Detroit Zoo. This past weekend I spent an entire day at the Detroit Science Center. This coming weekend I will spend an entire day at Clancy Day. Some of the other things I’ve packed into my time: movies (the director’s cut of Alexander is nearly 3 hours long), Red Wings (won, 1-0 in overtime), 5-a-day (had to do a couple 10-a-day days too try to make up for lost time), moving furniture, and spending quality time with a good friend. And probably other things I can’t recall.

Things I need to do still:
Get my “Basic Bug Triage for Ubuntu” presentation for Penguicon done (or at least sketched out)
Update the MeMaker package for Ubuntu (because I was holding off for an update on Good Friday, and when I finally got the update I procrastinated a little bit, and never had the time again thereafter).
Go over the Penguicon schedule and figure out how I’m going to pack everything I want to do into 3 short days.
Post some photos from the zoo trip.
Return to a life of blogging. Because teh internets need more of me. B-)

It’s the most busiest time of the year

Here is the entry I tried writing yesterday. I think the title is underscored by the fact that Firefox hung/crashed around 5:30 and I wasn’t able to replace it, even with a short “this sucks”, until around 9:30. So as I was saying…  I haven’t had time to do the things I normally enjoy lately, plus I’ve been wanting to get into some new hobbies to boot, so I think you can understand why the blog has been sparse. I have been “storing my nuts”, so to speak; throwing stories off the web into my Google Notebook for later bloggage. Initially, I took 3 of these stories and tackled them all in one post, but I think that 2 of the 3 are deserving of their own space. So now, on with the show…

Hey, look here: —————–>

I just wanted to point to “Some things in my RSS reader” on the sidebar here. It gets new content pretty frequently. A lot more frequently than my actual blog does, lately. I’ve been afflicted with a combination of “lack of time” and “lack of anything to say” lately. Time-wise I should be getting better, but since I’m avoiding topics that tick me off (like The War on the Unexpected, currently topping “Some things…”) I’m having problems saying anything. Only four days since my last post, but it seems a lot longer, and I feel a need to say something just so I don’t get those annoying e-mails from my friends asking if I’m still alive…

Brand new day

I’ve been mulling over what changes to make to my blog(s), and coincidentally a good friend of mine, who is a “HAM”, wrote an entry for his blog about Good Ham Blogging. I read his ideas, and my personal opinion is that he could have left the word Ham completely out of it. Those are just good rules for any sort of blog. Then he followed up with Mo Better Bloggin’:

Blogs are great ways to blow off steam … Writing about [something that annoys you] will let you get it off your chest and perhaps it will educate somebody, somewhere.

Maybe.

But take care that your Web log doesn’t become a festering pot of hostility.

I think one of the problems with this blog is that I’ve done just that. The world really pisses me off, sometimes, and I use this space as therapeutic release. But does anybody really want to read that, or associate with somebody who emanates negativity all the time? Well, I know I don’t like to associate with people who are negative all the time, so I’m going to try to be more positive here, and talk more about things that make me happy. Despite appearances, I’m actually quite a happy person, so that should be easy, right? We’ll see.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Taking stock.

I haven’t been blogging very actively, lately. When I’m in the mood to write, I don’t have time. When I have time, I want to do other things. I made one of my increasingly rare posts this weekend. It was a post about my new Linux installation, and my feelings on Linux distributions in general. To say that it was well-read would be an overstatement by professional standards, but it absolutely shattered my previous “high” for number of visits in a day. I broke the previous high easily on the day I posted it, and nearly tripled it on the following day (thanks to tuxmachines.org for picking up the teaser and linking to my post). Which leads me to wonder if maybe there’s a larger interest for a Linux blog than for just-another-personal-opinion blog. I think I’ll be talking more about Linux in the days to come, at the very least. Talking about Linux is also a heck of a lot less stressful than discussing stupid laws, evil capitalists, and current events. I’ve also got the problem of “too many blogs, too little time”. Between here, 1 Fjorda Road, LiveJournal, and MySpace, I just can’t possibly talk enough to populate them all.

OK. That’s a lie. But to have the *time* to populate them all would require I win the lottery and quit my day job. So I need to re-evaluate (again), and decide how I’m going to handle things. I think it’s likely I’ll kill or remodel “1 Fjorda Road”. My LJ is already darned near dead, and that’s a shame because I’d like to keep up with my friends list there.

Switching to Google Reader for reading RSS feeds was a great decision but, just like buying a larger house, the amount of crap I own (subscribe to) has expanded to fill the available space (time). That’s the curse of the computer age… computers save us time, so we fill that time with more things. Not necessarily good things, either. Like, for example, I’d like to exercise more. And do some leisure programming. Maybe make a significant contribution to an open source project. But those aren’t the things I fill my free time with. I fill it with more junk. Blog fodder for a blog that I don’t use enough to consume all the fodder.

So: re-eval, re-org, re-launch with another “30 in 30″. Stay tuned.