d3ft.com

There are for real people reading this website. I have evidence. And it feels kinda weird.

For a minute there, I thought this thing was going about as far as to my monitor. And by “minute”, I thought, “months”. But actual real-life humans are showing up in small numbers to check out the site’s ware.

And I haven’t even started advertising or giving stuff away yet. And I will. Starting pretty soon. Pretty soon being a relative term, though.

Kinda makes me sad I couldn’t keep making fun of the comment spam. Lemme tell you, Outlook has the most joketackularly horrible filtering system of any program that syncs with the iPhone in iTunes in Windows.

In closing, let me say, “Thanks for stopping by.”

Man.

The past few days I’ve been really sick. Today is the first day in a long while that I’ve been feeling well enough to see the doctor, and I slept through when I could’ve gone. Just as soon as things start looking for the better, something bad happens.

Upturns

It’s this sort of thing that most people refer to as “downturns.” But me, I have a more positive view of things. What other people call “downturns,” I call “upturns.” Allow me explain this with a few examples.

Whenever I finally get everything paid off, upturns a broken part on my truck.

Whenever I think my team is gonna win, upturns some miracle comeback.

Whenever I think I’m finally have some freedom, upturns some kid I never knew I had.

And so on and so forth. It’s all about positive attitudes and making sure that you never look a gift horse in the mouth. Even if the gift horse looks nothing like you and has 18 years of child support included.

While there’s a ton of controversy over the leaks that Wikileaks is leaking, I’ve just tried in vain to come up with the necessary angst to write about this subject. Pretty much the only thing I can think of to say about Wikileaks falls into two statements:

1. If there was any value in Julian Assange any more, he would have a .50 caliber hole in his head right now. He is no longer important in the dynamics of Wikileaks. Assasinations are easy to do, but he just isn’t important any more.

2. Usually, leakers are either disgruntled employees trying to get even with their employers (or former employers), or calculated media relation tools used to gauge how well something is doing right now, or how well it might do in the future. In any case, Wikileaks is going to prove to be a mixed bag of good and bad, and I do believe that some very bad things will come of the stuff out there, so the punishments that come of this will be justified.

Okay, fine, how about three…

3. Wikileaks is a stupid name. It just is. There had to be something better out there than that, right? Deathleaks? Superleaks? Chrisleaks? Warleaks?

Sometimes the days get away from you. That happens. Don’t let one down day (or days) discourage you from keeping on keeping on with your writing.

Explain, but don’t apologize for the lack of or slowdown in your writing. You are doing your part to make the internet more internetty. Don’t get down on yourself because you missed one day. Or days.

Or year. Or years.

At one point I was much famouser than I am now. Back then, people thought I was going somewhere. It’s fun going along with somebody for the ride.

But I stopped the ride and got off. Then the people forgot about the ride. Let me tell you folks, it’s hard to get them back on the bus when they start to drive themselves.

If I could go back in time, I would. Back to the time when I shut down the blorg and scurried everyone away. Back to when I screwed it up all royally.

If I could go back to 2006, I’d buy some friggin’ lottery tickets and be covered in hookers and blow right now. And blog something something blah blah moral of the blog something something. But mostly hookers and blow.

Tumblr, the micro-blogging service that all the hip cats are using these days, is down. As a public service to all you comment spammers that read this site, I’ll post a few things that you too can do whilst waiting for Tumblr to return.

1. Continuously reload When Tumblr is down… Great fun, and a pretty good primer for what all those people user Tumblr for in the first place.
2. Continuously reload Is it down for everyone or just me? Because you really, reeeeeally need your fix. Admit it, you have a problem.
3. Just keep reloading the Tumblr homepage, hoping that it’ll come back to life.

As an early Twitter adopter, I can really remember the days when Twitter would go down, for minutes, or even hours without any rhyme nor reason. Heck…it seems like just yesterday… Actually, I think that was yesterday.

My dad was eating some cold bars of Velveeta cheese by dipping it in some left-over barbecue sauce while drinking apple juice. This is not the worst thing this week I’ve caught him eating. There may be a television concept in there somewhere.

Can’t be any worse than anything else CBS puts on the air.

The other stuff much better than the rambling story that had nothing to do with anything that could benefit anybody anywhere. But hey, at least we learned about Nevada’s quarterback.

I like Mary Kathrine Ham. She should do more of these videos.

And, well, Harry? Never do this again. It makes even the people that like you want to club you over the head like a baby seal.¹

1. Obviously I don’t really want to club a baby seal. That’s just pure evil. Clubbing the people who came up with the BCS, however… Well, that’s another story. ↩

Some days are just better than other days. And some days you drop a pass that could’ve won you the game and you’ll be scarred by it for the rest of your life and there’s nothing left to do but blame God.

And if I can get personal for a minute…

But if it makes you feel any better Steve, Terrell Owens has dropped a metric ton of passes, and he turned out alright.

Well, hello there. My name is John, and I’ll be your guide. During our journey please make sure to keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times.

I started blogging before you knew what blogging was. Heck, I was “blogging” before the term was invented. I was blogging before you knew what email was, for that matter. I’ve been doing this for a while.

In 2007 I found out how nice Movable Type was. I’ve been dodging using for the past couple of years because I kept listening to other people. They kept telling me how awesome everything else was – and that “awesome everything” usually was something you can do with template tags in Movable Type.

Or, really, WordPress. But that’s just because people don’t know what they’re doing. Not with WordPress, not with Movable Type, or really anything else. Just using a thing is not making yourself an expert.

And about those experts…

I’ve never really been impressed by experts. Most of the self-identified experts  are either terrible at communicating their expertise to the unskilled, or reeeeeally need to read up on the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s enough to make me think I could actually become an expert myself.

If I had a dollar for every failure I’ve had on the interwebs, I’d have many dollars. This latest incarnation of The Internet Staring John is going to be probably the first attempt to be really all I care about since the early days of the blorgalicous MacStansbury.orgy.

Speaking of bloggeratti, I’ve included some of them in Havok 3. A couple of sidebars on the side there (of my site, both of your RSS people) and you’ve got the place where comments would go if people like me. You’ll see links to popular bloggers who are far more interesting and nice-looking than me for your clicking-on pleasure.

After alluding to this very thing a while ago, it seems time to start putting myself out more openly.

It was an experiment, really. Trying to see if I could get an audience without anyone knowing my name. The interesting things about being anonymous was the realization that fame is pretty darn hard to muster. Especially when you have a real job. Or two.

The upshot of this is that I’ll soon make this site non-anonymous, my other sites more connected, and stop worrying about all that famousness that the kids all seem to want these days. All with new CSS3, HTML5, blog-refresh-y, buzzword-y goodness, just in time for Thanksgiving.¹

Plus, there will be a blogroll! Everybody still loves blogrolls, right?

Right?

1. Or Christmas. One of those. Maybe New Year’s Day. ↩

Something different this way comes.

With the changes to Twitter and other web-related entities, I’m going to change the way I go about some of my personal web-related strategies. Namely, I’m going to start moving some traffic off other sites, shut them down, and start here afresh. It’s been a while in the making, but now I feel the time is right.

The major change here being that this will stop being mostly a playground for some of my wilder ideas, and more of one-stop experience for all my latest bad ideas. There is really nothing that I feel I have to prove to the rest of the Internet, so why bother? Not that I’ll stop tinkering, of course. It’s just that all my various places of tinkering will be moved over here.

Expect changes soon.

If it’s the beginning of Fall, it must be time for another round of people complaining about how blogging isn’t as much fun as it used to be. Oh, for the blissful days of yesteryear when the words flowed from your blogging fingers to the blogging keyboard to the blogging software without so much as a seem or rough finish.

Those days are over now, of course. The muse is gone, and no longer are you able to even get your ranting up to a discernible hrumph or gafaw. Your time of 1,700-words posts on the do’s and don’ts of just about anything are over.

All that is left is you and your blank Add New Post screen.

Yeah, that’d me me. I’ve lost my muse, and have nothing left to say. So I’ve decided to quit blogging — forever.

Or until I think of something else to write. Which will be, like, next week or something. So yeah, I am giving up my blogging career, forever, or next week. One of those two.

It’s Friday. Friday the 13th. It’s Friday the 13th, and I am going to post something because it is a day know to be full of superstitious zeal from some people.

So I’m going to remind people what day today is. The 13th of August, of the year 2010. Or was, I guess, depending on you time-zone.

That’s really all I wanted to do. Continue living your lives for the rest of the 48 or so Fridays on average a year that are not the 13th.

As a side note, this movie was just about terrible.

One of the great things about owning your own comments section is the wonderful interaction with peoples from all over the world. Especially those from countries that don’t speak the language similar to the one in which the blog in question is written. Especially when the interaction is in a language that no human could understand.

Whilst going through the normal maintenance of a the greatest kitsch video-posting site on the interwebs, you’ll need to update plugins, delete spam, and keep the thing running smoothly. As you gain in size (and archives), you’ll start to see more and more bad behavior. That is why there are WordPress plugins dedicated to elimination of nefarious deeds. The blog software even ships with Akismet standard.

As far as legitimate comments go, I’ve found I am running a good 77 to 1 ratio of bot to human. Makes me feel good that somebody is putting that much effort into making something that will never see the light of day. That somebody out there is keeping it real. That they are doing their part to make sure that the Akismet people have jobs. And, presumably, the people who they pay $2 US dollars a day to post thousands of spam comments.

There’s a missed opportunity for a slogan for the second Bush administration. “Russian blog-comment spammers: doing the work that Americans just won’t do. Because they’re too busy playing Farmville. And trying to figure out what to do with Twitter. And watching Jersey Shore.”

Yeah, that would’ve been a pretty long slogan. And not all Americans are watching Jersey Shore. Just the ones that need to be sent to Russia. With the Russian blog-comment spammers.

Did I mention that Akismet keeps spam from appearing on Cluebus!? Because it does. It stops spam from showing up. Just thought I’d let that piece of information get out there in case somebody of the blog-comment spam community read this blog (that has no comments).

Someone I work with suggested this the other day. A one-item checkbox that would weed out most of the riffraff that show up at your place of business, looking for employment. It’s a simple checkbox, but it is really powerful.

Here it is, as it would be presented on either a web application, or just the standard paper kind (you boring, 20th century person):

Do you have common sense?

That would be it. The best part of this question is that it immediately lets you know which applications to toss in the dustbin. To explain:

1. If they don’t check the box, are they saying they don’t have common sense?
2. If they don’t check the box, are they just completely lazy, thus not a person you want to work with?
3. If the do check the box, at least they have sense enough to check the blocks.

That’s why it is such a good idea. Expect to see this on job applications from Best Buy to Wall Street (at least, until somebody sues somebody for some type of discrimination).

In November of 2008, I came up with what I think was a rather brilliant URL. That’s where you go to find your good internet, for those of you who don’t know what that means. The thing you type into the location bar for you internet browser, that’s what it is. That is an URL.

After trying to figure out what to do with that URL, for over a year, I finally purchased the URL. It is a fine, fine internet domain. It is a top-level domain name, meaning that it ends in something like .com or .net. But this one does not end in .com, or .net, or even .org.

It ends in something that you can only get in the US of A. A domain name that you can only get if you live in, or the site is mostly about, things in the United States of America. Fortunately enough, I fit some or all of that criteria, and now I can both register, and own the domain.

The most difficult part after getting the domain was making the stuff I wanted to work on the domain work. I did that by outright copying and embellishing what smart people who do this sort of thing for a living do. I took there good stuff, added other good stuff, put in some special sauce, and then seasoned to taste.

But mostly there was the stealing.

Stealing-well, taking the stuff people say you can have for free and use it without paying, which I guess isn’t technically stealing-is the point of the thing I made. Copying, maybe. Copying things. And showing them off to other people. All pretty much legal, as far as I can tell.

I made something. Here it is.

This month has seen precious little on the site. It is because I am working on something else. The something else is not ready yet. But it will be, soon.

What is my typical response to the question of, “What have you been up to?” It is this: “Devisin’.” As in, my personal colloquialism smashing the original intent of ‘devising.’

That’s really as complicated as the conversation gets. This is also as in depth as the conversation gets. To illustrate, here is how things go most generally.

Typically, someone asks me, “What have you been up to?”

“Devisin’,” I reply.

They laugh, and continue on their way. It’s easy, then, to continue to plot world domination, laundry, or how they get those funny words on those pictures of cats. I mean, “Caturday"?” Whomever thought of that should get the Nobel Peace Prize or something. Genius.

In conclusion, to answer what I’ve been doing through the month of June is this: working on something. Something I’ll show off pretty soon.

…are not here. Nor will they ever be on here.

I should also add that as I was taking the laptop out of the box, I didn’t take the first picture. Thus, I have no pictures to post. Even if, for some bizarre reason, I took some pictures while removing it from the shipping packaging, I do not see how that would interest anyone other than myself.

While I got that computer (and the thrill of a new tool), people still care too much about the opening and viewing of the innards of the packaging of technology. I say, for me and my house, we will not care that much about every new thing that shows up from the FedEx man. To be so obsessed with new things that you need to feed the desires just to know what’s in the box bugs me, really.

Also note, I bought a PC. Or, pc, I guess. That stands for “personal computer.” It is not a Mac (nor a Macintosh, nor anything OS X-y). I changed allegiances, and I’ll deal with that more in the future.

For now, I just want to revel in the knowledge that somebody out there is going into fits because I moved from a Mac to Windows.

A few days ago, I wrote a FAQ for d3ft.com. In it, I answer both things that you may wonder, and things that I’ve actually had to answer. As more questions arise, I’ll answer them, as well as add them to the list.

The need for answers came from answering the same question repeatedly: d3ft? Is that, like, a word? Or Something? Seriously, how did that happen?

Therefore, the FAQ. No better way to answer questions, than to provide answers, I say. The events that led me to write it came from two main misconceptions: (1) I grow tired of having to explain the domain name; and (2) I hope to someday educate all peoples on how you refer to a name by the object, not the identifier (e.g. refer to d3ft punk as punk, rather than d3ft).

A recent web comic brought to light something I’m not sure anyone really knows. For whatever reason, I adopted the nom de plume of “d3ft punk” shortly after registering this domain. It was a combination of the four–letter .com top–level domain, and a reference to a relevant, pop–culture phenomena, the techno band, Daft Punk.

Click the image to see it full–sized.

Sadly, only after reading the first panel three times was I sure I was safe. I just had to be sure, you know, because of the spelling. As an aside, it’s comics like this that prove this is inaccurate.

Last week I added a category titled simply, “Things.” It’s the place I keep the reviews of things I find in the Universe. There are many things in the Universe, and I have an opinion on many of them, some of which could be helpful for others, such as yourself.

Since I decided that I wanted to start reviewing things, I figured, like all good users of WordPress, I would add a plugin or two that would help me express my opinions (in 3200 database calls or less). Perusing the options for ratings plugins, I wondered to myself, “Why don’t I just use some Unicode stars?” And so I did just that.

While trying to over–think this, I just decided that I would just put in the star ratings. On a scale of 1 to 5, how good or bad is this thing? Since this isn’t YouTube, there isn’t going to be the inevitable 2.5 rating that almost every video on the site gets after the wisdom of crowds takes hold.

Then, I use an obscure HTML tag that I can only guess I’m not supposed to anymore. The <big> tag takes something that looks like this:

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

And makes it look like this:

★ ★ ★ ★

The fun thing is, since this isn’t driven by some sort of CSS hack, and by an honest–to–goodness tag, it’ll show up in your RSS reader of choice. And it better show up larger, because I don’t really want to add a whole lot to each review. Gotta fill up some space, you know. Nothing worse than having your point made, and then not padding it to make it seem like you have more to say, when you really should just stop. People don’t like brevity, anymore. Give ’em a few 19–sentence paragraphs, that’ll show ’em.

And that is exactly why I don’t add anything else.¹ If I post a terrible review, you’ll probably want to know why it was so bad. You’ll probably use some sort of internet search engine to find other reviews of the same thing. You’ll then see that others thought the item was either as good or bad as I said it was, or much better or worse.

Since you have your own opinion of things, you’ll probably take my review and let it shape your opinion. It could be that you can let my words (really just Unicode stars) embolden your own decision. It could also be that I set your soul ablaze with a seething rage. Anywise, I hope that my terse, prosaic entries help others who want to know about things.

1. Okay, so I add some snide remarks in the excerpt. That’s just because Google gets upset when you don’t have enough content in a post. Go figure. ↩

Here, I present to you, an unaltered screenshot from my iPhone, taken on the 19th of March of this year. In it, an advertisement for a certain wireless cellular company that wants to assure people that its products are as good (or better) than any of its major competitors.

This is an advertisement run in an iPhone app, that could only run on an iPhone, that could only use one cellular data network.¹ AT&T was the only company that could buy space on this network (ads for iPhone apps). How in the world did this even happen?

Let us hope when Apple is doing its “tasteful” iAds they don’t have trainwrecks of logic like this.

1. This was before the iPad was available for purchase, so it had to be on an iPhone. ↩

I’ve always been concise with my post titles. This is, as I am told, a problem for the web–skimming general populace. The problem with concise titles is that they don’t convey enough information to entice the reader to stop skimming the article titles and read the post.

While trying to create a title for a blog post about some random, anecdotal thing that happened to me this evening, I was going to use a fairly long post title that I figured would amuse…well…me. But the length caused the title to break into several lines. For whatever personal reason, I do not like post titles that take up more than one line.

The irony, of course, that I put together a design with humungous post titles. Therefore, I need a way to break up those long titles. There are at least three ways I know of to achieve this:

1. Truncate your post title, then add it to the post
2. Add break tags (<br />) to the title
3. Go with a shorter title, add the rest to the post

To truncate your post title, you would need to then add additional tags inside your post to differentiate it from the normal text. Not only will this make your post look goofy, it could confuse people. I constantly remind myself that the majority of traffic for this site is from the US, and this is the country that has yet to outlaw soap operas for gross stupidity and contributing to the sloth of the citizenry. That means, stupid people live here, don’t confuse them.

You could add break tags to the post title, but that would cause all kinds of behind–the–scenes problems. Mainly, search engines (read: Google) will index your context with strange HTML entities. Unless you like the way that WordPress will mangle your post title with extra characters, it is best not to give WordPress the chance to mess something up.

What I do (and what I suggest you should do, as well), is just to add that incredible wit and wisdom to your post. That will require another title, but your anecdote probably wasn’t as interesting as you thought it was. Another major benefit of this is it will probably be the best way to make you better as a writer, other than just writing.

The shorter title does not, however, always bode well for search engine optimization (SEO). Sorry. I’m not saying that anyone will read your original, un–formulaic–ly titled post, it’s just that it will look better. The web will look better. I will be able to sleep at night.

For some odd reason, the second–most used search term that sends traffic to this site is “xkcd sucks.” Most of the time, with that capitalization. Most of the time, with that exact phrase, “xkcd sucks.”It is an odd coincidence that my personal opinion deviates so from the entrance point for so many people searching on the internet for evidence that, in reality, xkcd sucks.

Please tell me you’ve clicked that link. Have you? In the off–chance that you haven’t clicked that link, do it now. I’ll be patiently waiting here, a mere step away in your browser’s history.

Just going to check my Twitter, while I’m waiting.

Be back any time now.

Hmm, Zoroastrianism. I wonder if that was the symbolization that Jacob was working on in that tapestry he was sewing right before Ben shived him? That would explain the duality of Smokey and Jacob, but could you logically go from there to Tawaret?

[THREE HOURS OF FASCINATED CLICKING]

Err…that wasn’t supposed to happen. Sorry about that. Um, in conclusion, uh, I don’t think XKCD sucks.

This thing lets you stylize Twitter tweets in the way they (sorta) look on their site. And they sorta look like they do on your site. Sorta.

This raises questions, like, is this the next big thing? Or is it just a gimmick to waste bloggers’ time? Are they going to make it easier for bloggers (and other, more reputable outlets, like, uh, news sites and such) to take an individual tweet and post it? And is there some enterprising person out there crafting a WordPress plugin (as we speak) to take advantage of this to add every one of their boring–life–having tweets to their personal–ramblings blog (such as this one?)^1,2,3 And the biggest question, is it that much better than the old style screenshot version?

1. HINT HINT.
2. Not that I’m going to beg, or anything.
3. But, yeah, please? ↩