Posting Daily

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.

Things You Can Do While You Wait for Tumblr to Come Back to Life

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 Eats

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.

Harry Reid Ruins the Easiest Football Story Ever, and Other Stuff

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. ↩

Tweet of the Day


I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPadStevie Johnson
StevieJohnson13

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.

Just Start Doing the Thing

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.

Change? Yeah, Change.

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. ↩

Expect Changes

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.

D3ft Funk

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, August the 13th

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.

Bad Behavior

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).

Something for Job Applications

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).

Look at What I Did

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.

Wither Thou, June?

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.

Photos of the Unboxing of My New Dell Studio 15″ Laptop

…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.

Way to Target Those Markets!

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.

So don’t even think of leaving

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. ↩

Breaking Up Long Post Titles

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.

I Don’t Think XKCD Sucks

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.

Twitter Repost Stylings

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.

We’re done. Amen.less than a minute ago via EchofonCarlton Cuse
CarltonCuse

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?

We’re done. Amen.

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

Havok 2.0

After weeks of work, trying to gussy up the place, I’m finally ready to show off the completed work. This is a major milestone in the development of the WordPress theme that displays on this site.

Havok was the rather haphazardly chosen name of the theme I was working on when I was trying to make another, incredibly minimalist theme. I was going for nothing but words. I ended up with that, plus a couple of images. From the start it was never intended to evolve. Yet, evolve it did.

From The Internets

I’ve uploaded a few pictures onto my Picasa account to show off just how much it changed. The fact that I’ve already changed the footer—twice—before I could write this post should tell you that this is more of a constant work in progress than an endpoint.1 You should be happy about that–some sites never change.

So come by, kick the tires, click some links. Tell me if I’ve completely messed everything up. There are a lot of CSS3 elements in here that you really need to check out. If you are just reading this in a feed reader or aggregator, you are totally missing out on the fun.

  1. By the time this was published, the theme was up to version 2.1. ↩