Anthology of Ideas

The following is part of an open letter I wrote to an university committee that was surveying students and faculty on the feasibility and desirability of providing discounts to students for popular and expensive software packages. This discount would have been provided by basically sharing the cost among all students by purchasing a large number of licenses and then reselling them at a lower price to interested students. Obviously, I thought there was a better alternative.

Bloggers by definition are writers. They may not write stories, but they write enough to fill many books. It doesn’t matter whether you blog about yourself or random and esoteric topics that only matter to you (cough: guilty). You are still a writer. If you write about yourself, you are writing an autobiography. If you write about current events, you are a journalist. If you write anything at all, you are a columnist, a historian, a science writer, or whatever title you want.

Not only is it going to be a total eclipse… But most of the U.S.A. has good – great viewing weather. Sucks for all of you in the blue and purple. Now if you will excuse me, the light from the computer screen is obscuring my view of the moon.

Note: I have never tested the software below nor will I, I’m only commenting on the way it advertises itself. In the Adsense block, I noticed a CMS named Graffit was advertising itself as a better CMS system than blogging platforms. Out of sheer curiosity, I Googled it. The landing page I found tries to argue that it is better than WordPress as a CMS system, and it goes so far as to declare that it is “Finally … A WordPress alternative.” It argues that it is easier to install than WordPress (it takes only 3 steps instead of 5.) The page then continues with its spiel — including the admission that it only runs on Windows servers and is built in .net — but doesn’t really say anything that doesn’t make me sit up and go “Wow, I wish WordPress did that.” Although this was a custom landing page, I’m not sure it works as expected.

This 17-foot-long, 6-gilled monster of a shark was filmed off the coast of Hawaii. One of the researchers on-board the submarine where this was filmed, reported that it was the biggest shark he has ever seen off the coast of Hawaii. Hat Tip And if that didn’t fulfill your need for sharks. Have fun playing with this one.

Take a look at the following stats and let me know if you see anything odd. Summary by Month Month Monthly Totals KBytes Visits Pages Files Hits Feb 2008 3769739 8427 24576 121569 132159 Jan 2008 3634098 36357 131454 429936 478043 <p> Didn&#8217;t notice anything odd? Take a look at the first 4 days of the month below (focus on the bold column.) </p> <table border="2" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" width="400"> <tr> <th colspan="13" align="center" bgcolor="#c0c0c0"> Daily Statistics for February 2008 </th> </tr> <tr> <th align="center" bgcolor="#c0c0c0"> Day </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#008040"> Hits </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#0080ff"> Files </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#00e0ff"> Pages </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#ffff00"> Visits </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#ff0000"> KBytes </th> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> 1 </td> <td align="right"> 12484 </td> <td align="right"> 11167 </td> <td align="right"> 3915 </td> <td align="right"> 1194 </td> <td align="right"> <b>100.954</b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> 2 </td> <td align="right"> 14990 </td> <td align="right"> 13412 </td> <td align="right"> 5617 </td> <td align="right"> 1273 </td> <td align="right"> <b>136.491</b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> 3 </td> <td align="right"> 41622 </td> <td align="right"> 37873 </td> <td align="right"> 7236 </td> <td align="right"> 2417 </td> <td align="right"> <b>1.288.875</b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> 4 </td> <td align="right"> 62827 </td> <td align="right"> 58979 </td> <td align="right"> 7763 </td> <td align="right"> 3544 </td> <td align="right"> <b>2.242.575</b> </td> </tr> </table> <p> If you noticed, Yah, seriously, but if you didn&#8217;t: in two days I used as much bandwidth as the previous months.

The following is part of an open letter I wrote to an university committee that was surveying students and faculty on the feasibility and desirability of providing discounts to students for popular and expensive software packages. This discount would have been provided by basically sharing the cost among all students by purchasing a large number of licenses and then reselling them at a lower price to interested students. Obviously, I thought there was a better alternative.

Bloggers by definition are writers. They may not write stories, but they write enough to fill many books. It doesn’t matter whether you blog about yourself or random and esoteric topics that only matter to you (cough: guilty). You are still a writer. If you write about yourself, you are writing an autobiography. If you write about current events, you are a journalist. If you write anything at all, you are a columnist, a historian, a science writer, or whatever title you want.

Not only is it going to be a total eclipse… But most of the U.S.A. has good – great viewing weather. Sucks for all of you in the blue and purple. Now if you will excuse me, the light from the computer screen is obscuring my view of the moon.

Note: I have never tested the software below nor will I, I’m only commenting on the way it advertises itself. In the Adsense block, I noticed a CMS named Graffit was advertising itself as a better CMS system than blogging platforms. Out of sheer curiosity, I Googled it. The landing page I found tries to argue that it is better than WordPress as a CMS system, and it goes so far as to declare that it is “Finally … A WordPress alternative.” It argues that it is easier to install than WordPress (it takes only 3 steps instead of 5.) The page then continues with its spiel — including the admission that it only runs on Windows servers and is built in .net — but doesn’t really say anything that doesn’t make me sit up and go “Wow, I wish WordPress did that.” Although this was a custom landing page, I’m not sure it works as expected.

This 17-foot-long, 6-gilled monster of a shark was filmed off the coast of Hawaii. One of the researchers on-board the submarine where this was filmed, reported that it was the biggest shark he has ever seen off the coast of Hawaii. Hat Tip And if that didn’t fulfill your need for sharks. Have fun playing with this one.

Take a look at the following stats and let me know if you see anything odd. Summary by Month Month Monthly Totals KBytes Visits Pages Files Hits Feb 2008 3769739 8427 24576 121569 132159 Jan 2008 3634098 36357 131454 429936 478043 <p> Didn&#8217;t notice anything odd? Take a look at the first 4 days of the month below (focus on the bold column.) </p> <table border="2" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" width="400"> <tr> <th colspan="13" align="center" bgcolor="#c0c0c0"> Daily Statistics for February 2008 </th> </tr> <tr> <th align="center" bgcolor="#c0c0c0"> Day </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#008040"> Hits </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#0080ff"> Files </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#00e0ff"> Pages </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#ffff00"> Visits </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#ff0000"> KBytes </th> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> 1 </td> <td align="right"> 12484 </td> <td align="right"> 11167 </td> <td align="right"> 3915 </td> <td align="right"> 1194 </td> <td align="right"> <b>100.954</b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> 2 </td> <td align="right"> 14990 </td> <td align="right"> 13412 </td> <td align="right"> 5617 </td> <td align="right"> 1273 </td> <td align="right"> <b>136.491</b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> 3 </td> <td align="right"> 41622 </td> <td align="right"> 37873 </td> <td align="right"> 7236 </td> <td align="right"> 2417 </td> <td align="right"> <b>1.288.875</b> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> 4 </td> <td align="right"> 62827 </td> <td align="right"> 58979 </td> <td align="right"> 7763 </td> <td align="right"> 3544 </td> <td align="right"> <b>2.242.575</b> </td> </tr> </table> <p> If you noticed, Yah, seriously, but if you didn&#8217;t: in two days I used as much bandwidth as the previous months.