Category Archives: Asides

Cheap proprietary software still costs too much.

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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.

To Software License Group members:

I agree that it is a noble cause to provide students with access to software at a cost that is commensurate with the resources of the average university student. However, with full-priced office suites and programs running as much as $300 to $700, even discounted software can be prohibitively expensive for this university’s students who are most in need of the discount. In the interest of accessibility, this program should be expanded beyond simple discounts.

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The most important writing tool I own: a notebook.

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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. You may not get paid a lot, but you are still a writer — most writers out there just gasped and said, “Yah right, like I do?” If you still don’t believe me, I am the self-appointed authority and I hereby declare you a writer, so don’t argue the point.

As a writer, the thoughts and ideas that flit around your head are the most important things you own. Random thoughts become great works of art …

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You only have one chance to make an impression. Use it well.

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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.

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Blink, Blink…”Whoops”

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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

Didn’t notice anything odd? Take a look at the first 4 days of the month below (focus on the bold column.)

Daily Statistics for February 2008
Day Hits Files Pages Visits KBytes
1 12484 11167 3915 1194 100.954
2 14990 13412 5617 1273 136.491
3 41622 37873 7236 2417 1.288.875
4 62827 58979 7763 3544 2.242.575

If you noticed, Yah, seriously, but if you didn’t: in two days I used as much bandwidth as the previous months. It turns out that on the SoBe Lizard post I added 5 PNG screenshots to the post.

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