Give Me an Assignment!

You get to decide what to post to your own blog, but what about someone else's? Here's your chance to boss me around. The readers of asisaid can discuss what they would like me to post about, and I will blog about the topic agreed upon by the comment posters to this post. Here's a few requirements: (1) it should be a topic I can discuss within a typical sized post, certainly not more than two pages and (2) it should not require research of any substantial sort. If you were thinking of assigning me to write the book you always wish had been written, I'm sorry, but I cannot promise I'll do that.

So what do you think? Post your ideas below. I will not be commenting in the comments for this post — it is up to you and your fellow asisaid readers to come to a consensus on this.

The Blogroll

Here are some blogroll items I've been meaning to do and/or ask about:

asisaid Blogroll now with a personal touch: I decided to give my blogroll a more personal touch by switching from blog names to the names of the bloggers. Here's how I did it: if you publish your whole name on your site, your whole name went on the roll. If you publish only your first name and/or I am aware that you don't really want your whole name tied to your blog, I only included your first name or first name plus last initial. If I made a mistake, let me know. If I didn't put down your last name and you don't care if I do, comment below; if I did put down your last name and you don't want it listed, let me know that too. Thanks!

I also added a link to a blog by a friend of mine who just joined the blogosphere. Go take a look at Deep Thought and give Chris a hardy welcome! It looks like it should be an interesting blog for those interested in Macs (Chris has contributed a couple commentaries to OfB.biz, including one I mentioned the other day).

please ping weblogs.com: I'd like to ask a favor, if I may. If you have a blog, please “ping” (your weblog software should support XML-RPC pinging) weblogs.com and/or blogrolling.com when you update your blog. If your blog is at the bottom of my blogroll, that probably means you never ping and therefore blogrolling never moves your name to the top of my list. If you ping, then I'll know when you've updated and that means I (and others using BlogRolling's or Wordpress's ability to denote updated blogs) can enjoy your new posts.

blogrolling asisaid.com: In a similar vein, if you are blogrolling me, remember that the address I ping is http://asisaid.com/journal/, not just http://asisaid.com/ or http://www.asisaid.com/ or any other variation. Therefore, if you are wondering why update notification never works on my blog, you now know why. It is rather unfortunate that the XML-RPC ping spec does not provide a convenient way to provide alternate URL's (as far as I know), but since it doesn't, the address must be exactly the correct one for update notification to work.

Contest!

I was thinking about asisaid points, and I decided it is high time that I made them useful. Therefore, the first person to earn 350 asisaid points will get:

• A 1 year purchase of the domain name of their choice (under the .com/.net/.org/.us/.biz/.info or a few other top level domains). Yourname.com is nice to have if you don't have it already. ($5.95 value)
• 3 months of ServerForest.com web hosting's Maple plan — a $60 value. Here's what you get:
  • 500 MB disk space
  • 24000 MB transfer per month
  • 80 e-mail addresses
  • 30 extra (sub)domains
  • 6 MySQL databases
  • 15 FTP accounts
  • Urchin Professional Statistics
  • Protected by my new Spam Blacklists configuration
  After three months you can keep the account, downgrade to a smaller account or cancel it. This is your choice. Your dealing with me, not AOL, so have no fear about getting stuck.
  

Now if you're saying, “I already have a hosting account,” that's OK, you can take the domain and skip the hosting (or vise versa). If neither item is of any interest, well, maybe I'll think of something else too.

Here's how it will work: I'll post questions that offer asisaid points a bit more frequently than I have in the past. If you are the first person to answer the question correctly, you'll earn your way toward the prize. This is on the honor system — I trust that my readers will not use Google or any other similar service to get the answer. I reserve the right to disqualify a participant who I have deemed to be failing to honor this request.

The small print.
Void where prohibited. No cash value, no purchase necessary. To enter, you must be a regular visitor to asisaid, as judged by Tim — this means regular commenting and not simply coming over to this site to try to get points. You know if you're regular or not. Most anyone who has commented on this site prior to this announcement is a regular. Offer expires June 1, 2005, when someone has earned the set 350 points or when Tim deems it necessary to stop. If either of the services offered become unavailable a substitution may be made or the offer may be revoked. Personal contact information will be required by the domain registrar for the WHOIS record, therefore participants in the contest must be 18 years of age or older.

Blog Spam

For the first time, my blog is being hit by blog spam. Since my blog requires a confirmation to post, I think it is fairly unfriendly to the average stupid spam bot, but someone has been on here posting generic posts of anti-Bush quotes over the last few days. If that person reads this, I do consider “boiler plate” comments — those written to go anywhere and everywhere and not specifically in response to this blog — a form of spam, and I will take the necessary measures with your ISP to put an end to this if you do not cease immediately (yes, I have logged you).

Don't play games with me.

Question For You, The Reader

I have a question for you, the readers of asisaid. Starting last week, I restarted ChristianSource's Bible Study. We are going through the book of Hosea at the moment. The way it works is that I post a link to that week's Bible reading (one chapter) and a few questions which I cannot promise will be particularly profound or anything like that. It also comes with the encouragement for participants to add their own questions to the discussion

Ok, so here is the question: would anyone not presently interested in being on CS be interested in participating? If so, let me know, and maybe I'll start posting the study here too.

Don't Miss the Music Man Post

With the long Kerry post, I'm a bit worried some might miss the lighter hearted “Music Man” post if you weren't hear earlier this evening. Click here to read it, or scroll down to it below the Kerry entry to find it (read the Kerry piece too, of course).

Tired

I was going to write a nice post, but all of a sudden I feel completely drained and exhausted and I think I will hit the sack instead. Maybe tomorrow…

What in Tarnation is this!?!?!?

I went over to Christopher's blog when my blogroll noted that the site had been updated and I found quite a surprise there! Asisaid has received Christopher's blog of the month award.

May 2004: As I Said

Needless to say that was a great surprise. Thanks Christopher!

Life Mimicks Humor

Remember last year when I joked about being Dan Richardson? Well, now I'm in trouble. It seems like the real Dan Richardson read that post and is suing me now for tarnishing his name. Here's the letter I got today from his attorney:

Johkin, Laffen and Funknee, LLP

Dear Mr. Butler:
Our client has notified us that you have engaged in acts of impersonation of his identity on your site. Our client has since received questions from potential employers who found this information when searching the Google search engine about him. We have calculated a net loss of over $28,000 in actual damages since you posted this message last year.

This is your official notice that our client is filing suit against you and shall attempt to retreive the $28,000 plus punitive damages for this disgraceful action on your part. If you are interested in settling this dispute, our client is open to accepting $26,000 upfront to drop litigation.

Thank-you,
Arntu Laffen
Johkin, Laffen and Funknee, LLP

Trip Down Memory Lane

Perhaps it was the fact that, despite forgetting to write about it, my blog turned two on March 4. Maybe it was something else. But, I spent a little while tonight browsing the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine looking at some of my favorite blogs back when I first discovered them. In particular, I was looking at the two blogs I've been reading the longest that still exist: Sakamuyo and What in Tarnation!?!?!?.

It was interesting to look back into what Kevin and Christopher were saying in 2002. It was interesting to see what the respective sites looked like at the time. Sakamuyo was still in its green theme with Kevin talking about his new hard disk on which he was going to install two or three GNU/Linux distributions (Kevin has since betrayed the PC world and switched to Mac). On the other hand, I took a look at WIT as of November 2002, when I first started reading it, and Christopher was answering a Friday Five about thanksgiving (incidentally, that post was the first one I commented on at his site).

That's definitely one of the great things about WayBackMachine — it's really neat to get a snapshot of the way things were a few years back. Maybe reminiscing about web sites is a geeky thing to do, but when you've come to think of the people behind the sites as friends, maybe its not. It is sort of like a blending together of a photo album and old news paper clippings. Or something like that. A nice thing to do on a Saturday afternoon when nothing else terribly urgent had to be done.