I made it!

Well, if I don't count the fact that my one post was a comment/post “in exile” while the server was down on the 16th of October, I have succeeded in posting every day this month. I've been meaning to attempt this ever since Christopher accomplished the same feat in February.

Hope everyone had a nice Halloween yesterday. Did you get many Trick-or-Treaters? I probably had 35-40… my uncle, who lives near by, got about 80!

Having a WITty Day

Well, Christopher is busy this week, so he invited me (as well as some really great bloggers, a few of which are on my blogroll) to “sub” for him. I just put up my first post; it's about reading blogs. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, so why not stop by and give your comments, here.

Bzip2: Ubercompressor for Everyone

I realized I had filled up my hosting quota (ouch!) and so I logged onto ssh and started to clean up my account. I found asisaid.com's logs were about 20 megabytes and FaithTree.com's were taking up a pretty good amount too (although I had started those over about two months ago), so I compressed 'em to start fresh. Thanks to the powerful bzip2 compression tool, I was able to take about 30 total megs of logs and shrink them to about 2 megabytes using bzip2's best compression mode.

So that leads to two points: (1) If you tried to post here and couldn't, please try again — there's room now. I think this may have been the problem with CS-FSLUG too, so CS members should try reposting as well. (2) Try bzip2 if you haven't previously.

And the moral of the story: watch out for runaway log files!

Well, There's Always Next Month

[Update: Since I quoted the text that would have gone on the blog if it had been up, I took Kevin's advice and backdated this entry.]
Up until yesterday I was proceeding along well with my goal to blog at least once a day for an entire month (previously I've never gone for 15 days without at least a one day pause). Unfortunately something took down at least a good portion of the datacenter my site is in, thus preventing me from continuing my attempts.

Unfortunately something else [other than yesterday morning's Slashdotting] has taken down my sites, all of my clients' sites, and my hosting company’s site for the last three or four hours (must be something bigger than a simple Slashdotting or such, since they have 20 or more servers and they all seem to be MIA at the moment). sigh I’ve been trying to post a blog entry every day this month, so I guess this comment will have to count as one because it certainly doesn’t look like my server will be back up any time soon.

At first, the obvious solution seemed to be to just do a post on Sakamuyo, but its on the same company's systems as asisaid, so that didn't work either. Oh well.

More Stock

For those that missed the last issuing of stock, I've issued more asisaid.com shares of stock at BlogShares. Take a look, here.

Get yer asisaid shares!

Well, I haven't been messing with BlogShares much lately, but I decided to today. I accidentally pushed this blog way over the edge and crashed it to 1/4 its old BlogShares value. It has almost regained all of its value however from me buying a large number of newly issued shares (and through some other buying I've almost gotten back to my old $4.3 million in BlogShares worth).

At any rate, there are presently 700 newly issued shares available at $23.38 a piece. If you'd like a few shares, why not jump over here right now? This is an ideal time to pick up new asisaid.com shares if you lost yours when Just James Productions quite maliciously did a hostile takeover last month.

Disclaimer: For anyone who isn't familiar with BlogShares, this is a fantasy stockmarket. I'm not really worth 4.3 mil., and the money you use to by asisaid.com shares is fictional money. Just thought I'd mention that in case you'd never heard of BlogShares before.

New Day, New Blogs

Well, I seem to be on a blog adding mode at the moment. I've added two new blogs that I think should make nice additions to the blogroll.

• David's Journal - David McGlone is a friend of mine I met, hmm, I can't remember any more! Anyway, I met him a long time ago on the SuSE-Linux-E mailing list, and he has since been on other mailing lists I'm on, most notably FaithTree.com/OfB.biz's own ChristianSource and OfB-Talk mailing lists. He's new to the blogosphere, so give him a hearty welcome!
• DogfightAtBankstown - This looks like an interesting blog from down under with a wide array of stuff. “Saint in a Straitjacket,” the writer, stopped by and commented here a week or two ago and I've been reading the blog since then. I like it!

Have a nice Saturday afternoon!

Mysterium Tremendum

Well, I ran into a new blog tonight called Mysterium Tremendum. It looks pretty interesting, so you'll now find it on my blog roll.

What really caught my attention was the title. It is derived from Rudolf Otto's statement “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” (which roughly means trembling and fascinating mystery), a description Otto used to describe Holy or numinous experience. It's a good statement, I think, for describing the experience of the Holy and if the name of a site can be any kind of indication, it ought to signify a good new blog starting up.

Anyway, uiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur. (Ten points to the first commenter who knows what that means).

Go Endorse Tony!

The Blogger's Congress has a nomination process going on for caucus leaders. Tony “I Am Always Right” Rosen currently needs three more nominations by tonight if he is going to compete in the election and try for the title of “Supreme Potentate” (his choice of titles) of the Blogger's Congress. If you haven't nominated someone already, why not nominate him?

The International Small Town

On e-mail lists, I've met a number of great people that I've later gotten to know better via private e-mail or perhaps even a phone conversation. I've also made a lot of friends on the list I started with a few fellow Christian GNU/Linux users last year. It's small enough people can post a bit more about themselves there. However, for the most part, the people still feel distant. Personal web sites also seem somewhat distant, perhaps because they are often stale and non-interactive.

Blogging is different. I really feel like I “know” many of the bloggers on my blogroll even if I only know them through blogging. Through blog postings you sort of experience what the people are going through in a way that seems very different than other forms of remote communication. Comments and trackbacks also help in this respect.

It's interesting too how the different “communities” of the blogosphere form, perhaps that's part of the charm. It's like a small town. I might link to something Kevin or Christopher has to say or some such. Sometimes its just a link, sometimes it starts something much larger than just a link — such as Pressed's Southern Baptist posts that got me motivated to write on the UCC's current state (Part III is on the way).

Like a small town, when someone new “moves in,” word spreads pretty quickly. When Sophoristically Speaking launched, it took only a month or two for many blogs I read, and my blog, to link to it. While this happens in the web at large, it doesn't happen nearly as much. I posted stuff on my site when it was just a site and didn't have a blog, and it went largely unnoticed in the billions of pages on the internet. It was only entering the blogosphere, or more precisely, the small community of it that I'm largely in, that I really started to get interaction about what I posted.

By small community, I'm referring to the set of bloggers that I link to that largely link back and forth between each other. Like a small community, probably each “resident” knows people they border on that others in the community might not have met yet. For instance, Josiah “flickerfly” Richie's blog links mostly go to blogs outside of the community of bloggers I link to. But, as I link to stuff he mentions and vise versa (as he recently did on a post or two of mine), those communities come together to an extent like two small towns converging toward their borders.

Through this method, you get to meet a lot of great people. My personal experience with blogging began when Ciaran gave me this blogging script. I read his blog, but I didn't venture out into the blogosphere. Then another friend of mine, Kevin started a blog and slowly reading comments and visiting links I was “introduced” to bloggers he read, such as Christopher. From there I went on to run into Pressed, Le Renard, Susan and Katie, Tony, Justin (Sophorist) and others. In a reverse manor I met Jake and Owen (of the late gooddogbaddog.ca).

The interesting thing about this community within the blogospheres is that it may actually be more of a “virtual community.” In that there are no real boundaries, each blogger exists in a community that is slightly different than his neighbors. My “community” covers a slightly different region of the blogosphere than another blogger's community. I can't simply say “my blog is located in Blogosville.” To someone outside of the blogosphere, there is no community, only an incomprehensible number of blogs. However, once inside the blogosphere this “virtual community” forms between one's blog and the blogs of those who read and link back and forth to that blog. Certainly not a community in the sense we are use to in the physical world, but still strangely similar in many senses.

All of this is part of the nature of the blogosphere and makes blogging the interesting activity it is. I wonder — are different sectors of the blogosphere sort of forming a replacement for the small community that most of us no longer have the opportunity to live in? How will these “virtual communities” grow and change in the future? And most of all, are you thinking I'm off my rocker for talking about virtual communities at all?