Super Ginormous

Month: December 2006

  • Tag, I’m it.

    Another day, another meme. Thanks for the tag, Jesse.

    Christmas MEME

    1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?
    Hot Chocolate, with marshmallows.
    2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree?
    Both. It depends on the gift :)
    3. Colored Light on Tree/House or White?
    White.
    4. Do you hang mistletoe?
    Nope.
    5. When do you put your decorations up?
    Early December is when I start. I eventually hope to finish putting them up/out sometime around Christmas.
    6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)?
    Deviled eggs.
    7. Favorite holiday memory as a child?
    Getting buttloads of Ninja Turtles from Santa. Me and my brothers were in heaven that morning.
    8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
    Can’t pinpoint an exact time. I think I sort of knew the truth at some point, but it’s the idea of Santa that’s more important than whether he’s real or not.
    9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?
    Yes. An unfortunate necessity when you try to spend Christmas with both sides of your family.
    10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree?
    Randomly. :)
    11. Snow. Love it or dread it?
    LOVE IT. Miss it. :(
    12. Can you ice skate?
    Umm, not really. But I can fall especially well.
    13. Do you remember your favorite gift?
    Hmm, it’s hard to pick a single thing…. but I’d probably say my iPod is one of my faves.
    14. What’s the most important thing about Christmas to you?
    Being with family; celebrating the birth of Christ.
    15. What is your favorite holiday dessert?
    Cheesecake. I know it’s not strictly a holiday dessert. I just only tend to eat it during the holidays.
    16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?
    Watching A Christmas Story over and over again.
    17. What tops your tree?
    An angel, because my wife says so. :P If it were up to me, we’d have an iPod on top, or something.
    18. Which do you prefer, giving or receiving?
    Giving. Though, receiving ain’t half bad.
    19. What is your favorite Christmas song?
    Hmm… Christmas in Hollis, by Run DMC? :)
    20. Candy Canes. Yuck or Yum?
    Meh. I’ve got to be in the mood for em.

    I’m tagging:

  • New WP Tiger Admin 3.0 Released

    The WordPress Tiger Admin plugin has been updated to version 3.0. It’s been completely redesigned, and has much better compatibility with the newest WordPress features. I’ve been using this plugin for quite some time now, and this latest release is phenomenal.

    read more | digg story

  • Change is afoot

    I’m going to begin the process of migrating the site over to Sandbox in a couple of days. Right now, I’m using something loosely based on Qwilm!, but I want something a little more standardized, with better semantic markup as the basis for my site.

  • Ripple

    It started with a simple post on Digg – “New Apple.com Design Coming”. (It has 1253 diggs as of right now.) A user reportedly found a design on someone’s site and posted it to Digg.com saying: “I found this image from desudesu.com. ‘It’s design test for Fantasy Interactive for the next generation of apple.com site’ says the caption. It looks quite great to me.”

    I caught it early, under Upcoming Stories,  before it even made it to the homepage. I posted the first comment:

    Looks nice, but I’m going to have to call BS. A “design test” doesn’t mean, “this is the new design for apple.com”. They probably asked the guy to submit a concept for a site he’d love to redesign.
    Sorry, no digg.

    All’s well and fine, right?

    Enter Kyle Neal of Warpspire.com. I subscribe to his feed (mainly because I’m interested in his work on Hemingway), and noticed a post from him within an hour: Spotting a fake: “New apple design”. Evidently, someone else noticed it too, because the story got Dugg. (Since yesterday, his post has received 1100 diggs.) Some of that traffic ended up bleeding over to my site because I had posted in the comments.

    I mention all of this, because yesterday I had double the amount of traffic (102 unique visitors) to my site than my previous high (56 visitors). (Yeah, I realize those aren’t real impressive numbers.) When you consider that my site doesn’t get a lot of traffic at all (maybe 30-35 unique visitors a day), this spike is pretty significant. People are always looking for ways to drive more traffic to their site, but sometimes all it takes is to get involved in a discussion. I’m sure Kyle’s site experienced a lot more traffic than that… but it’s interesting that the Digg effect rippled over to my own site to some extent.

    I use this site mainly for testing. I blog from time to time (fairly irregularly, I might add). But I’ve been able to boost my Google PageRank to a PR4 by continually gettting in on the discussion, whether it’s on Digg, Warpspire or any other number of sites. So if you’re looking for a good, legitimate way to drive traffic to your site, get involved, say something worthwhile, and people will take note.

  • Thirsty

    Full Throttle Family

    Lately I’ve been on an energy drink kick. If I had to choose a favorite, I’d probably say Full Throttle and its’ two other flavors, Blue Demon and Fury, would be it. (Sonic’s Full Throttle Fury Slush is awesome, BTW.) But I digress, that’s not really what I wanted to post about.

    At home, I drink a concoction that could be described as “Mud”, “Dirty Water”, “Dirty Toilet Water”, etc. It looks disgusting. Because the color of the beverage is a very – umm – odd-looking shade of brown. What is this odd concoction? It’s 50% Orange Juice, 50% Pepsi (or a cola of your choice). I’m not quite sure when or where I picked up the idea for this drink, but I love it. My wife, on the other hand, nearly gags everytime she sees me drink it. (And she didn’t appreciate how much Tyler seemed to like it either.) I’ll try to post a picture of it later. If I had thought about it, I would have snapped one last night while I was drinking it…

    I suppose it goes back to when I was a kid, when me and my brothers would mix “Suicides” together at fast food places. In Germany, we called them Mezzo Mixes, because Fanta actually had a soda out that was a combination of several soda flavors called a Mezzo Mix. Depending on my mood, I’ll mix most sodas together… Orange Fanta, Coke, and Sprite is a personal favorite, with Fruit Punch and Coke a close second. Funny thing is, the last time I ate at a Burger King I noticed something odd at their beverage counter… They have drink recipes decals on the soda dispensers! Mix 1 part X with 1 part Y and it makes Z. And here I thought I was the only sicko that enjoyed mixing it up a bit.

    What kind of weird drinks do you like?

    Speaking of beverages – check this out.

  • Interactive News

    The Augusta Chronicle This won’t be big news for people outside of the Augusta area, but I just noticed that if you are a registered user of the Augusta Chronicle website, you can comment on articles.This might make me visit their site more often. I know that newspapers have struggled with retaining subscribers as more and more people start to get their news online, and it’s going to take more innovation like this in order to grab eyes.

    I tend get my news from CNN.com, Google News, Digg, and a hundred other places. I usually avoid the local paper – partly because I don’t care too much for local news and partly because there hasn’t been any real reason for me to keep coming back to the Chronicle website.

    Now, if only they’d consider doing a daily digital delivery (via PDF or something)… I might subscribe to the paper all week long. (Right now, I only get Sunday papers delivered to me.) It would save trees…

  • Testing Live Writer

    This is just a test to see how well Windows Live Writer works. I’ve grown accustomed to using the WordPress backend, but if this makes life easier, I’ll definitely use it. This isn’t the first time I’ve used a third-party app to write to this blog. I used to use w.Bloggar for a time, and it worked well. I just thought it was a little too much for what I wanted to do.

    The interface is very Word-like. That’s not such a bad thing. I like the fact that you can toggle between Normal layout, Web Layout, Web Preview and HTML Code. Normal Layout doesn’t pull in any of your style information. Web Layout let’s you type your post(s) using your stylesheet. Web Preview let’s you preview the post within the context of your site design. It wasn’t perfect when I tried it, but that may be more of an issue with my code and IE than anything else.

    I’d say that all in all I like Writer. It’s easy to use, supports Plugins, writes fairly clean code…