Super Ginormous

Category: Personal

Posts of a more personal nature.

  • Proud Granny

    On the way into work today, I stopped and got gas at a station I frequent at least once a week. A new clerk was working this morning. When I went to pay, here’s part of the conversation we had:

    Clerk: You work at John Deere?Me: No, ma’am. I got the hat for free when I bought a tractor from them.Clerk: Oh, okay. I have a new grandbaby comin’ soon.Me: Congratulations.Clerk: Ya see, JCPenney’s was havin’ this sale this past weekend. They had this cute little camouflage outfit and I got for my grandbaby. It had the John Deere logo on it.Me: … (I didn’t know how to respond)

    I don’t think I’ll be wearing this hat out in public again.

  • Tragedy

    Words escape me when I think about the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech today. A Columbia County resident was among those killed. It’s hard to even imagine how senseless acts like this occur…

  • Feed

    I just finished up “Feed” by M.T. Anderson tonight. Man… what a good book! I picked it up based on the recommendation of a complete stranger, and I was not disappointed at all.

    Imagine a future where everyone’s plugged in… People have microchips implanted in their heads that connects them to the Feed. The Feed constantly delivers news, information, music, and so on based on how you feel, what you want, and more.

    I can’t help but think about how we’re inundated with so much information on a daily basis, and how much of it I choose to voluntarily consume… The book really struck a nerve with me, and really challenged me to unplug myself from the feed. I would definitely check the book out. I highly recommend it.

  • Wireless

    Well, this morning I ended up picking up a DI-624M from CompUSA, brought it home, installed it and didn’t have any problems. Then I tried to setup WEP, which shouldn’t have been a problem. But one thing led to another and the router ended up not working at all. Trying to reset the router to factory defaults didn’t work at all.

    A quick trip back to CompUSA resulted in me getting a cheaper D-Link router: the D-Link WBR-1310. It’s an 802.11g/b router with less range than my previous router, but I don’t bring my laptop outside much anyway. I was able to get my laptop, my wife’s laptop, the Wii, and the 360 all connected to the new router within about 10 minutes. I didn’t bother with WEP this time, but I may enable it at some point if I see that neighbors are leeching connectivity from me.

    What a way to kill a Saturday.

  • Optimization

    In an effort to conserve GPUs on my new web host, I’ve been taking the advice of OpenSwitch’s Ben Gray and trying to optimize this site as much as possible. I’ve temporarily killed the Flickr photos I had displayed on the sidebar, and made a few other tweaks to cut down on the number of queries on page load… I usually get less traffic on the site during the weekend so now’s a perfect time to do some testing and optimization of the site.

  • Browse the Archives

    I added an Archives page to the site last night. You can now easily view posts on cdharrison.com by Month or by Category/Subject. A few of the earlier posts you’ll find in the archives appeared as part of a column I had in the Augusta State University student newspaper, The Bell Ringer.

  • RSS Fair Use?

    If you publish an RSS feed, does it give others the right to repurpose your content as they see fit?

    I have been noticing frequent trackbacks from a couple of sites when I’ve tagged articles with a keyword of “adsense”. On the surface, this isn’t a big deal. When I checked the sites out, however, I realized they were nothing more than Content Scraping Spam Blogs. I sent a note asking for one particular site to stop scraping my content and the guy had the audacity to send this to me:

    “Dude, I am not scraping your content, I’m linking to your site with a small quote. Most people are happy to have free links to their site. If you don’t want anyone else to link to your site then why are you syndicating it with a feed?  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication

    Take down your feed or at least put a notice that no one else can use it.”

    What are your thoughts on this? If I have a publicly available feed, does it give others the right to re-syndicate that content without the author’s permission?

  • Conduct

    So the idea of a blogger code of conduct is being tossed around… My first thought after reading it was “You’re kidding me, right? This is the Internet and trolls aren’t going away anytime soon.” Greg Storey’s response to it is the best I’ve seen so far…

    You’re on my site and these are my thoughts. I do not moderate comments, except in the event where someone has posted spam, obscene messages, hate speech, etc. that has somehow made it through Spam Karma, Bad Behavior and Akismet. If a comment is posted that I find objectionable, I will delete the comment and take steps to make sure you can’t comment here again. I’m not going to write something inflammatory about other bloggers, coworkers, clients, etc. on my site because it’s common sense not to do so. I am responsible for what I write online, and I know that.

    I don’t think a Blogger’s Code of Conduct is a terrible and/or outlandish idea, but it’s completely unnecessary.

    What do you think about the Blogger’s Code of Conduct? Is it necessary? Will you subscribe to its policies on your site?

  • Ending AdSense

    Last month, I decided to place Google AdSense ads onto single entries on the site. 1.5 weeks later I’m ending the AdSense Experiment. In practice, AdSense is a good idea, but for a small site like this it’s unnecessary and adds nothing to my site. I learned a few things during the experiment:

    1. Ads aren’t always relevent. As a matter of fact, I’ve found that most of the ads that appeared on this site were very irrelevant and border-line offensive. Ads asking “Are You Gay?” don’t have anything to do with anything on this site.
    2. I don’t get enough traffic to warrant sufficient click-throughs. One or two clicks here and there doesn’t equate to much. Over time, it might add up, but at what cost?

    Why even bother with this sort of stuff? Well, this site’s always been a place where I could experiment. Whether it’s trying to get better at HTML, PHP and/or CSS; search engine optimization; site monetization; etc… I’ve tried to use this site to learn ways to add value to customers I service at my day job. After all, why suggest anything to a client if you haven’t tried something and succeeded at it yourself? You should never be content with what you know in this field. If you are, you’re going to get left behind.

  • Switch

    The one thing that has really surprised since moving this site to it’s new home is just how well WordPress works in the environment it was intended for.

    I had been running the site on a Windows 2000 Server under IIS 5 with PHP4 installed. For the most part, the site was usable, but little things either didn’t work at all or stopped working after a while. Stuff like notifications, paging, auto-creating thumbnails, etc. stopped working. In order to get cleaner URLs, I had to resort to PHP.ini and ISAPI filter hacks. It worked, but not like one would hope and/or expect.

    Now, everything just works. I should have made this switch a while ago.