Super Ginormous

Category: Personal

Posts of a more personal nature.

  • Success

    If you’re seeing this post, you’re seeing the site on the new MediaTemple server.

  • Migration

    I’m in the process of moving my site and a few others under my control to their new home, over at MediaTemple. I’m not sure how long it will take for the DNS changes to propagate. Your patience is appreciated.

  • Naked Day

    Nope, you’re not seeing things: Today is April 5th and that means it’s NAKED DAY! The stylesheet has been disabled on this site in support of the 2nd Annual CSS Naked Day. (This is the first year that I’ve participated in the event. Last year had 763 official participants!) The idea behind NAKED DAY is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. To learn more more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

  • Cold Turkey

    I deleted my Twitter account last night.

    To some this was an odd and unexpected decision, so I’ll try to explain my rationale a bit…

    Some time ago, I mentioned reading a book called “Choosing to Cheat” by Andy Stanley. The basic premise behind the book is ‘Who wins when work and family collide?’. Andy talks more about finding a balance between work and family, but I think it can be more far-reaching than that. Every little thing we do in life takes time from something else. Twitter, for me, is one of those ‘little things’. It is a great web app that I have truly enjoyed using. It is, for the most part, a wonderful insight into other people’s lives.

    But, Twitter takes time, and that isn’t something I have a lot of these days. Time spent using Twitter takes time from work and it takes time from my family, and that’s not fair to either of them. So, my account is gone… but I am not.

    In all honesty, this has made me reconsider my usage of a lot of ‘Web 2.0’ services. Signing up, just for the sake of signing up, is really counter-productive. But that’s a post for another day.

  • Build it and spam will come.

    Anytime anything gets popular on the web, spammers exploit it. Case in point, I received a friend request from someone last night who’s sole purpose on Twitter was to show which chores they were working on, and provided a link to a web app they were promoting to help keep track of their chores. Umm, why would I want to read that? No thanks. Some people are a little more covert about it. One guy I was subscribed to started innocently enough… but then there was post after post about visiting a coffee shop and check out the coffee shop website and check out this blog and… Had to remove that person.

    MySpace is infested with spam. Try viewing any bands’ MySpace profiles without wading through dozens upon dozens of “comments from friends” trying to solicit people to sign up for a VISA card or whatever…

    YouTube is getting awful as well. No one cares about angels sleeping, or any of your retarded chain letters. No one wants to watch your video to learn how they can make money.

    Stop breathing my air you venomous bloodsuckers! There are plenty of legitimate advertising opportunities that are out there if you are, in fact, running a legitimate business. The fact that so many of these idiots think its okay to try and sneak advertising into comments really blows my mind. Do you honestly believe I’m going to click your ads or respond to your chain letters?

    Think again.

  • AdSense

    I hate advertising as much as the next person, but I quietly added Google AdSense to the site earlier this week. Right now, it’s only a test, and I’ve tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible: Ads only appears on individual post pages. If you happen to subscribe to my RSS feed, you probably won’t even notice.

    What do you think about the addition of ads? Love em? Hate em? Let me know…

    In the meantime, if you’d like to support this site, feel free to check out what some of the advertisers happen to be, umm, advertising…

  • Unacceptable

    I’m still in shock over the news that Kathy Sierra, a fairly well-known blogger, author and speaker, was on the receiving end of some pretty heinous threats online. [See Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)] The threats were/are serious enough that Kathy has canceled speaking engagements and basically shut herself off from the rest of the world.The Constitution affords us the right to free speech – even hate speech, but your rights end when your “free speech” threatens to take the life of another. There is no place for this kind of BS in the world. There are some sick and, quite frankly, sad people out there. It isn’t funny. A line has been crossed and I hope the sick individuals responsible are caught and punished to the full extent of the law.Kathy, you’re in my thoughts and prayers. I hope justice will be quickly served.Thanks, Jina, for the idea about posting about this to raise awareness.

  • Foreign

    I collected comics significantly before I met my wife. I’d spend anywhere between $100-150 a month (at least) on them… buying everything from issues of Spawn to imported Japanese Manga to a silver Superman ring. I love comics, and I can’t wait until my son gets older and I can share my love of comics with him (and perhaps even give him the books I currently own). But I learned something this morning as I stepped inside a comic book store for the first time in nearly 6 years: I’ve been left behind.

    As I stared at the shelves of comics, I felt lost. Even though the staples were there – Batman, Spiderman, Spawn, etc. – they all seemed so foreign to me. I went with the intention of buying at least one book, for old time’s sake, but left empty-handed and depressed. As we get older our priorities change. Things we loved even a decade ago probably seem incredibly foreign to us today. I’m sure I could probably go back and eventually find something I wanted, but the magic just wasn’t there.

  • Refocus

    I’ve kind of gotten off-track with where I had hoped to take the site (again). It’s so easy to post Wiikly Updates and Heroes’ graphic novel stuff… It doesn’t require much thought (or time). I really need to refocus on what I want to do with this site. In the meantime…

    Are you on VIRB° yet? I’ve been amazed at how quickly it’s taken off… Let’s face it… MySpace sucks, but for some awful reason it’s popular with all the cool kids *blech*. (I’ll never understand the success of MySpace.) VIRB° is much better. You’ve got complete control over your profile. You can create custom modules, modify existing modules, modify the page structure and CSS to your heart’s delight. It doesn’t require any sort of crappy “hack”, like what is required with MySpace. VIRB° was built with flexibility in mind. You can check me out on VIRB° at virb.com/cdharrison.

    I’ve also been using Twitter and Flickr more often. Now that I’m able to send and receive SMS/MMS messages on my cellphone, I’ve been posting tweets and moblog entries like mad! The fact that I can make posts whether I am tethered to a computer or not is definitely a bonus. Since it’s a lot easier for me to post on the go, you can be certain that you’ll see more content along those streams…

  • Permalinks

    Permalinks on the site have been updated, thanks to this great tutorial and this ISAPI Filter from Dean Lee. The old link structures: http://cdharrison.com/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and http://cdharrison.com/index.php/%page%/ will still continue to function. (Amen!) But now, the index.php is no longer required in the URL. This has been one of the things that I have absolutely hated about my install of WordPress, and now, it’s a thing of the past.

    Now I need to figure out why notifications aren’t being sent from my server…