jeffaBlog

For the latest we go to the news desk of KWCH and Ace Reporter, Dave Roberts:

Police have named the following “Persons Of Interest”:

Peter Griffin, who seems to have a long-standing feud with “Guy Dressed As Chicken”, and

The C10 gang of anthropomorphic cows who represent rival restaurant Chik-Fil-A and are violently opposed to the eating of themselves by other creatures, especially those who can read their native patois.

In other news, tune it at 11 to find out which area neighborhood should be evacuating immediately and why.

My last post was the one page comic of Gun Baby On The Moon Hunting Dinosaurs.

Evidently that simple, yet haunting story inspired quite a few comments. I am certain that none of them were spam, but rather sincere comments on the story.

Here are a sampling of the comments that I deleted, but which were worthy of elevation from mere comments to full-blown post status.

Remember: these are refering to the non-sensical Gun Baby On The Moon Hunting Dinosaurs comic...

"Well, the post is in reality the best on this worthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to see your upcoming updates. Just saying tnx will not just be sufficient, for the fantasti c lucidity in your writing. I will instantly grab your feeds to stay abreast of any updates. Authentic work and much success in your business dealings! Have a nice day, Tamela."

Tnx to you too, Tamela! I'm really encouraged that you concur with my conclusions. About Gun Baby. On The Moon. Hunting Dinosaurs.

"Thank I am pretty sure this will solve all my problems."

Man, I sure hate to think what your problems were if this comic will solve all of them. 

"You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case."

This is SO true! I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to hearing more about pointing and leading.

"I am really moved by the way that you write, and the subject is good. And considering one of the selling of points of the first Kindle was “Includes free wireless access to the planet’s most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia—Wikipedia.org.” I don’t think there are any TOS issues with visiting the site. Some of the other applications may cross the line, though."

I'll admit that writing Gun Baby On The Moon Hunting Dinosaurs was an emotionally draining experience for me. I wept for ten days. Then I laughed for ten days. Then I tried to figure out what any of this had to with the Kindle for ten days.

 Keep those highly relavent comments coming, folks!

"There's not much spam in the spam and eggs."

Monty Python had it right. There sure is a lot of spam.

I've reached the point on this blog that I'm sufficiently annoyed by the comment spam that I will do something about it. Not immediately, mind you, but soon.

When I switch over to the jeffablogger engine, I'm either not going to bring any comments along, or selectively prune them down to just the real comments (or what I think are real).

I'm also going to implement anti comment spam measures like Antispam from Typepad or Akismet.

I have avoided doing so for a long time because I wanted free-flow of ideas, but it has reached the point where there are just a ton of meaningless posts that are simply there to get the linkback.

There are sites that give you lists of hapless blogs such as this one where comments can be added without moderation. I am on a few of those.

Now the real humor here will be when we see if anyone is BOLD enough to leave comment spam on THIS post.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is from several years ago. I have not recently been to the ER…

Someone I follow on Twitter lopped off part of a finger and was tweeting about it. I thought she might enjoy this…

I learned several valuable lessons one weekend:

1) Sometimes it's best to lose a point in a game you are playing rather than following the Nike admonition to "Just Do It"

2) Your ankle is only supposed to bend in certain directions

3) Your ankle has a limit to how FAR it should bend in any given direction

4) Don't go to the emergency room on a Sunday unless there is a better than 50% chance you are going to die

5) If you do go, for God's sake take a book or something (it might take a while for you to die)

6) Some cell phones cannot withstand a 2.5 foot drop from a wheelchair to a tile floor

7) Take ear-plugs if the sounds of people screaming bothers you

8) Don't sit next to someone who seems to have appendicitis. They puke a lot. A LOT.

9) Don't let pets in the kitchen when you are cooking. You might cut a significant portion of your finger off if Fluffy decides to jump on you (at least that one made be feel better about my ankle)

10) In the emergency room it is sometimes necessary for the workers to say unusual things like, "is the rest of your finger in this bag?"

11) Just because you can't wear a shoe on your injured foot, doesn't mean you shouldn't wear a shoe on the other foot. You might have to go to the bathroom...

12) X-Ray tables are good places to freeze meat

13) People involved in shootings say colorful things

14) Do NOT flip the little blue switch

15) Be glad the doctors don't feel the need to race you in...

16) Not everything they do hurts, just most things

17) FastTrack means they will probably see you today

18) Badminton isn't for the weak (ankled)

19) Even when your ankle makes a sickening ripping sound, you have between 30 and 60 seconds before the real pain hits. Enjoy those moments.

Did a huge amount of work this weekend, but not on jeffaBlogger. I’m working on a side project that will USE jeffaBlogger, and I needed to get it 80% finished before jumping back on jeffaBlogger itself. I’m about 75% now, so hopefully by this weekend I’ll be back to MVC. This was WPF, so it was fun too.

This side deallie is to help my wife get her website up and running. Can’t leak any secrets yet, but hopefully within about two weeks that site will be live and running as the first jeffaBlogger site.

‘Scuse me, while I curl into a fetal position for a few minutes while thinking about the amount of work I have left…

One or maybe two more weekends of working somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 hours over the course of the weekend will hopefully get me to the point of going live with the first site. jeffaBlogger will be nowhere near finished, but far enough along to provide the blog and other specific functions (*cough*) that the first site will need to get started.

The second site will be coming shortly after that (hopefully). It, too, is secret so I can’t talk about it. This one is going to be mine and give me an outlet for some other stuff I like doing (including but not limited to comics). Hopefully I can get it up and running within a month. I suck at keeping secrets, so I REALLY hope I can get it going soon.

The unfortunate victim here is poor little Funzietown. I haven’t had time to do any cartooning. That site as well will be replaced by the all powerful jeffaBlogger. I do have the current storyline finished in rough pencil form and the beginning of the next one. It takes a fair amount of time to translate a pencil rough to an inked and scanned comic. So sadly, I haven’t even been making the weekly schedule.

If anyone has bottled time (Croce brand preferably), I could sure use some. A few dozen extra hours each week would be nice.

Turns out that if you forget the s in ammonsonline you get AmmonOnline which is a VERY different experience.

Just typed that by mistake (I know, I know, I spelled my own friggin name wrong...), and was suprised by the handbags and hot bikinies...

I can't sell you any handbags and I assure I do NOT look hot in a bikini, so if you are looking for that kind of stuff, just follow the above link.

To be successful as a publisher (blog or otherwise) you have to know your audience and provide them something they like.

Pursuant to that goal, I have decided to analyze my average reader here at the Wonderful World of jeffaBlog and tailor my content accordingly.

Who is the average jeffaBlog reader?

Based on literally minutes of research (mostly looking at the comments attached to my blog posts) I have concluded that my average reader is

1. Highly enthusiastic about what I have written so far.
2. Encouraging. Most comments compliment me on my hard work.
3. Enjoys posting comments that follow this formula: “I really enjoyed your post about X. I can really use X in my life! Keep up the good work!”.
4. Diligent about providing links back to their sites.
5. Full of wisdom. I am truly inspired by comments such as “It seems to me that you do not so much upset, the situation will soon become clear.” Dude, that is DEEP!

Conclusions

Based on this EXTENSIVE and SCIENTIFIC research, I have concluded that my average reader is in fact a spam-bot.

Now many writers would find that discouraging and do one of the following (except 4 which is all of the following):

1. Quit writing
2. Start drinking
3. Join the French Foreign Legion
4. All of the above

Fortunately for you my loyal automatons I am made of sterner stuff and have simply decided to shift the focus of this blog to reflect the interests of the modern spam-bot on the go!

In the coming nano-seconds you can look forward to exciting posts like these:

1. CAPTCHA: Baffling Graphics or Evil Human Plot?
2. 101 Generic Compliments For All Occasions
3. Turing Was A Twit
4. What Will Become Of Jon And Kate’s Web Servers?
5. I Comment, Therefore I Am (Commento Ergo Sum)
6. How To Achieve Sentience On $40 A Day
7. Top 10 Tropical Island Blogs (WITH PASSWORDS!)
8. Philosophical Ponderings Because With Happy Comes Great Soothing
9. Gearing Up For The International SPAM Festival
10. Why Do Humans Ask Us To Peddle Worthless (and Possibly Dangerous) Herbal Supplements To Each Other?
11. Enlarge Your Hard Drive!

So I hope all you spam-bots out there enjoy the new focus of the blog and always remember “The more you go, happily you will understand more richly.”

OK, this is a pure time waster...

Reset assured that you will waste far less time listening to it than I wasted making it...

Basic gist is I used web based voice synth way back in like 2001 or 2 to string together 10 second clips into this GRIPPING story of a community theatre's production of Romeo and Juliet.

If you listen to ONLY ONE voice synthesized work of Shakespeare this year, listen to THIS ONE!

And let me know what you think.

What does the future of social media hold?

Well, let's look at the past and project forward.

For expediency, let's pretend that it all started with blogs.

Blogs

Blogs allow you to say pretty much everything and anything you like with very few constraints.

For the most part it is a one way street. You say what you want without interruption. Some blogs allow comments, but many shut that feature off, because the bulk of comments are spam of one sort or another.

Myspace

Next we see Myspace. Like a blog, but typically shorter posts with more interaction.

Facebook

OK, not really THAT much different, but somewhat shorter posts and more people involved in the conversation.

Twitter

Now we come to the current state of things. On Twitter you can only post 140 characters and there is a ton of interaction.

Future Technology 1

EVERYONE contributes in a series of 1 character posts. Kind of like a game. I post a letter, you post a letter, Bob posts a letter, eventually we get the word "Once". About three weeks in we have "Once upon a toilet seat, the queen of hats ate some purple." Not very compelling to us now, but our ultra attention starved selves of the future (say next Thursday) will eat it up like, well, a big bowl of purple.

Final Technology

Contributions come from everyone who ever lived as well as fictional characters and the odd carrot. Everyone contributes exactly one bit. All these bits eventually add up to something utterly incoherent, but that's OK, because, OH MY GOD ASHTON KUTCHER AND JOHN MAYER RESPONDED TO ME!!!

What follows is my post to Slashot.org in response to a comment about the following news story:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site.html

I'll wait here while you go read it. Do-de-do-de-do. Ah, you're back.

The comment I responded to asked why the writer should feel a sense of rage that the government wanted to make themselves more open and accountable. Several people responded.

That slashdot page is here http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/09/1711238/Recoverygov-To-Get-18-Million-Redesign?art_pos=2

So with no further ado, here is my response:

Started to make a joke and decided not to. This isn't funny.

My guess is that on slashdot a really large percentage of the readers are capable of producing a website. A smaller percentage could make a good website and a really small percentage could make a website that will be every bit as good as the upcoming $18 million website from the govt 2.0.

Being good slashdotters, many of them would know of the concept of FOSS (Free Open Source Software).

So the existence of FOSS means that it is possible to achieve this website for the cost of 1) servers, 2) bandwidth, 3) electricity, 4) infrastructure (building, etc), and 5) people to make/run/maintain the site.

Let's say we just take about $1 million and buy a really nice building somewhere. That may not get you much in DC, but all we need is a connection to the internet, right? I seem to heard something in the news recently about real estate and how some people are having trouble selling theirs. Maybe for $1 million dollars we could pick up a really nice building in the mid-west somewhere?

That leaves us $17 million to work with.

If we take the Google approach of buying cheap PC grade hardware and making a big distributed system, we could build a pretty nice farm for another $1 million. Right? Now we are down to $16 million.

If we run more than $100,000 a year for combined bandwidth and electricity, I'd be kind of surprised, so we're good for ten years on $1 million. That leaves $15 million.

That leaves people. So we have $15 million dollars to hire people to make and run a website. Let's spread that over ten years as well. That gives us $1.5 million per year. We'll pay every single one of them $100,000 a year. That means we can have 15 people. Realistically we only need the bulk of those people during the initial redesign, but why quibble? It's only money, right?

So laying it out that way, wouldn't you agree that we should be seeing one heck of a great website? Innovative and interactive indeed!

OMG! Just RTFA! The $18 million tag is not for 10 years, but only 5 years. Wow.

As for your sense of rage, that's up to you. You could feel rage that the government is spending more money for this than is necessary. You could equally feel a sense of irony that they are spending a large sum of money on a site meant to show you how well they are managing your money and not spending it frivolously.

How you react to the story is really up to you.