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Those of you using a feed reader, load up http://www.doycetesterman.com/atom.xml.

- random-average.com is live. random.average-bear.com still work, for now, but the days are numbered.
- average-bear.com is moving to a different location on the server, which is making a number of programs like movabletype very angry.

By "complex" I mean, "an often hastily cobbled together solution that somehow manages to accrete enough history and mass that simple removal of the resultant organism is possibly dangerous, and attempts to control, rebuild, or unify the whole is passively (or actively) resisted."

I pack a lot of meaning into a single word.

((I've also packed this entry with analogies. This is self-musing, so if you don't like how it comes out, well... tough.))

Average-bear/random-average (and, before that, bears-cave) is something quite beyond a landmark in my online timeline. Significant sections of the website date back to the mid to early nineties; taken as a whole, the site informally documents well over a decade of my life in one form or another -- in very real ways, it *is* the timeline. (Unfortunately, in some ways it's a very outdated one, and was not helped at all by the recent loss of the main blog templates, which served only to remove the site's look and feel, without actually making any of it more accessible.)

The problem is, the site is very much like a house that I've been living in for the past 13 years.

Alone. (With guests over, yes, but still...)

I built the house myself. I didn't actually know how to build a house at the beginning, and didn't get organized until five or six years after beginning -- until then, everything was basically one big entry room with a lot of crowded closets. And no chairs. Or windows.

I've switching building tools a number of times, and moved to different neighborhoods with different zoning laws...

In short, it's a mess. Although it causes me pain from time to time, the smartest thing I did early on in my blog-building (which only covers about half of the life of the site itself) was to separate my gaming-related posts into their own blog, where they could flourish in a garden of minutia. I never did that with any of my other interests, and now...

Here's the deal: I need to set up an author-site.

I know what I'd like to include within that site. I know the author sites that don't go anywhere near as far as I'd like to go in making it personal (Cory Doctorow's), those that are almost-but-not-quite enough (Gaiman) and those that put so much crap on there that it's not a writer's site -- it's just a personal website with a blog from someone who happens to write (Average-bear).

So I feel that what I'd like to do is:
1. Break random-average off into it's own domain, with all the gaming stuff therein, well and truly separate. That's easy.
2. Create a clean new site. (Mostly done. Empty, but mostly done.)
3. "Fill in" the site's blog archives with pieces of relevant stuff from this site. (So much harder than it sounds -- 3400+ posts to sort through for possible export?)
4. Archive average-bear and move on.

I'm not sure I can accomplish #3 without (a) shaking the current site to pieces or (b) polluting the new site with the same poor organization. Even if successful, it'll take ages.

Why do it?

Because there IS a lot of history here, and I'd like to carry at least some of that over.

Also, I need the stuff on this site. Well, I need three things, really.

1. The gaming space (listed first because it's easiest).
2. The writing space.
3. The living space, in which i can talk about home improvement projects, travel adventures, and my extended family shenanigans. (I *need* that, personally. The blog has become my diary/journal/history, if nothing else.)

I want two and three to be the same place, if at all possible, because i really do NOT want a situation involving three different sites, in which two are specialty sub-areas and the third becomes the dumping ground for the other eight-tenths of my life.

Another thought occurs to me -- moving a few things from here to the author site, and some of truly pedestrian (read: personal) bits over to doyceandkate.us, into some kind of communal blog. The Money Pit entries... most of the pictures and geeky fanboy stuff.

That might work. It's still going to require a painful sorting process as I figure out what's going to stay in the old place when I move, but that's the pain of every move to a new house, right?

I apologize for this post -- this is really boring behind-the-curtain stuff that I would normally only inflict on a couple people via a CC'd email, but I feel like thinking out(very)loud today.

kt literary - your home for deft literary agenting and lowercase optimism

Kate and I spent pretty much the whole New Year's weekend assembling the site, up to and including.

• Domain registration (okay, that was a few days earlier)
  
• Setting up a new installation of Movable Type
  
• Setting up the front page (which cries out to be a Flash animation at some point)
  
• Customizing an oswd.org design
  
• Getting the design to work with MT 4s 'improved' template organization (a new arrangement of SixApart's that gives me pain in parts of my brain I didn't even know could hurt)
  
• Getting in content
  
• Getting the backend pages like archives and the like to basically match the site without the pain of totally rebuilding their templates
  

All in all, it came off pretty damn swimmingly and (to quote De) pretty much screams "Kate" from one end of the site to the other. What more, aside from functionality, could you want from a site representing your business?

One annoying quirk with the site that we still haven't decided if we're going to try to fix: the "main content" section of each page is stupidly narrow if you view the site in Internet Explorer 6.0. The code for the related /div is clean as far as I can tell, and it displays just fine in Firefox or IE 7.0, so... yeah... either upgrade your IE installation or (my recommendation) switch to Firefox, because I don't like putting time into fixing code to be compatible with outdated browsers.

Feedback (or some way to force IE6 to display the damned content div correctly) is welcome.

January: Goodbyes are a total crap idea in general, and I'd rather have no part in them.
February: This year has been so much more full, that it makes it seem as though more time has been compressed into the same number of days.
March: So we ate, we danced, I proposed, she shrieked and cried and finally said yes, then cried some more, said some very funny things, and then we resumed dancing.
April: I'm getting married in exactly one year.
May: I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth this evening. You should watch this movie.
June: As she moves that elbow, even the tiniest little bit, it starts again - surprised and hurt and confused, like she can't understand what she's doing wrong - and my heart, people, it is breaking, breaking, and broken.
July: Your religion (or, more broadly, your faith) is like your car.
August: Been too tired to blog, but I finished the Triathlon.
September: I found my dogs!
October: So let's say you're folding your laundry, naked.
November: As Kate mentions here, the most recent anthology from Wicked Words finally hit the US shelves this week, and reviewers have been very friendly to the story we had in the book.
December: I have a literary agent.

You may or may not notice (most of you), and you may or may not care (all of you with much much better things to do), but I've managed to get some of the features I've been a-missing back in their rightful place here at the Casa. Notably:

- The Flickr Badge, shuffling pictures for my enjoyment off on the sidebar. (Thanks Amanda!)
- The Google-powered search.
- The Google-powered "shared posts" window, which shows you folks the things out on the internet that I've (a) found interesting, (b) thought you might also, and (c) didn't want to write a whole blog post about it. Things that are (a) and (b) become blog posts. The rest of it shows up there.

Nothing more to add beyond that, it's an update to the tweaking going on behind the scenes to get this page into a form I really like. It's getting there.

In order to cut down on the (insane) upswing in spam comments on the average-bear blogs, I've added a "Turing Test" on the comments; just before you post, you'll see a little line that asks you to put in a specific letter before trying to post. If you don't do this, the post will fail.

Sorry for the inconvenience; it is unavoidable.

Kaylee has what I call "rehearsal mode". Every few hours she'll pick a phrase she finds interesting and repeat it, with full emotion and body language, until the words have lost all meaning to me. This morning, the phrase was:

"*gasp* Oh, the baby is sooooo cute!"

-----

I lost the code for embedding the little flickr picture-show/scrambler thing in my sidebar. I miss it a lot, and I can't find the program anywhere on the internet. It makes me sad.

-----

Moblogging via flickr/movable type still isn't working.

-----

124 days!

-----

Kaylee showed me how to take a bow this weekend. The end result, with her bent nearly double, her arms flung to the sky and hands flipped around like a stage magician, is Made of Pure Win.

-----

I'm buying a new mattress for Christmas. My back would like it to be Christmas now, please.

-----

Windshield still has a huge crack in it.

-----

My DNA thwarts me in mid-winter. As much as I work to maintain a good weight, the only things that smell instantly good are fried, grilled, or chili. The idea of a salad, even a big one, makes me cringe at an evolutionary level, unless I imagine the thing swimming in dressing.

-----

I'd really like to fly back to SoDak and see everyone.

I'm fiddling with the templates and layout for the front page, using one of the older 'official' MT templates as the baseline. I'd love to use the 4.0 templates but... well, I don't have the time to learn what feels like a whole new html language so I can piece the damn things back into one file again.

Anyway, the front page is a plain-jane simple layout I'll be tweaking when I get some time. It utilizes the full screen, which I want, and isn't grayscale, which I also want. I need to put the links to other sections of the site back in, get my flicker links back in, my Google Reader 'shared' box back in (and it's settings tweaked), and generally play with the colors and such. That's my to-do list, but I'm not going to get to it til probably the new year. This'll do for now.

Most of you are seeing this through a feed-reader anyway.

... ever since I upgraded to 4.01 of MoveableType. Hopefully there will be some fix for that soon, but for now it's simply "the reason I haven't posted much this week."

So, in lieu of that, here are some pix from this weekend.

Kaylee likes to take the game controller and pretend it's a camera. She's notoriously difficult about actually LOOKING at a camera, or even sitting still, so I hit on the idea of "taking turns" taking pictures Sunday morning -- she 'took a picture' of me with her 'camera', then I snapped one of her. Brilliant!

Okay, so I upgraded to Moveable Type 4.0.1 a week ago. Here are a few thoughts:

- Can't tell that I upgraded? Yeah, the reason for that is that I'm still using my old 3.x templates for all my blogs. I didn't actually INTEND to do that -- one of the main reasons I upgraded was to reset Average-bear to a fresh, blank, MT 4.0 compliant template for the main page and then break customize it.

Problem: I can't FIND any such templates, either available within the tool, or on the MT website, so the old templates linger.

- It's pretty. It really is. From the point of view of someone making new posts, it's a really nice interface, and they've added some nice functionality.

- It's REALLY HARD to find anything. Yes, the interface is pretty, but it's very very different from everything that has gone before, and I still can't find a number of things that it should NOT be that hard to find: the list of banned commenters, for example, or a way to make a "QuickPost" bookmark (which I JUST found, while writing this, as a "drag and drop" option at the bottom of my entry-post window... and NO WHERE else. That's a fine secondary place to put it, but it should be easier to find. Also, it appears that I need a quick-post link for each of my blogs, which is stupid.

Hell, it took me about four tries to find a link to "Write an Entry," just now, after a week of using it. That should be the easiest to find, biggest damn button on nearly every screen in the program.

Anyway: good, but requiring a LOT of getting used to.

Average-bear.com blog comments (and only those for Average Bear) are kind of... umm... broken right now. Badly.

No idea why, as I haven't been messing with anything, so... I don't really know what I need to fix.

Right. I'll fiddle with stuff and let you know if any of it works.

Spam = Email you don't want.

Bacon = Email you want, but not right now (google alerts, newletters, mailing list messages, etc).

Coined only this weekend, its use is exploding over the inter-tubes. Perhaps not the perfect word for the thing it refers to* (Dave, at least, would probably argue that Bacon is never 'not wanted right now'), it definitely identifies a specific thing that NEEDS a name... and arguably also a solution for managing it.

(* - though neither was "spam")

About a month back, following the kerfluffle over SiteMeter, I switched to Google Analytics for monitoring the visitor specifics on my website.

In that time:
- average-bear has averaged just a little over 100 visits a day, mostly to the main blog page (the rest being mostly visits to the all-gaming RandomAverage Wiki). The majority of that (62%) has been direct traffic (which I read as "clicked through from an RSS reader"), and the remainder was split somewhat evenly between Referring Sites and Google searches that led people here.

By contrast
- Fireflywiki.org averages about 600 visitors a day. The majority (65%) comes to the site via search engines (one-fifth of those searches are either for Firefly or Firefly Wiki, specifically), and only a tiny bit comes in from RSS-feed-like direct-clicks.

In general, I like the analytics reports a lot better than the SiteMeter ones -- they're more informative and give me a lot of info that SM didn't even capture. I'm pleased with the switch: no regrets.

This is why: Betrayal of Trust: is SiteMeter.com Planting a spyware Cookie? (Geek News Central)

Didn't MT used to have a thing where it would close a post to comments after X number of days? It doesn't seem to be there anymore.

Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year

As noted, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

Interesting piece, as is another one the same poster did on low-wattage color palettes for web design. It makes me consider a long-overdue fiddling here.

Like I need another project.

Blogging during the day is somewhat hindered at the moment... apologies for the relative silence: I'm fiddling with a workaround.

Thanks to Rey (ages ago), I got into blogging. Not too very long after that, ***Dave got into blogging and, between the two of us, we've co mutually explored what blogging is about -- what's good about it, what's bad about it, and what the dangers and pitfalls are to the medium. These discoveries became (for me) informal guidelines to follow when blogging, then good rules to observe, and finally (at least for me) the unconscious, inarguable constraints that are "just part" of blogging.

Usually these little rules come after a painful episode where something bit you in the ass:

• You said something about someone who was pissing you off, because you wanted to vent, and they saw it, or a mutual friend did, and drama drama drama.
  
• You bitched about work, and a coworker read it, and showed it to your boss, and drama drama drama.
  
• And so on.
  

What's interesting about this -- or why it came back up to the forefront of my mind, now -- is that some folks I know have recently started blogging (or LiveJournaling, or posting on their MySpace page (why MySpace? WHyyyyyyyyyy?), and are running headlong into The Problems with Blogging.

Veteran Bloggers, see if this sounds familiar?

"I hate having to edit myself on my blog. It's MY blog."

Hmm... let me see if I can find...

... ah! Here it is:

average bear: Bi-monthly self-indulgent whining post

I think the great secret to blog longevity is this: whenever you have one of those days where you think to yourself...

"why am I doing this anymore? this isn't what I started this for; it's not personal anymore, it's not private, it's not really the Journal that I hoped it would be..."

...that you take no significant action whatsoever in regards to those questions. (Honestly, those 'self doubt' days are the worst times to make decisions about anything.)

See, eventually the mood passes and you can get on with what you've been doing.

My current conundrum:
- I want to have a place where I can literally write exactly what my day's been like, what I did, et cetera, without alienating my friends or editing myself.
- For something like that, it would really be best to write the whole thing offline.
- If it's offline, what's the point?

I wrote that about four years ago. I bet I could find a statement similar to that boldfaced line (if not the whole thing) on ***Dave's blog... or really anyone's blog.

That's the main problem of course -- you're essentially (unless your one of those money-making superbloggers) talking to your friends and coworkers when you write on your blog, also (secondarily) to the world in general, and at some point, you realize that talking about how you love spending every night poking your cat with a barbecue fork... you're going to run into problems with the people you know.

There's an old internet-forum rule for discussions that goes like this: "If you wouldn't say to someone's face whatever you're about type in a message -- don't type it." The blog corollary is: "If you wouldn't say this to a room full of your friends, commingling with your coworkers and some family members -- well, don't blog it."

Ugh. Rules.

That's the most annoying Problem with Blogging, but there are more. How do I know? Easy: I did a Google search for "the problem with blogging" and collected some other thoughts on the subject. Here's what The Internets say:

The Problem with Blogging...

• ...is that occasionally, a reader will send you something that makes your head explode.
  Yep, just when you thought you were going to have a nice easy day of talking about the Grammys and posting links to boingBoing articles, someone points out something incredibly stupid about the war in Iraq, and you just have to post something angry that ruins your day. The other aspect of that is when you get someone who comments on your blog with something so... umm... frustratingly... challenging that you just wish you'd never seen it.
  
• ... is that it's so shamelessly self-indulgent.
  Heh. Yeah. To blog is to admit that you like talking about you, and stuff you're interested in, and everyone else.... well, they can get their OWN blog!
  
• ... for me, "Gone are the days of writing."
  and...
  
• ... is one sets a standard. And sometimes it's hard to maintain.
  Blogs are time-consuming. This post will have taken me more than an hour, almost two, to get together, tweak, comment on, and format. One post. It bites into the time you have in a day, and if you build up a habit of high-quality (or high-quantity) posting that happens to be time-consuming -- that means that you're either ALWAYS going to be taking up that much time, or you cut down on the blogging and find yourself posting apologies for not keeping the flow up at it's accustomed level. I distinctly remember someone, last year, saying to Jackie "Hey, where have your Quote of the Days been?!?" and her "I'm sorry! I'm really busy!" reply. I've been there. I've done that. It kinda sucks.
  
• ... is that you can never see what goes on behind the scenes in the lives of these people.
  The toughest things about blogs are that people who usually mean well think they know how your life is going and what's going on with it, based on your blog, and the fact of the matter is this -- it's better than nothing, but everything that anyone puts in a blog, that you read, is taken out of context. Always. For all intents and purposes, there are no exceptions.
  
• ... is how easy it is to be misinterpreted.
  Heh. See above. The blogging format encourages you to write quickly and informally, which sometimes mean you don't choose your words quite as carefully as you might. This can leave you wide-open for flames and criticism, by people who sometimes get what you're saying and sometimes don't.
  
• ... is that it creates a culture of impermanence.
  
  
• ... is that it creates a culture of gossip.
  Something that seems to have dribbled onto the blogosphere from Web forums.
  
• ... is that it creates a culture of spin-control, revisionism, and censorship.
  Blogs tend to get quietly, retroactively edited for content by people who've said things they later find inconvenient, and visitor comments that don't suit the blogger's agenda get quietly deleted. God knows I've done it, as much as I don't like to. History is written by the victor, and if a blog page is exclusively "yours," well, you're always the winner, aren't you? The ability to authoritatively 'publish' your version of history is a terribly tempting thing.
  
• ... is that it creates a false sense of connection to your friends, without the same level of communication that talking face to face/phone calls/even email afford.
  Yeah... nothing more to add there.
  

I still enjoy blogging. It's incredibly valuable to me as a scrapbook, daily notebook, daily snapshot, and a public journal.

Aside from the problems, there are great, great things about blogging...

... maybe next time, I'll post about THAT.

I'm trying out the Google Documents ability to publish to my blog. So far, I can't seem to get the settings entirely right.

Edit: Correction -- got it!

Average-Bear, Random Average, RandomWiki, Fireflywiki.org, and all the other various sites maintained by yours truly are going to be moved to a new server on Sunday.

In theory, this shouldn't do anything to anything -- in reality, it could make a whole bunch of stuff stop working correctly and may require a lot of reworking, some software updates, and the bloody sacrifice of otherwise harmless livestock. We'll see.

Airblogging.com seems to have gone the way of the dodo. I would like to find a replacement service. Specifically, something that'll let me post pictures from my phone up to my blog.

Suggestions?

Think I got it all fixed now. I think.

Next time I see a file filled with leetsp3ak, I'm going to shoot someone.

Just... why are people so fucking stupid?

The blog comments should remember your personal data now.

The formating buttons probably also now work in IE -- I don't see them in Firefox.

Okay, done with template tweaking for now. Retina burn should be somewhat reduced.

Comments related to putting back an obvious date stamp are duly noted -- but not tonight. Tired.

Gonna try out this design for awhile... see if I get sick of it. Input will not result in smiting.

Way too much time on my hands.

And a slightly less annoying one.

After thinking on it for a couple days, I decided to renew the bears-cave domain. Something said during an unrelated conversation reminded me why I got the domain in the first place.

The internet is a shifting sea of crap. Bookmark some brilliant, funny thing and three weeks later that page -- hell, the whole site -- is just gone. Sometimes there's a forwarding link to the author's next new, semi-permanent home... sometimes not.

So, to put it simply, I got bears-cave.com as a service to people who might be semi-interested in my crap: I wanted a link that was at least semi-reliable -- yeah, I rearrange stuff on the domain, but the domain itself is *there*, and the front page of that domain has a pretty damn good site-search tool on it.

So... last week, someone dropped a comment on one of my blog posts that asked if I was the author of [insert old crap I wrote three years ago]. I pointed out where it had moved [*cough*wiki*cough*].

That felt right... felt like the whole reason I'd gotten the domain to begin with.

So I renewed it. All the unrouted spam mail to that domain has to be routed to a big ol' 'fuck off and die' blackhole, but at least people can come back and find stuff where they left it.

Which was always the point. I'd just forgotten.

Umm... I said this in the comments below, but some folks in email seem to be confused, so I'm going to post it for all to see.

Just bears-cave.com domain is going away. That's it.

average bear is still here. Will still be here. The blog will remain and continue in it's inspiring mediocrity.

Folks just won't be able to get here by typing in http://www.bears-cave.com. That's it. Really, no big deal.

(That said, I did think of one thing last night that might induce me to keep bears-cave functional -- I have to chew on it a bit and see how strongly I feel on the subject.)

The bears-cave.com domain dies in four days.

About... hmm... it seems like about a year ago... something like that... about a year ago I picked up average-bear.com and rolled it overtop my old bears-cave.com domain, mostly in an attempt to reduce my incoming spam email -- most of which was thanks to the 400+ pages on this site to which I had once unwittingly appended "Contact us at mymainemailaddress@bears-cave.com", complete with a mailto link once upon a time.

What I can I say? I was young and foolish.

Anyway, the end result is that the bears-cave.com address is irredeemably fouled -- I 'turned on' my old bears-cave email address this morning to see if the spammegedon had subsided and got an advertisement for "FRee NeW Pr-zac" less than a minute later. When my ownership of the domain expires in 30 days I will let it go, and probably gladly -- ten years from now some unwitting fool will reserve the domain and be inundated with 100 emails in the first three seconds simply because the bastards left the spam faucet running after I sold the house.

Which leaves me feeling a bit unsatisfied in the domain department, simply because I've never been one hundred percent in love with average-bear.com. I want something simple -- something not-gimmicky. These asshats have testerman.com locked up for the next year or so, at least (and getting no business from it, I'm glad to see), and doycetesterman.com... yeah, not yet, I think.

Input? iamagoldengod.com might be a little long to type.

Once again, just in case you missed it, Hosting Matters is the best damn domain hosting service in the known yooniverse.

Period.

And Seki is their spokesmodel of kickassedness. That is all.

By a bit of synchronicity, Les linked to an article I'd read this morning on Wired on beefing up Mozilla and Firefox by installing various cool extensions. The article's okay, but not as useful as that other page I was on... damn, where was it?

Ahh, here it is: a really good post with some great extensions that brings Firefox up from barebones browser to sand-kicking-in-face strength. Very cool.

All of which is an unsurprising 'mainstream' trend lately: even microsoft-owned Slate recommends Firefox, fer gawdsakes. Damn.

Anyway, for the sake of information, I've given up Slimbrowser (which, while sweet, is just a different frontend on the security-hole-that-is-Internet-Explorer) on my work machine in favor of Firefox, with the following extensions installed: TabWarning (just because I'm an idiot who closes stuff he shouldn't), Tabbrowser Extensions (which is really useful for getting Firefox to act like other tabbed browsers that I'm used to), TabX, Copy Plain Text (mentioned in the Wired article and darned handy at work when quoting stuff off of vendor sites), and DictionarySearch (ditto :)).

Also, I had to drop in the tiny little RoboForm plug-in to let it work with Mozilla browsers -- it's linked off RoboForm's FAQ somewhere.

My one and only bitch is that I want 'Open Link in New Tab' to be at the to of my right-click menu in Firefox, instead of 'Open Link in New Window'... other than that, I'm loving it -- I'll probably switch over on my home machine as well pretty soon.

Update: Ahh, I figured out how to do that about ten minutes after I wrote this.

A few weeks ago, I had about fifty megs of free space on my Hosting Matters-hosted domain.

I now have five times that amount.

I am paying exactly the same monthly fee that I have since I became one of their happy customers about two years ago.

How? So simple: Hosting Matters increased the amount of disk space and bandwidth you get with all their hosting plans without increasing any prices.

Why? Simply because they are one of the best web hosting teams in existence.

(Also, they've got a nifty new site design. :)

Comments should work again.

Well, they should work for more people than they were working for, again.

To explain, I managed to add the text string 'hi' to MT-Blacklist -- as a result, a lot of innocuous comments and no small number of friendly urls were being dropped into a 'you can't use those words' error screen (which was, itself, also broken).

P.S.: Rebuilding all blog entries officially takes a long damn time.

Dear Internet,

I will be away until next Tuesday. I still love you, I just need some time off.

Thx,

Doyce

W00t! I'm number 5 on Google!

For the... umm... Swedish? Google websearch for Life with an Idiot.

Okay, for those folks following along that don't speak geek:

1. Like lots of folks, I get people pretending to leave real comments on my posts that are, instead, just posting links to porn, viagra, real estate deals, whatever.

2. I have added some code to my blogging software to keep that from happening by blocking people from known Sites 'o Evil.

3. This code makes posting comments take a few more seconds. Please be patient.

Since I went to individual-pages for commenting, my comment spam has quin-maxi-quad-trebled, so I guess it's time to install MT-Blacklist.

... I notice that this plugin zip is remarkably free of... any kind of readme. Hmm.

Six Log: How are you using the tool?

I currently run the following blogs. All are personal hobbies, non-commercial, non-profit, blah blah blah.

• The Average Bear: This Blog. 1 Blog, 1 Author.
• Random Encounters: A RPG Gaming-related Blog, splitting out my RPG gaming stuff from "everything else", not always due to volume as much as the number of Categories that section of my life requires. +1 Blog, +0 authors
• Chrysalis: An active RPG gaming blog for a campaign on which all the players post. +1 Blog, +7 Authors.
• Cry Havoc: a gaming blog for Randy's Cry Havoc Amber DRPG campaign. The game's over and the blog needs to either transfer to his new MT install as either a second blog or (more likely) as static pages to his new domain. +1 Blog (defunct, not counted below), +1 Author (who would still need to be on the list of authors even if the blog went away).
• Hidden Things: a writing blog where I write. .htaccess and robots.txt has this blog hidden away (hence the name), so I don't think this applies to the license. +1 Blog (not counted? I dunno), +0 Authors
• Writing in the Dark: An on-again, off-again blog meant to help writers support each other with attaboys and word counts during things like NaNoWriMo. +1 Blog, currently +4 authors, after I figured out who was already included from the other blogs.
• Pulp Adventures!: An inactive, announcement-only blog for the front page of an RPG game. Should become a static page, because in two years I've posted 13 entries, mostly 'where we're playing next stuff', which I can use the mailing list for more effectively.

So that's 5 active blogs (maybe 6?), 10-12 authors. All of them fall under the Average-bear domain except for Pulp Adventures, which I'm probably disabling soon anyway. No idea where that puts me on the pay scale ($150-$180? heh), since I haven't seen any point in upgrading since 2.64 (which I've already paid forty bucks for in voluntary contributions to 6A).

Frankly, if it came right down to it, I could (I wouldn't want to, but I could) switch those high-author gaming blogs to a wiki, which (a) is good code and (b) doesn't piss around with counting authors for non-profit hobby sites. The one and only reason I haven't is simply because blogging code offers the ability to comment on each entry and creating mini-discussions, which I think promotes the feeling of community more.

Come right down to it, though, I can see a way to hack a standalone comment package to work with a PMWiki pretty easily. I suppose it would be worth it to do so.

Movable Type Commercial License Options.

No. As Dave has already phrased it, I think I will not pay more for less functionality. I'll most certainly continue with the perfectly functional version that I have now until something equally functional comes along (with the ability port over the {{ridiculous number}} posts already in this system.

I've freely donated a couple yuppie foodstamps to the cause before now, and that's all 6A'll see out of me.

Well, I tried to be subtle about it in the last post, but subtle really isn't the thing for you people is it?

Anyway, at the cost of about 30 megs of web space, I changed the way comments work. Feedback appreciated.

So what do you do when you can't fix the last big problem on your PC and you've got an afternoon to kill?

You fiddle with blog templates and write bad noir ripoffs that don't go anywhere.

The sign over the door read S m's B r & E tery, blinking on and off in red. (The a's had been smashed out by some wise guy trying to make a point and regulars with a sense of humor usually left notes with friends saying they were going to 'sm's'.)

Light mist drifted down onto shiny black streets -- motors putted by and threw it back up at the sky in a half-hearted attempt at a life-cycle. Men in dark suits and long coats held the arms of women in war-era dresses as they moved along: the women wore pillbox caps, the men fedoras.

In the nook of a building's entryway, light flared. A hard match held near a hard face, eyes scanning the street over the edge of the wind-blocking hand as the cigarette lit. Headlights washed over the man, revealing a stocky frame that held up a double-breasted suit, black trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat like they’d been hung over a refrigerator to dry out.

He tossed away the match, exhaled, and stepped onto the walk.

-----

People didn’t usually look directly at you in Sm's -- it just wasn’t that kind of place -- that never stopped the bartender from knowing who was sitting down and having a glass ready for him.

"Evening Captain. How's the night treating yah?"

A shrug, a tap of the cigarette. "She around?"

The barman nodded. "In back, cleaning up the poker room."

The man nodded, dropped a bill on the bar and stood.

-----

The woman -- dark gold hair pulled back out of her face -- didn't pause in her table clearing until the man sat down at one of the chairs, set his drink on the table, and shoved it toward her. At that, she sat and drank as the man removed his hat and combed thick fingers back through his hair. Her eyes were on him.

"Long night?"

A nod, eyes on his left hand as it rested on the table.

"Leads?"

He shrugged. "We know who it is, we just have to prove it."

She nodded. "Marty okay?"

He nodded again, hoarding words.

"Do you think it's soon?"

Another nod.

"You're quiet."

A pause. A shrug. He toyed with the ace lying alone on the table's felt.

"Listen, about last --"

"I'm sorry."

She started at the sound of his voice, then processed what he’d said. "No! Don't be, it was just a strange night."

The man looked up finally, his eyes dark. "They're waiting for me."

"At precinct?"

A nod.

"So..." She left it hang there. Cigarette smoke made a try for the ceiling, only to be beaten down by the slowly turning fan over the table.

He leaned forward, elbows to his knees, rubbing at the palm of his left hand with a thick, callused thumb. "I wanted to say --“ He shook his head and started over. “I'm not so good at this, but if you have time, after this is over, maybe we could..."

"Coffee or something?" She said, the corner of her mouth quirking up at the private joke.

He nodded, obviously relieved at the help. "Yeah. That's good, coffee"

-----

Afterwards, she stayed sitting, feeling his last touch on her cheek -- watching the light play in the amber of the drink he'd left behind.

When my old bears-cave.com domain registration finally times out, two-thirds of the people who stop by every day will not be able to find me.

I can't decide if I'm more disturbed that I'm getting hits from:

riaa.com ...
benaffleckfan.com ...
or the Paris Hilton sex video blog (yes, seriously).

For those of you messing around with the Firefly Wiki, you'll be pleased to know I think I fixed that 'cannot display XML' error message.

Apparently, it's caused by the PHP code trying to do something that the Apache server is doing already.

I officially disconnected my old '(at)bears-cave' address yesterday... I've been using the new address for a week or so, but I'd left forwarding on from the old address to the new so that I could flag the non-spam to the old address that I needed to get updated information out to.

I'm done. At least, I'm done enough, and willing to deal with a few headaches from whatever stuff was so minor that it hasn't cropped up already. (After all, if I need to verify my old address to change things over to my new address or something, I can just turn the forwarding on for a few minutes.)

So, if you don't have the new address, holler if you need it.

Also, on the off chance that someone has built an email harvester that can get to a cgi-generated page, I've removed the email-links from the comment-posting page as a just-in-case.

Why using tables for layout is stupid (via Web-Graphics).

...will find such things useful. (Paraphrasing Lincoln).

Many props to Dave for the button.

The website is basically working now (except for some stuff I need to do with blogrolling to straighten things out and), but note that at the moment the subdomains aren't working. This means that cryhavoc., nobilis., random., amber., et cetera are all kind of busted right now, since the system doesn't seem to like my subdomains at the moment.

Old email addresses still work (though I'm going to kill my current email address as soon as I've got most everything important pointed away from it.) My new email address is available upon request, or can be guessed by going for one of the more obvious puns.

Posting to MovableType from FeedDemon

A tip from Jakub Kazecki which enables posting to MovableType directly from FeedDemon.

This website will now ping blogrolling as www.average-bear.com (props to Ian for the idea).

Feedback welcome.

You know, the default rss template from Movable type puts the author's email address right in the header (<$MTEntryAuthorEmail$>) -- I have to think that that sort of thing would be pretty easy for a spam collector to grab.

Maybe <$MTEntryAuthorNickname$> would be a better thing to put in there...

There may be some strange stuff going on tomorrow for awhile -- we're doing stuff with the site and the domains hosted here, so there may be some 'not found' errors for awhile.

Don't freak. We'll be back.

Bears-cave, like anyone else hosted by HostingMatters, has been down today due to a DOS (Denial of Service) attack on one of HostingMatters' clients. In this case, the client is a privately run site that publically 'outs' chat rooms and message boards that are used for terrorist activity. The members of those boards and chats decided to get even (and AT&T frankly seems to have no real way of dealing with that).

But that's not the point of this post.

While all the sites were down and being re-IP'd and so forth, I had a chance to poke around the 'emergency' forums that have been set up by HostingMatters in preparation for just such an event as this -- under a different domain, using different machines, there is little chance that both these boards and the main servers will go down at the same time, barring catastrophe. (Yes, they actually set that up beforehand, and they actually put information there. Shocking.)

Anyway, reading the boards led me to a not-so-startling discovery: people are idiots.

Specifically, I'm speaking of the folks freaking about and threatening to find another hosting service over this DOS adventure. The idea that someone could look at the last couple days and think "I need to go somewhere where the Host is reliable." is the most laughable, sad thing I can imagine. Those folks suggesting that moving to another host will rid them of such difficulties are only displaying their pitiable lack of comprehension regarding the way the internet works. (And a mind-numbing innocence regarding the quality of most host's technical support.)

These attacks happen. Sadly, they happen for a lot of lousy, reprehensible reasons, but that's not the important part of the equation; that's not what matters. What matters is how the hosts deal with it. What matters is the service. What matters is the commitment. Those qualities in a Host are as rare as gold.

HostingMatters is blessed with a staff that goes the extra mile, works extra hours, and makes the extra effort (and it is extra effort) to keep their clients notified of exactly what's going on.

Some other host? Roll the dice, because it's a crapshoot.

I've been with over a dozen providers since '92. I've never seen a team as dedicated, pleasant, and professional as this one -- I'd be proud to be a part of a team like that in any arena (even as, in this case, a client), and all I can say is this: HostingMatters has my support and my (meager) business.

They are the best people I could have on my side on a day like today and I just want to publically commend and recommend them.

Very seriously looking at a different domain name.

The 'inherited' spam from the innocent days of the late nineties (back when I had my email address listed as a 'mailto' link on every damn page on my site) has gotten to the point where well over 65% of my incoming mail is spam.

The spam filters take care of most of it, but the simple fact of the matter is that I'm losing 'real' emails amongst the deluge, and there's simply too much crap coming in to double check the filters all the time (heck, if I had time to do that, I wouldn't need the filters).

That said, I don't really know what I'd use for a new domain name (www.golden-god.com seems a trifle overwrought). Something with a bear in it would be nice, simply because I'd be able to continue using some of the image themes here and there, but I'm just not coming up with anything. The eponymous testerman.com has a certain appeal... the appeal of something I can't have, actually (according to the whois).

Thoughts?

You people are brilliant.

Okay, so I just rebuilt the whole index.html template by hand, since for the life I me it still wasn't loading very fast. (Madeline, would you check it out and see if it still loads wrong from that one machine of yours?)

Anyway, I will be... damned if I can figure out what the deal is with that frelling table up in the corner that had

[had, mind you, past tense]

the little navigation pictures in it. It doesn't load right and I just don't want to figure out why right now. Therefore: gone.

Update: and of course i figure it out about three seconds later.

Just so folks know, I am actually trying to figure out why the main page takes something like a hundred thousand years (I.e.: 12.5 seconds) to load.

It's especially frustrating, since it doesn't happen here, where I'm loading most of the same scripts, or here, where I'm using the same layout.

I took the basic template and stripped out all the extra scripts for picture swapping, color loading... heck, I even stripped out blogrolling to see if that was it. It's not -- the page just takes 12 times as long to load.

A really cool web-site optimization tool that tells you how your page rates in terms of load-time, as well as how to fix some of the issues.

Just a brief summary of the week, so I can remember what needs some further attention at a later time:

Note that this is entirely for my own reminders, so I can post something properly when we get home.

Saturday: Flew to SD. Dad nearly kills a dog that attacks at 85 year old woman.
Sunday: Church. My idiot cousin. My cool cousins.
Monday: Stopping by the old farm. The blocked section line. Massive metal sculptures and the oddly familiar hotel.
Tuesday: Visiting USD and the inlaws. Getting Jadyn's shine off. Gateway Country.
Wednesday: All day with the kids. The girls run errands while I watch the bebe.
Thursday: Wandering the Mall. Hilfiger/FUBU Deathmatch? Kiki's Delivery Service.
Friday: USD again. Jackie the Peacemaker. The Great Packing of '03.
Saturday: Early morning (hopefully) flight home and (hopefully) some foobaw.

If, with MT, I link to any images that contain the world 'banner' in the name -- the link to that image... not just the name, but the whole img link... is simply vaporized out of the html when it saves.

Doesn't matter if it's in a post or part of the MT template, they just don't show up. SO weird.

Fiddled with that randomly-loading image a bit more, using a different bit of code to do it -- the old version was lagging the page-load too much.

Just something I noticed by accident while cleaning up the server directories and changing around the bears-cave archives.

Cool.

Added picture-swapper code so you don't have to see my mug every time the page loads.

Finally got Random Encounters to ping Blogrolling correctly.

Also, complete fluff: got the redirect from http://random.bears-cave.com to work.

I do not seem to be successfully pinging whatever thing I need to ping to put the happy 'updated' mark next to other people's links to here. Hrm.

I've noticed this intermittent problem with some of my 'lesser' pages before, but never with the main one. Weird.

Road trip today, chilluns. Back later this afternoon.

Update:
Meeting cancelled, which I found out after I'd already driving the sixty miles. *grr*

I'm miles and miles away today, chilluns, so no posting for awhile. Dave's back from Cali, though, so go check out his stuff.

It's amazing what a missing " can do to html code.

I put it back in and now my browsers... doing all the stuff that Madeline has always said hers does on a Mac.

A HA.

Okay. I'll get it fixed.

Posts will be sparse in the AM, as I upgrade the box I'm on from NT4. At home in the afternoon, however.

Apologies for the dearth of posts yesterday -- Monday was a long series of meetings. Blah.

B L A H. Okay. Back now.

The test, actually, was related to the old new page, which you can see is now back.

Lately I've witnessed a surprising drop in visits, and I couldn't decide if it's been because I'm posting things much more to my personal taste, or my ugly mug (the second thought echoing through my head in the remembered voice of a jovial great-uncle).

Well, unless the green scheme is even more shocking than my visage, it must be the content, because changing it back didn't have any sort of effect.

Or it's spring and people just aren't browsing much. Either way.

I'm still not in love with the layout on this version of the page, but that's not a big deal.

Anyway, I'm back.

I'm conducting an experiment. Bear (ha!) with me.

So I say I wanted a cleaner page... Done. No problem. Piece of cake.

There is, of course, a problem.

Aside from being a blog, the page is also a portal to all the other crap I have on this site, and as the blog continues, it's other function atrophies.

Annoying. I'll need to do something about that.

Update: I did something about that. (Mouse over upper right buttons.)

My main page, if synced up to AvantGo, is smaller in kb than the actual AvantGo version of this page that I made.

Why funny? This page is basically the AvantGo page with more stuff added to it, yet it's coming up smaller :P

Okay, that's all I'm doing with the redesign for now -- I need to put in css, but I'm really not going to mess with that right now.

(Not having one screwed me up, though -- took me five minutes to figure out that I'd originally used the Body tag.)

At least there's something there.

(Possible) new design is here.

Regardless of whether or not I use that design, I do intend to split the the archives off to this page, and the links off to here.

A side effect of everything else was moving my personal info stuff back over to a page of its own.

Comments welcome expected.

In an effort to clean up some of my old bloggage, I'm in the process of moving my oldest-oldest posts over to movable type. By hand. One post at a time.

I pretty much have to do it this way because the original blogger.com database is long gone, so all I have are the output pages; so it's 'new entry', 'copy', 'paste', 'cut title', 'paste title', 'save as draft', 'reset time/date', 'save as published'.

Repeat.

Repeat alot. Here's a few things I've found out about my old blogging habits:

I posted a lot.

Well, that's pretty much all I've figured out, but there you have it. I'm working backwards through the last Blogger-month (September 01, and let me tell you THAT'S been a barrel-of-monkeys kind of fun) and after working on it last night and this morning, I'm allll the way done with 9/30 back to 9/20.

I've got to be back as far as May. :(

I'm torn about it.

On the one hand, this front page is both a blog/journal and a portal to all the other crap I've goin going on in my life and surrounding the actual text with all the links I use daily is just part of the way I work.

On the other hand, it's a big texty mess; when I just want to reread what I wrote yesterday, I go here -- it's damn tempting to add a few tiny things to that version of the front page and swap the two.

And I'm in the mood to redesign.

One of the things I love love love about Blogrolling is that it shows when the sites linked on the side have been updated. Yes, that's cool.

Two of the things that I hate hate hate about blogrolling is that (a) I can't tell where people are coming to my site from and (b) other people can't tell that a visit from blogrolling.com was MY visit from my linkbar.

That last bit really bugs me -- makes the whole thing seem less personal.

But I really like seeing the little smilies that show me someone updated... do I love that more than I hate the level seperation it puts between everyone's blogs?

We'll see.

Links to a few photos have been added to the first vacation post, seen here.

Well, today the Grumpy Six make it home again, or at least four of them Doyce, Jackie, Dave G. and Lori. The other two are detouring to Farie.

Word has it the Lori is sickly. So all of her friends (and you know who you are) should make sure that she has plenty of Chicken soup and such.

I had gone looking for a Poo flinging Monkey animated Gif to post for the Grumpy Six's return, but have been unable to find one…So if the people who are still reading this blog while Doyce is away have one, could they post it in the comments section.

Thanks.

Also, I know I've had fun being a guest blogger over the past week and I would like to thank Doyce for the opportunity. I don't think I could do what he does on a daily basis…I'm more of the pithy commentator and Quiz poster kind of person.

Yes, they will be back today...

Unless they forgot to pay their Eight Pound "Conjestion Tax" yesterday...

While I'm out of town, I've invited a few people to fill in as guest bloggers. The criteria I used was:

1. Should/could do a blog.
2. Doesn't at this time, but has.

So, they're a little rusty, but they all know how these things work.

A few notes:

I will be posting and checking email anyway, but this is a good excuse to screw around and have some fun.

"The Bear" is still working, so if you want to contribute and you aren't a guest blogger... well, you still are, so there. (Or just write me by tomorrow if you REALLY want to guest blog.)

Grrrrrrrr Arrrrrgh

*hee hee*

Okay, since I'm going to be on vacation starting a week from tomorrow (and thus posting less), I'm bringing back an oldie-but-goody.

That's right. The Bear.

Down on the left-hand linkbar you'll see a little bear picture. Move your mouse over him, and you'll see instructions for logging in as "the bear".

Yes, that would be "logging into this website."

The rules are simple:

1. When posting as The Bear, you can only make Bear-like noises (I'll leave that to your imagination) or make Bear-like movements (*dances*) and post links to cool sites or news or whatever.

Yeah, this is sort of a risky thing to do, but what the hell.

Rawr.

It's icy-blue and cold in the bear's cave now, too.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Dave has already posted this both on his blog and on Writing in the Dark, but dang it, it's just so darn cool I wanted to mention it here.

The Smarty Pants plug-in in Movable Type automatically translates straight quotes, double-dashes and dot-dot-dots into typographically correct smart quotes, em-dashes, and elipses.

This -- this is "very cool," seriously...

Geeky game-related industry news linked to over on Random Encounters.

Whoo.

Little quiet out here, isn't it?

Well, if you want lots of posts and tension, check the WiD page, where we're coming down to the last big push on NaNoWriMo. One of the participating authors finished up her story today, so we're already up to 50% of last year's success rate.

Me? I'm plugging along, just a little bit ahead of where I need to be at this point, just like I have been all month. I know I've been remiss in posting snippets, but it's getting to the point where the stuff that I like only makes sense if you've been reading everything else.

Which is too bad, cuz I'd like to share the joke about the jelly packets -- I really liked that bit. Anyway.

Next question: how many times can you kill a main character before they start to protest? Sounds like one of those Tootsie Roll Pop commercials.

Looking down the page, I'm seeing a lot of posts about music lately.

Don't worry, this evening I'll be able to post about... well, Firefly, and...

*crickets*

okay, writing the NaNoWriMo...

*more crickets*

Since I think it's important to maintain traditions, I've asked GoDaddy.com to take over my domain registration from Verisign... it should go through right around the beginning of NaNoWriMo.

Last year, of course, I was switching hosts in the middle of the month -- switching registrars was the best I could do this year -- the only way you'll get me to leave Hosting Matters is in a virtual bodybag.

Updating Writing in the Dark for the upcoming month of use.

Anyone interested in doing the group NaNoWriMo support blog again? It would take me all of 20 minutes to set it back up for those interested, but I'd want to have a decent-sized group. Denver residency not required.

I just don't feel like answering any quizzes at the moment, so my normal burst of Friday posts will be delayed just a bit.

Nothing going on tonight. Nothing. Nada. Roll that word around on your tongue and feel the texture of it.

Feels good, doesn't it?

Tomorrow, there will be yardwork, soccer, guests; Sunday even more yard work and maybe a few other things, but tonight, nothing.

Except for Firefly, which kicks ass.

Something I've never really done as part of my Blog is take notes. With pretty much constant access to a connected computer and a decent memory for the bloggable subjects that take place outside and away, it's never really been necessary.

But not today.

This noon's posts have been brought to you by the letter M, the number 23, and the notepad function on my PDA.

--

Related note: the worst part is not the inability to blog; it's not being able to catch up on "Mah People". I miss them more than they miss me - I'd guarantee it.

Yesterday was... I actually don't know if it was a record high number of visits, because Site Meter sucks, but I certainly don't recall a spike that high recently.

I have no idea what would have caused it, either. The referrer log is locked up(did I mention the profound sucking that is Site Meter?), but from what I can see it's just the same old people and a slightly-higher-than-normal number of freakish Google hits.

"farmers that spank" "AvantGo PDA sex channels"

Sadly, I know how those searches could have turned this site up.

Update: Looks like someone at Slate mentioned the Blogathon in passing and the hit-slam is overflowing here. Ah, fickle Internet, what a tease you are.

After a pat on the head and a kick in the butt from Seki to get me going the right direction, I finally got the blogrolling thing to format the way I wanted it to on the page, thus bringing my linkbar into the 21st (.02) century.

I'm not in love with the 'powered by' thing that must needs be repeated over and over, but I really like the little update notification thing, the timestamp for 'when this was last updated', and the means by which a cool site can be added to the roll so easily and on the fly. Much good there.