A Personal Blog
From My Life
"Hello, This is the Ebay Collection Agency"
Feb 15th
Uh huh. This is what I woke up to this morning. Ebay’s collection agency calling. Apparently I owed 35$ for “services”. Which is fine. I mean, I go through periods where I use Ebay quite a bit so it didn’t really surprise me. What DID surprise me was that they called at all.
I mean, yes the amount was overdue. But, being honest, I get so much Ebay and PayPal spam that it is very, very difficult to figure out what’s real these days. I mean, it’s downright impossible without hovering over the links on each and every email (and I get 50+ of them a day). Sorry Ebay, just not happening.
So I logged in and paid it. I was a little surprised to find that the amount had only been owing for 2 weeks and that they’d already sent a collection agency after me. I mean, I always pay my balances eventually. Why would I want to give up my 4+ years of history with Ebay over 25$, after all?
Anyways, it was an eye opener. Nothing I can really prevent (except by being more active on Ebay), but an eye opener nonetheless.
How Not to Become an A-Lister
Feb 15th
Scoble wrote a post that all kinds of people are linking to (1, 2, 3, 4). Most seem to agree with him. Which isn’t much of a surprise. Scoble’s pretty good at STAYING an A Lister.
However, as someone who skirted with blogging fame, and then let it die away, let me tell you the truth.
First, Scoble’s tricks don’t work. Why?
Well, it’s kind of like being a geek in high school (in the 90s anyways). Scoble’s tricks basically boil down to “get a new haircut, get some new clothes and get your friends to think you’re cool”.
Which is ludicrous.
Just like in high school, the only way to be a blogging A-Lister is to sell your soul.
So, here are 10 simple steps to selling your soul:
10. Talk about what everyone else is talking about, adding your own spin, and linking to everyone else who is mentioning it. 9. Disagree with A-Listers. If you have the balls, “challenge” them to prove they are right. 8. Use A-Listers names in your posts. Name dropping is good. 7. Disagree with conventional wisdom. Dave Taylor is really good at this. It’s even better if you have a solid point (like Dave often does). 6. Blog. A. Lot. 4-5 posts a day is a minimum. 5. Go to conferences and meetups and geek dinners. Giving up your entire social life will give you a “virtual” one. No, really, it’s better! 4. Talk about controversial topics. Say that the FireFox memory leak IS an issue, and that the team’s response to it is the EXACT SAME THING as Microsoft would say about similar issues in IE. 3. Make up lists. Top 10 lists are great. Funny top 10 lists are better. As you can see, I’ve given up on the latter. 2. Find ways to get all the top people on your Skype list, and talk to them at least once a week. 1. Start a Web 2.0 company, then sell it.
The truth is that if everyone did the above, every blog would suck. Your blog would have no personality, no value beyond the hour in which a given post was written and wouldn’t gain you any lasting attention.
Be you. Be different.
Blogging is just like high school. And, just like high school, who is cool right now doesn’t really matter. What matters is who is still cool in 10 years, and you are much more likely to get there if you don’t listen to Scoble’s advice than if you do.
BlogHerald Sold
Feb 15th
Just a note that the Blog Herald has been sold. The buyer contacted Duncan directly, so I don’t know the terms of the deal or anything, but just wanted everyone to know :)
Olympic Blogging
Feb 14th
Just a note that b5media has launched a dedicated Olympics blog called Light the Torch. A few great things about this new blog (and why I’m announcing it here as well as on the official b5 blog):
1. We’ve invited every other blog network to join in on the blogging, not just b5. 2. All ad revenue is going to athletic organizations. 3. There is an RSS feed for the medals!
If you are a blogger and want to join in the blogging, let me know. If you want to suppor the athletes by advertising, let me know.
Either way, here is my email address: jeremy@ensight.org.
Valentine's Day Riddle
Feb 14th
Okay, as I mentioned, I’ve decided to stretch my puzzling abilities.
This is a first. It’s rusty, it’s awful, but I believe it works.
Here is your clue: if smitten is the key then where is the lock.
If nobody guesses in a while, I’ll issue some more instructions. This is a multi-part challenge, so you need to find the text to “translate”, find the marker, then figure out the “decryption” (I use this term loosely).
Clue 1: There is a specific post in Ensight’s archives (now) which contains the text to decrypt. To find it, you’ll need to use the key.
Clue 2: Assuming you’ve found the post with the word “smitten” in it, you should see the ugly text. There were two basic kinds of ciphers in the Roman times. One was simple letter replacement (ie: a is b, b is c, etc). The second was a counting system. So if you knew where to start counting, and knew the interval, you could pull out, say, every 5th letter starting with “the” (or whatever).
Clue 3: I’m not even sure anyone is reading this. However, one last clue before giving away the whole shebang. “Smitten” is not only the key word to helping you find the post in question, it is also the ‘starting point’ for the cipher.
Clue 4: I’ve been asked to not simply give away the secret to this. I’ll say this, this IS a counting cipher. So if you know where to start (either before or after ‘smitten’) on the page, then the only thing you need to know is the length of the ‘count’ (ie: get every 5th letter, or every 12th letter, or whatever). The only other clue I have to give is how many letters, and I’ll leave that until tomorrow. Also, final clue, don’t count spaces. Don’t count hyphenations. Don’t count apostrophes. Don’t count punctuation. Just letters.
