Writing online when nobody is reading

On all of the various websites I have had (starting with free Geocities and Angelfire hosted sites in the late 1990's/early 2000's and continuing through this site) I have done very little promotion of my internet presence. I have told a few friends and family members about some specific things over the years, but almost all of the things I've written or put online (including this site) were always just meant to be a creative and technical outlet for myself.

Before the widespread use of the internet to post every minute of every day from your smartphone, I (probably like many others around my age) had notebooks of doodles and stuff I wrote that nobody had ever seen. I had physical photographs of myself with people I'd met and places I'd been. It was amazing to be able to put some of the stuff out somewhere (somewhat anonymously) to share with people that I didn't know in real life and didn't feel like were judging me. When I put things up back then I always assumed that nobody was looking at it (and nobody really cared) but still posted somewhat cautiously because anyone could be looking at it.

There was a brief time in the early 2000's where I was a member of an online community that had journals. Through that site I met a ton of really cool people. People that I didn't know IRL, before I got to know them online. People would come around to your journal on the site and ask for updates and share stories and recommendations for things (movies, music, what to do after a breakup, how to cope with a shitty job). They'd come around just to say they missed you and ask how life was. I'd regularly make posts with boring little life updates. When I had nothing to write about I'd ask people to share random things with me and people really did. I'd spend hours reading what my friends has posted and commenting back to them individually. Towards the end of that time period I was busy with work and real life relationships (spending less time online) and short on cash (paying back student loans) and I stopped paying to be a member and very quickly lost touch with everyone there. For a short time after leaving, I tried to keep in touch with people by email and later I tried to keep that online community feeling going briefly with free options like LiveJournal, Friendster and MySpace (remember them?) but they never really went anywhere and I struggled with posting anything regularly enough to keep people interested in coming back on those other platforms.

During the early part of those years, though, I remember chatting in various chat rooms and ICQ (and later, AIM) with people from all around the US and Canada, all hours of the day and night. People I met online who were interested in stuff I'd written or profiles I had on websites that just randomly reached out for whatever reason and we started talking. It felt less weird back then to just randomly say "Hello. I really like your [picture]/[poem]/[story]/[profile]/[whatever]." or "I also like [author]/[band]." and then end up talking online sharing stories, pictures, trials and tribulations, relationship and family drama. Pretty much anything you'd end up talking to a good friend about.

People were a little worried about online stalkers and weirdos, but many of the platforms today are tied a little too closely to the real world to feel safe about posting a lot of things or just randomly commenting to strangers. (Not even going to get on the topic of trolls.) Back then, if you wanted to avoid people you just made a different ICQ/AIM name and shared it with a smaller group. I didn't post my phone number, address, where I went to school, hometown, who my real life friends and family were, what I ate for breakfast and where I ate it... and that was the norm. I picked funny city names to live in for profiles like Eek, AK or Boring, OR (real places) but told online friends where (roughly geographically) and eventually real city/state when I had talked to them for a little while. A few even knew my full name and address (as we mailed physical gifts, mix CDs and stuff to each other) but I think what made it fun for all of us was the ability to connect with people easily based on genuine interests instead of primarily based on physical location.

I bring my personal internet history up, because lately I've been thinking about how the internet has changed over my two decades of using (or not using) evolving technologies and platforms. I'm sure a lot of it is just me growing up and out of my teen (and twenties) angst and drama. It's been quite some time since I've ranted about a bad breakup or raved about traveling hours to see my favorite band(s). It's been even longer since I posted an extremely cryptic one line post and had multiple people I've never met in real life who knew instantly what I was talking about (and laughing with me or being supportive, whatever was appropriate). I rarely write about politics or religion due to the fear of offending someone I have to sit near at work on a daily basis. The remainder for me is the fact that online is much more like (and intertwined with) real life now. If I wouldn't talk about it with someone I don't know that well at work, I don't post it on Facebook. I don't like liking things because they're just using the information I give them to sell advertisements. The different groups of people that are friends on these platforms don't overlap on many/most interests and I don't care enough (or have the time) to break them into groups to post to different groups, anyway.

Most of my online friends now are people I actually knew IRL before connecting with them online. Facebook (and Instagram) are shared with family, friends, coworkers, classmates and the occasional person you didn't really know all that well in college/high school/middle school and even probably even some parents of your friends and acquaintances.

There's obviously nothing wrong with any of this, but these days my feeds are primarily posts about real life friend's families and pictures of their children, lots of doom and gloom about politics, and so many pictures of food. Some of it is interesting, some of it is infuriating and some of it is just shares to scroll past, but it just doesn't feel like it used to. It feels like a curated glance into the good parts of someone else's life and things that they want you to be [happy]/[sad]/[angry] at with them. It's nice to have a convenient way to keep up with people's lives but I feel like there's little to no actual interaction short of clicking the thumbs-up (or now long press for the heart, etc...) and typing a quick "Congratulations." post on major life events.

I feel more disconnected even though I know more about what's going on in friend's lives now compared to when I actually saw a lot of them every day in school, work, etc.

Email addresses and authentication of online accounts

Recently I've started thinking about the problems with the security of using "free" email addresses as the main method of personal authentication and control of important / sensitive online accounts. This all started because someone signed up for a match.com account with *my* "free" email address after also attempting to retrieve usernames and reset passwords for a few other accounts using the same email address over the course of two days. (Not including match.com, as I've never had an account there.) I logged in and changed my passwords to my more sensitive accounts, just in case... It didn't seem like a case of hacking, since the person also registered a new Toshiba laptop and was likely attempting to log in to things for the first time in awhile.

I've used the email address in question since at least 2006 as my main email address and have signed up for dozens of accounts with it over those years. The email address is based on my name without any numbers or any filler since I was the first one to get to it.

It appears that the person has a similar name (same first initial and same last name, at least) according to the info contained in the welcome email from match, but he (unfortunately) doesn't know what his email address is. Another thing that was VERY odd to me was that they (match.com) sent both the username and plain-text password for the new account in the initial welcome email. Not like it needs to be crazy-secure, but it's possible there's sensitive information that the user has entered there and then accidentally sent control of to someone else.

In researching how to get rid of my email address on the other person's account, without logging into it, it seems that their policy is to contact support to cancel the account. Which I did, via their website, when I received the welcome email. After 3 days with no response from support and continuing to get emails at least 1-2 times daily from them for three days, despite attempting to unsubscribe from those emails every time I received them, I decided to delete the account.

So, this morning I logged in with the plain-text username/password from the welcome email and deleted the account. Thanks for nothing, match.com support. I didn't want to have to do that, but I also don't want to see the all of the "matches" that he may be eagerly anticipating and not getting... and you probably don't have any way to contact him to actually correct his email address, since all he likely gave you was *my* email address instead of his.

I'm expecting to get another account welcome email today when the poor guy tries to log in again and finds his account deleted and builds another account. Maybe/hopefully he figured out his correct email address by now? If not, at least I know they'll send me the username/password and I can do it all over again.

I had a similar experience with Wells Fargo last year when someone signed up for online banking using my email address (because they forgot one character in their email address, based on their name). It took *me* multiple emails/phone calls to get that straightened out (for them). I'm not sure they had any idea they had entered it wrong and if they did, they didn't try to change it for awhile... Fortunately, that experience seemed a little more "secure" in that they didn't give me enough info to get it on my own directly, however (thinking back on it) I probably could have reset the password, since the confirmation likely would have come to my email address. I didn't want to have anything to do with messing with their bank account, though.

I'm feeling kind of fortunate that I don't have a common name.

I think it's time to take an inventory of all of the accounts I have signed up over the years and clean them up and then find more secure ways to control my own accounts so that I don't have to rely on a "free" email address from a large, for-profit corporation that I also don't trust completely with all of the power I've given them as the (in most cases) sole way to control access to the accounts I've signed up with it.

One more thing: MAKE SURE TO CHECK YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS BEFORE SIGNING UP FOR THINGS!

(Sorry for yelling!)

Blog comments.

I don't know if anyone else out there does this, but I find myself almost constantly reading a blog post or article somewhere and typing out a comment in response and then when I'm just about done I close the window and never post my comment.

I do this because I usually find that what I've typed out has either already been said or I feel that it doesn't matter what I'm typing because the people who's comments or post I'm commenting on have already moved on and probably won't read what I've spent time thinking about and writing down. So I don't bother.

It popped into my head a few days ago that I almost always do this. Anyone else?

Website changes.

Google is removing FTP publishing support for Blogger which I have been using since I started this blog. It was a bit of a struggle to switch to Blogger's custom domain option but I persevered. After a few temporary stops, I'm back online at blog.suburbicide.com.

While I was messing around with switching from FTP publishing, I also took the time to get everything switched over from the the old "Template" style to the newer "Layout" format. It took a bit of work and I'm sure I broke a few things here and there but I think I managed to capture most of what my blog looked like.

Something I learned today: If after making major changes to your blog's layout, the order of the "Posted by" and "Labels" stuff in your actual post is messed up and you can't move them where you want them: In your Dashboard click on "Layout" and then on "Edit HTML", scroll down to the bottom and click on "Revert widget templates to default" and it seemed to magically work for me.

I'm making a wish list...

Now that the weather is starting to get nice again I'm feeling the bug to start working on my car beginning to bite again.

I had resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to do much to my current car (a 2007 Subaru Legacy 2.5i) besides adding nicer wheels and then replacing parts with better, upgraded parts as they wore out. It's a nice car but I specifically bought a car that didn't have many aftermarket parts available for it so that I wouldn't be tempted to spend a ton of money modifying it. However there still is enough stuff from the Subaru Legacy GT that will fit my car that I've been tempted to go a little bit crazy. I've actually already started making a huge list of stuff that I want and it's getting longer every day. (Damn you Zero/Sports, Cusco, RalliTEK, Blitz, Prodrive, AVO, Samco, Tomei, etc. for making such cool toys!)

Even though I made a wish list I'm still trying to stick to my plan of paying off my student loans and credit card balances as quickly as possible so that eventually I can purchase a house (with a nice garage) and then a (hopefully better) project car will come after that. That said, though, I'll probably still end up picking up a few parts for it over the next few months, anyway.

Part of my recent re-obsession with cars has involved me checking out a bunch of car-related websites and blogs that I haven't been to in awhile (or at all). I've been mostly haunting the classifieds hoping to stumble on a great deal on something on my list. ;)

Aside from that I haven't been up to all that much new stuff. Mostly just day-to-day stuff and working has taken up a lot of my time. I tend to lay low in the winter and not do too much. As the weather continues to get nicer and nicer I'll hopefully have a bit more new stuff to write about.

[02/13/2024: Removed a couple sentences with outdated links.]

Long time, no post!

I really haven't felt inspired to post anything here in quite awhile.

Occasionally, I'll read a news article or something and have a quick flare-up of a reaction to it but I'm usually in the middle of doing something else and don't feel like sitting for a few minutes, formulating my thoughts and putting together a post. If I just posted a sentence and a link to what I was reading, I'd feel like I was being lazy and half-assed and that it's probably better that I didn't post at all.

On top of the fact that I think that I'm losing interest in this website, my everyday life has been hectic (and crazy) and I've been spending a LOT less time on my computer at home over the past month or two.

Summary & Conclusion: I think I'm settling into my blog/web-laziness that has killed all of my other internet projects aside from this one. Life is hectic and probably won't slow down until after New Year's Day. Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of this blog soon... but if not, it was fun while it lasted.

Cuil - Not so cool.

I've read a few stories about the new search engine, Cuil, which is supposedly pronounced cool. Cuil's creators seem to believe that it is already poised to take on search giant google.

I've tried it out a couple times now and I'm not quite so sure that it's going to challenge google anytime soon.

My first attempts last night were met with error messages stating that the servers didn't return any results because they were too busy. I attempted again this morning by searching for "tour de france winner 2008" (without the quotes) and the first result on google was: "Sports News: Carlos Sastre 2008 Tour de France Winner" which was a good result. All of the other results on the first page were similar results.

Cuil gave me results about scandals, the 2006 winner twice, the 2007 winner twice, the 2004 winner, etc. I didn't see anything on their first page about Sastre or the 2008 Tour.

I also like the way google search results are just a simple list of links with descriptions. Cuil looks more like a newspaper page with results in blocks spread over three columns. I found it hard to look at compared to google.

While this isn't a definitive test, it's enough for me to not waste my time with Cuil for the time being.

Minor Website Updates

I bet you didn't even notice the two very subtle changes that I made to my website over the past few days. I'll mention them in a minute... but, first, there's something else that I've been thinking about. This all started when I mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that people are actually looking at my blog (according to my web stats from my web hosting company). He was as surprised as I was... possibly even more.

I'm not really even sure who reads this blog (let alone on a regular enough basis to notice my two tiny changes). I post here mostly just to write about interesting things that I've come across, to get ideas out, to rant and complain or just to blab about my somewhat boring life. I also have a somewhat poor memory and very little in the way of an internal time line... so keeping that stuff straight is another reason behind this blog.

However, even though I'm not sure that there's really even anything interesting here, I see in my stats that there are actually some people coming here mostly because of my MacBook Pro rants and my take on an article in Rolling Stone magazine about the hardcore crew FSU and the Hudson Duster in nearby Troy, NY. (Related tidbit: In that last linked entry, I mentioned another blog entry that I found while researching my Rolling Stone FSU article post that tried to draw a line between FSU and biological weapons which I thought was hilarious (in a bad way). That post actually drew a response from the guy who wrote the blog entry that I linked to and picked on! I noticed that his post is no longer on his blog now, though.)

Anyway, now that I got that out of the way... The changes I made to this site were adding a categorized "links" page instead of just a little column of links only on my main page and adding a drop down menu to my archives section on my blog page.

I had gotten out of the habit of posting links for the past few years on my various websites because maintaining links was too much of a hassle but recently I've wanted to add a few new (mostly local) links and felt the column was going to get too long... so... there is the reason for that change. As far as the archives drop down, there were links for every month that this blog has been going all listed out and they were getting rather unruly. I doubt anyone uses them, anyway... so the menu is much neater.

Anyway, that's all for this entry. If you're reading this leave me a comment or send me an email with the contact link to the left and let me know you're here...

Thanks.

Bands with ONLY MySpace sites

People in bands (especially unsigned ones that only have MySpace pages and no website of their own) please listen.

MySpace pages shouldn't be the only source of information for your fans on the internet. I realize that you probably get tons of people that look at your page there, add you as a friend and listen to the songs that you're sharing there and it's free! That's all good but there are many employers (including mine) that block MySpace. On top of that, there are tons of people that don't like MySpace and try to avoid it as much as possible. (I tend to fall into this category, as well.)

Put up a website of your own. They're really not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. It'll cost you less than $20 for a domain name for a year and $5-10 a month for basic hosting to get you started. Divide it up among all of the band members and it'll probably cost you less than $20-25 each for the year! The hardest part of the whole process is going to be finding a domain name that isn't already taken. I'm sure you have a friend or a band member that can put up a good looking website. It's pretty easy these days.

Keep your MySpace up but also link to your own site and keep the information there up to date so it looks like you're interested in keeping your fans who can't get to (or don't want to go to) your MySpace page informed on where you are touring and what you're doing.

There are some bands out there that I'd like to link to and share with my friends... but I won't link to MySpace. I dislike it that much. This might be just a pet peeve of mine but I can't be the only one who feels this way.

Website stats and Dell Vostro update

I just pulled up my statistics on my website (as I have a tendency to do on occasion) and I found that quite a few people that have looked at my blog in recent history are coming here for problems with the MacBook Pro. I've had people hit my website in the past couple weeks by searching google for: "macbook pro not charging", "why is my macbook pro not charging", "macbook pro issues with trackpad while charging", "macbook pro screen not coming on when opening it", "macbook pro cd dvd rubbing inside" and "stop importing cds on macbook pro".

So, it seems to me like there are other people out there that are having the same problems with their MacBook Pros that I did. It's sad because they're such nice looking computers. It's my feeling that Apple put form way too far above function on the MacBook Pro and at the prices people are paying for them, they should be damn close to perfect. (Which, in my humble opinion, they are not.)

This leads into a a quick update on my Dell Vostro 1500.

It's still big and it's still heavy. Since I usually use it around the house it doesn't bother me too much. However, I found out that it doesn't fit in my awesome Timbuk2 laptop messenger bag that my sister got me for Christmas a few years ago. It's not even close. So, that's a little disappointing.

The matte black finish does show fingerprints pretty easily... but again, this isn't too big of a deal.

As far as functionality, though, I've ran into one glitch with it so far. Just for the hell of it I tried to play a DVD on it over the weekend and I couldn't get the DVD to play. The media player software that it came with kept asking me to switch the region on my DVD player to Region 1 for US/Canada. I attempted to, but it still wouldn't play and it said it was still set to "Free". I didn't really care enough to try to fix it since I was sitting in front of my TV. I just popped the DVD in the DVD player and went on with my day. I'm going to figure it out sometime, though... I just haven't cared enough to yet.

I purchased Need for Speed: Pro Street a few days ago and while the graphics aren't that awesome on the game, the Dell runs it with no problem at full native screen resolution with all settings on high. Even playing with the laptop sitting on my lap it doesn't get uncomfortably hot on my legs like the MacBook Pro did under less load.

I do find the trackpad to be a little "twitchy" sometimes... but not very often. It's more responsive and seems to not have the issue of my MacBook Pro's trackpad where I had to swipe my finger a few times before it picked up that I was touching it.

Overall, though, I've been happy with the Dell so far. I've been much more pleased with it than I thought I would be and especially knowing that I saved $1,300 or so on it compared to the MacBook Pro...

New website layout

I've been a little bit inspired to be creative this weekend. I spent hours yesterday looking for a new template for my website and I didn't really find too much that was promising. I messed around with changing the colors of one and then it looked weird. I messed around with the style of another and it just wasn't flexible enough to do what I wanted.

My main issues were that I didn't want to spend a ton of time messing around with a complex layout or a ridiculous amount of graphics but also I didn't want to use something completely as-is.

So, this morning I ended up finding a couple of photos I really liked on a free stock photo website called Stockvault.net and modified them into one and then went on the hunt for a new simple, clean layout with room for one big central graphic...

So here it is. What do you think?

Who should you vote for to be President?

I stumbled on this website earlier called Glassbooth and I haven't had a chance to look at it too in depth but on the surface it looks like a nice tool.

First you assign 20 points according to how strongly you feel about 14 issues and then you take a quiz to measure how much you agree or disagree with certain points related to the issues you feel strongly about.

It then gives you the candidates who most strongly match your positions and allows you to compare others who weren't your top matches to see how closely they match your positions.

I don't think this would influence how I'd vote but it allows you to kind of see how the candidate you are interested in compares to you and gives you some things to think about and look into.

New books, strange new people and work.

I went to Borders after work today to spend the gift card that my parents gave me for my birthday. I picked up Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann and Thomas H Naylor and PHP for the World Wide Web by Larry Ullman.

Hopefully I'll get to put the PHP one to use on my website soon. I actually think I'm going to return it and get it on amazon for 1/2 of what I paid at Borders, though.

I met a strange guy at the bookstore tonight. He seemed really friendly but I think he is going to try to get me to sell energy drinks. We talked for a few minutes about our histories and he asked if I was interested in doing work outside of my current job and I said "possibly" when I should have said "no". He ended up giving me his business card and when I looked up his website when I got home it looked like a generic template that you get when you pay into one of those businesses that let you resell their crap products.

My supervisor came back to work today, too. I NEVER thought I'd think this... but I'm glad she's back from vacation. Today was a million times more productive than any of the days last week. My phone didn't ring off the hook. It actually didn't ring that much at all. I have a meeting with my newest boss on Wednesday. Hopefully that goes well...

Checked out my "stats" on my blog today.

It's looking like I'm getting a little bit of traffic from google searches on various search terms included in my blog from two nights ago on the FSU / Punk Rock Fight Club / Rolling Stone article. Sorry to everyone who was expecting the article or something more interesting than my LAME commentary and links. ;)

I also got a few hits from people looking up "suburbicide", so I searched it on google and found that I'm the first (main page) and second (blog) links. I also found out that there's a Pinkerton Thugs song named "Suburbicide" that I'll have to hunt down on CD. There was also a band from MA that broke up in 2000 and an older hardcore band from NJ that both called themselves Suburbicide. The coolest link that I found, though, was for an artist named Greg Daville who has a project going that he is calling Suburbicide.

Also, a quick website update: Last night I combined the stuff on my main and about me pages of my website in preparation for putting up some of my rants and 1990's "teen angst poetry". I've blogged about the craptastic stuff I wrote in my teen years before and I'm sure I'll write more in here about it when that's really getting going.

I've been in a somewhat restless, creative mood lately so I'm hoping to get some work done on getting some real content on my website and getting some of my junk sold on eBay this weekend.

[05/19/2026: Removed dead links. All of them...]

suburbicide now my main site.

I had my web host Spooky Media switch over my hosting from smushybrain to suburbicide and I was really happy how quickly they did it... but there's one bad thing. They must have changed their basic account from when I signed up because now I can only redirect one outside domain name and that's got to be suburbicide.net so I can't redirect smushybrain or scenebot back to suburbicide any more... That doesn't make me happy.

I've been thinking about looking for hosting with more bandwidth and features anyway... I guess this gives me another reason. I really like Spooky Media, though.

I don't have any mail at any of my domains any more, as well. I'm eventually going to set some up at suburbicide, probably, but not right now.

If you see anything that doesn't work at suburbicide or on my blog please let me know so I can get it fixed.

I'm off to go get some dinner now.

UPDATE: A quick email to Randi at Spooky Media and I have my 5 add on domains back. I'm happy again. I'm off to bed.

Site was down. Oops.

Out of the blue I decided to check the one active email address I have at smushybrain.com this morning. I hardly ever check that particular email account anymore... Anyway, I discovered that my automatic credit card billing didn't go through a couple weeks ago and my web hosting was suspended. I'm guessing that it went down at midnight last night since I was able to post a blog entry yesterday. I would have been so confused if I had tried to post a blog entry today before I checked my email and found out what was up.

Luckily my site came back up within a few minutes of me taking care of updating my CC information and paying my outstanding bill.

Not too much to report today other than that.

I spent a couple hours last night after work going through old school papers, notebooks and folders from when I was at Clarkson that I had no idea I still had. I was surprised at how much junk I had brought home with me, stashed and forgot about. I filled about 75% of my car's trunk with junk to be thrown out. I wish our apartment complex recycled paper other than newspaper since about 90% of the stuff that went in the dumpster was paper.

I did come across some old stuff that I had written and drawn in my notebooks when I should have been taking notes. (Quite a bit of stuff, actually...) I'm thinking about taking a crack at putting some more of my horrible old "teen angst poetry" up on the web again for nostalgia's sake. I haven't had that much personal stuff up on the internet since I took my first domain (atomicnut.com) down off the internet in around 2002 when it was hijacked by a horrible free web host that wouldn't let me renew it and later purchased by someone who tried to sell it back to me for much more than it was worth. (I was embarrassed to tell people my domain name was atomicnut, anyway, because they immediately thought it was a porn site.)

It's kind of weird to read most of what I wrote in those days. It's actually kind of hard to remember what I was thinking and feeling, too. Just flipping page to page in an old notebook makes me think I was almost bipolar. One second it's some crappy, sappy love poem about my crush of the moment and the next it's borderline suicidal sounding. Chalk it up to hormones, I guess...

The day before vacation.

The only thing worse than the last day of work before vacation begins is the first day of work after the vacation.

Today is the day before... and I'm already not looking forward to the day after because today is dragging along so badly. I have PLENTY of work to do but my brain is already partially on vacation. I'm trying to get the time-sensitive things done first such as setting up products for a store which is going to carry a new (to them) line of products the week after I return from vacation. A little under 5 hours left until I'm out of here!

Website updates: I've been messing around with scenebot.com for the past couple days. I've been trying to think of interesting (non-scam) ways that I can get my currently unused domains to make money for me instead of sitting there lifeless.

I thought about actually putting up local show (concert) listings (like I had initially planned) and selling advertising. I created a SIMPLE MySQL database and wrote some PHP to search it by date... but I decided that I don't really want to start a business out of it (mostly since I barely have time or money to even go to shows anymore) and I'm kind of thinking that isn't going to be easy for me to do all by myself. There's a lot of data to collect, update, search and display. Most of that data is already available other places... but I still think it would be cool to integrate them all into one website that has information on all of the good local venues in one spot... but in short, it's going to be a lot of work for not too much return. So, I think that project is dead yet again.

Now I'm trying to think of ways to work some of the PHP and the MySQL database that I've been messing around with into something for suburbicide.com. It has been fun/interesting to start to teach myself PHP. I miss being geeky and writing code and PHP seems like a pretty good way for me to ease back into coding again. It seems pretty easy to pick up and it seems to integrate well with HTML and MySQL and it works with my current hosting... I keep thinking I should teach myself something more cutting edge, though... especially if I eventually want to get back into web development. ;)

Little excitement left in "green" movement?

A news story about the "green movement" popped up today on ABC's website today.

The basic premise of this article seems to be that the reporter feels that excitement of the "green" movement is basically over before it even began. The article seems to feel that many companies are jumping on the "green" bandwagon more as a tool to drive sales with little plan for the future or no desire to actually do any good.

There are a lot of points that were brought up that do make sense.

From my point of view, it is kind of crazy that people buy things based on a label such as "all natural", "organic" or "hybrid" without understanding the benefits, impacts or costs of what they're doing. It's more of a fad than doing something for a benefit. People are willing to pay extra for something that's labeled "all natural" or "hybrid" because that's the in thing right now. Actors and other pop culture "idols" spout off their ideals and people hang on their words and rush out to go "green".

I think we need to find a way to help people understand the impact of the things they're doing. Sometimes it's not better to buy a brand new hybrid to replace your well maintained '92 Honda Civic hatchback that gets 38MPG. It's not better to throw out all of your clothes and replace them with organic cotton and hemp clothes. Why do we have to spend extra money at the supermarket to buy organic tomatoes grown thousands of miles away when there's probably a farmer's stand or market close to where you live?

Things like this annoy the hell out of me but on the other hand, when was the last time I stopped at a farm stand for fruit and vegetables? Hmmmm...

New cell phone... and the rest of the weekend.

I couldn't believe how nice the weather was this weekend. Saturday morning I had to bring my car into the dealer to get it's oil changed. (Free oil changes for 5 years!!!) It was so beautiful outside that I was excited to spend the rest of the day outside doing something. My girlfriend and I ended up driving up to Saratoga and hanging out downtown for a few hours. We wandered around and checked out some of the shops including a small sports card/estate jewelry shop that a friend works at, got some drinks at Uncommon Grounds (which doesn't seem to have a website that I can find) and then headed back towards home to run a few errands.

One of the errands was to pick something up at the mall and while we were there we stopped into the Verizon store to see if we were eligible to renew our contracts and get deals on new phones. We ended up getting LG VX8600's for free after a $50 rebate. I like mine a lot so far. It's much smaller and lighter than my previous Motorola e815. It has a lot more neat features and the contact list is much easier to enter and navigate through. Among other things, I REALLY hated the contact list on my e815, the antenna that stuck out and made the phone more bulky and the fact that when I plugged it in to charge sometimes it would start to charge and then sometime overnight it would drain the battery completely and shut off and I'd wake up to a COMPLETELY dead phone.

Hopefully this phone turns out to be better than the Motorola.

Sunday I woke up and messed around with the template for my new blog in progress on suburbicide. I wanted to just upgrade the template to this blog to match the new design for suburbicide and host it on my own site but I couldn't get that to work correctly so for now I just made a new blog with nothing in it aside from a couple test posts to check out the template. I'm still going back and forth on what to do with it because I can't seem to find a way to code the "tags" feature into the classic style template and it seems that you can't host your own blog if it doesn't have a classic style template.

For now I'm going to keep posting here while figuring out what to do with the new blog.

[05/20/2026: Removed dead cnet phone review link.]

More website updates.

The past couple weeks my domain renewal notices started coming... and I'm halfway certain I'm letting smushybrain.com/.net go and 99% sure I'm letting scenebot.com/.net go.

In anticipation of this tentative decision I threw together a website for suburbicide.com using a free template I found online at freecsstemplates.org. I redirected scenebot and smushybrain to there for now.

Anyway, there's not too much up there now... but it's a start... and it looks better than the crappy shit I've had up in recent history that I threw together in two minutes because I was bored rather than inspired. Eventually I'll get around to creating a nice, fresh new layout of my own... but until then this will have to do.

Also, I haven't gotten around to adding some of my content or links yet. If you're reading this and you want me to link you to my "Friends of suburbicide.com" list please let me know. I'm not sure where all of your spots on the internet are these days...

Sam & Jason I'm going to add your blogs unless you have somewhere else you'd rather have me link to. Shoot me an email or drop me a comment if you're reading this.