mcgees.org

I got the pharmacy troubles straightened out, and I’m feeling much better, so I deleted the last post.  I should be relatively human again.  I get to see Niall on the weekend.  I’m still in constant, terrible pain, and found out I will probably need spinal surgery, but I’m better.

Thanks, everyone.  I should be back to posting now.

Anyone use Bloglines to read mcgees.org?  Anyone having problems?  For me, it’s showing no posts since August 2007.

Big news, released today, that I stumbled upon at eBay while looking for something else entirely: beginning 1 April 2008, eBay will launch its own “Partner Network” affiliate program.  If you are a content publisher, set an alarm and visit the not-yet-live eBay Affiliate site in two weeks’ time.

Is mcgees.org going to participate?  OH YES, if they’ll have me.  I see dollar signs.  Maybe I’ll have to get rid of my Auction Sniper link to be admitted…

mcgees.org is not a children’s website.  137 people (and counting) have made one post, “My Hamster Died”, a children’s post.

There is adult language and adult content on the site, as you know.  I tried to set up another site to take all the hammie comments, but that didn’t work.  People still post.  So, I have written code to special-case the hamster post, hard-coding a nice non-random tagline and adding a warning note to parents.  Please visit and tell me what else you think might need to be done.

I’ve been reconsidering my positions on a few posts:

First, I made too big of a deal about a little girl wanting to go to heaven to be with her hamster.  While I’ve run this by atheists who agree with my premise, I should never have done so in a way that it would get back to Poppy or her mother.  I think belief in an afterlife is dangerous, but probably benign in a first-world well-off small child raised by a loving mother (and maybe a father) with plans to dispel the myth to her in a few years.

Second, I’ve reconsidered my claim that Kill Bill vols. 1 and 2 should have received NC-17s.  I think R is appropriate for the films.

Third, regarding the my quote of the article from The Guardian about George W. in early 2002 that said:

Sooner or later, Mr Bush, self-styled universal soldier for truth, will have to stop pretending that tragedy gave him a free hand to remake America and the world to fit his simplistic, narrow vision — or risk having voters and US allies end the pretence for him.

Turns out, there was an insufficient allotment of brains and balls worldwide, and Bush has been unnervingly and nauseating successful in remaking America.  So the paper and I were wrong.

Fourth, something really funny to lighten the mood.

Check out the section on my sidebar (to the right) called “Sleeve”.  The meaning being, of course, that I’m wearing my causes on my sleeve.  But I was this close to calling the section “.org-y”.

Looks like this site, and all associated sites, are back up following a hard drive crash.  Let me know if you find any problems with any of the jhmdomains.com sites.

I was on a site — can’t remember which, darnitall — that, for every post, had a row of framed favicons from something like a dozen different bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Bloglines, Technorati, etc.)  One click would add the post to your favorite flavor.  Anyone know of a Wordpress plugin for this?  Or am I going to have to roll my own?

Good grief, is anyone else following this thread?  I realize the extended family of the murderer may be in a bad mood these days, but no one understands a thought experiment.  These are the same people who attend PETA marches to fight for the rights of Schrödinger’s cat.

Challenge-response for posting (the “What is 6 + 6″ thing) should be working again.  It’s been down since the upgrade of versions.  Thanks to Sue D. for the notification.

Regular reader or new reader, you might be thinking, “Hey, I’d like to subscribe to the comments on a couple of posts on this site.”

Well, probably not.  But in case you are, two active posts to try are Passing the torch, consisting of an ever-growing list of hot film and television actresses younger than I (some contributed by me, some by others), and, bewilderingly, My hamster died, to which well over sixty people have contributed, generally with their own dead hamster stories.  Click through to the pages, be bewildered, then either go through the “Subscribe to comments” option at the bottom or add the RSS feed for the post to your feed reader.

Please note that you can subscribe to the site by email by going to http://www.mcgees.org/subscribe-to-posts/.

Are single-post pages better with or without a sidebar showing (old = without, new = with)?  And is it obvious enough how to get home from the single-post pages?  Or is everyone just reading with a feed reader, anyway?

You can now advertise inexpensively on mcgees.org blog posts (about $1 per month.)  Click here for more details.

Such a big world.  So many hamsters.  So much grief.  Anyone want to help with the new site, myhamsterdied.info?

Too good not to post: unsolicited personal email, probably in reference to Number of the Beast:

Hi, while watching a show on the road of death between Kuwait amd Iraq They talked about the large machine gunin the planes that killed all the Iraqies and vehicles. When they mentioned how many bullets a second I calculated the number per minute and got 666. I then went on the internet to see how many barrels the weapon had, there are seven.
    the number of the beast is 666, It has seven heads. All the things coming out of the head are the result of war!  3-14-2007

                                                    Peter Rosenholm
                                                    treelaw45@yahoo.com

Apparently the show taught him that the machine gun fired 11.1 bullets per second.

I got a web-enabled phone today and thls is my first mobile post.  The site doesn’t look too shabby on it either.

I am training myself on the handwriting recognition now.

In letter recognizer:

L ne qvlck brown aox jumlyfd over tre laz y dog.

In Transcriber:

i-re quick brown fit jumped over the lazy dog.

More work to come.

i-nequick R 71

Please don’t hack my site this time.

I’m out of the hospital, and the site, with comments, should be working again.

If you can see this, you are on the new server.  Email problems should have disappeared now.

From a Snapfish email:

Add fun mystery text and a photo to a puzzle for you’re a loved one (will you marry me? and photo of a ring)

This does actually mean something.  At least if you insert a comma after ‘puzzle’.  And some quotation marks.  And maybe a colon.  Just nothing like what they intended.

mcgees.org has officially sold old.  Discuss.

I actually experimented with Google Adsense for a bit (you may have seen it briefly), but, to be honest, the main reason I’m opting out is all the Christians and New Agers who try to advertise on my atheism posts.  Who needs a free market when you can have, say, a publisher-slash-dictator (me)?

So all the banner ads you see will be personally vetted by me.  Many of the companies I have personal relationships with and can recommend, and would have anyway.  The others seem above-board and useful.  I try to tailor the ads to topics visitors of my site might be interested in.  I need your help to tell me if I need to yank an advertiser, due to a bad experience you have with them.  I don’t expect this to happen.  But click-through revenue is not worth sending my readers on bad leads.

Seriously, discuss.  Do the ads bother you?  Enough to stop visiting?

- Josh

Welcome, visitor from St. Helena (.sh)!  They visited lots of web posts nearly simultaneously, including the original WAC post.  I don’t know how they found me, but they were using IE 6.0.

154 down, 110 to go.

mcgees.org is greatly increasing in popularity:

month	#reqs	#pages
Sep 2004	9724	4335
Oct 2004	23731	8472
Nov 2004	37397	10772
Dec 2004	41505	14372
Jan 2005	40392	12464
Feb 2005	28114	8711
Mar 2005	28691	10056
Apr 2005	33438	11588
May 2005	42738	13566
Jun 2005	37692	13974
Jul 2005	39418	15335
Aug 2005	46708	16379
Sep 2005	36619	12735
Oct 2005	26718	10947
Nov 2005	49764	17737
Dec 2005	57466	20962
Jan 2006	58086	19534
Feb 2006	47430	17399
Mar 2006	61174	28580
Apr 2006	104228	56745
May 2006	134744	97006

Neat.

Welcome, visitor from Antigua and Barbuda (.ag)!  This is a bit of an odd one, as the referrer log lists the agent as MSIECrawler, meaning, apparently, that someone bookmarked a page on mcgees.org while offline.  Normally this would be followed up by the application downloading the site when the user is next online, but this didn’t happen (or hasn’t yet happened.)

153 down, 111 to go.

Welcome, visitor from Albania.  Distressingly, he or she was searching for “yahoo login cracker download” on Google, which matches my site because of a visitor comment that I allowed rather than deleted.  It is to be hoped that the site will welcome more respectable visitors from Albania in the near future.

Regardless, though, 152 down, 112 to go.

Welcome, visitor from Armenia (.am)!  He or she searched Google Armenia for information on Megaproxy and found my Best of the Web page.

151 down, 113 to go.

You can use my utility to generate a random English word.  You are welcome to call it from scripts.

I’ve upgraded my Random TinyURL script (it was giving a lot of “not found” errors, and I think I figured out why: “o” and “0″ are not present in any assigned TinyURLs).  Try it out, and please report the TinyURL of any TinyURL failures (not 404s).

Please click on the title of this post to go to the post page, and check the grey box under this very text.  It has date and time and some other stuff.  I think I’ve just made it easier to read.  Is there anything that could improve it, and are there any other links you would like?