Computer Genius Blog :: aka “TheGarage”

Armed and Dangerous, whatever it was about your blog that initially got you linked is not there anymore. Sayonara.

Betsy’s Page. Ditto. Too much quote, not enough original content. Trust me, I know it is difficult to continuously create original stuff but then that is why we get paid the big bucks. Quit mailing it in.

Lilek’s Bleat. A good writer, but not my style.

Madfish Willie’s Cyber Saloon, welcome back. I don’t see where you have me linked, but TTLB says you do so evidently you do.

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I just found out that the dumbest shit I write is at the ninth grade level–still way too complicated for the average internet user.

Even with my folksy, down-home writing style, most of my stuff comes in at the 12th grade level and damn near all of my long essays are college and post-graduate level. Seeing as I am educated well past my station in life, I wasn’t surprised at these results since I write what I think and make no effort to dumb it down for the retards. Which, when you think about it, explains a lot about the lack of repeat visitors here, especially from liberals.

On the other hand, if you are a regular reader of my site, you can feel comfortable that you are a pretty fart smucker.

This data comes from the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level test and the Gunning-Fog index. Very interesting. If you are interested in the readability of your blog, you can go here and plug in some of your own copy to see how it stacks up. Try it. I dare ya. Very fascinating. So much so that I just wasted about an hour plugging in a bunch of my stuff from different categories.

When you are done playing with that little gem, go to JD’s site and say hello, he is the one who turned me on to Flesch-Kincaid.

Update: Just for giggles, I went back to the Readability score page and entered my blog name and original tag, as follows: enormous incongruities. A beacon of intermittence. The results? Off the charts.

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: -35
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 19
Gunning-Fog Index: 26

Hmmm. Maybe I do need to rethink my presentation a bit.

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Rather than making good movies, movies that people might actually want to watch, Hollywood chooses to make fewer movies in an effort to stop the bleeding that has resulted from the crap they’ve been shoveling for quite some time.

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These screen captures were taken at the same time.

First :

Blogshpere referral log

Then:

Sitemeter Summary

I have been watching this incongruity for a couple of weeks now and as yet have only one explanation: The referrals I get from a Google image search do not regiser with sitemeter when the page is loaded into a frame on Google. I have been getting tons of these referrals of late:

Google Image Referrals

The other day my referral log had a couple hundred entries for the day and sitemeter reported about 50 visits. Go figure!

The most popular google image searches are ‘punishment’ and ‘corporal punishment’, followed closely by whatever gruesome crime du jour is current.

Go figure!

By popular demand…

Corporal punishment we can live with

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The Dow is down about 150 today and the NASDAQ 45. I wonder if any American executives will commit Hari Kari like the LiveDoor guy?

I used to own and operate a small business that depended heavily on continuously running heavy duty trucks around the greater Houston area. During the year 2001, after the Y2K threat was a bust along with the entire tech market, fuel prices had been high for some time and the Dow had been fluctuating around 10,500. I said then and have been saying since then that the Dow would never budge from the 10,500 median until the price of gasoline comes back down to an affordable price. Little did I know how right I was. Five years and counting and I am still right.

9/11 knocked the Dow in the dirt but it recovered. That the stock market recovered from 9/11 but not from the high fuel prices should put in to perspective how important inexpensive fuel is to the economy.

A buck twenty–buck fifty max–is the price point under which the stock market will resume its inexorable growth to 100,000. The reason the market wont grow otherwise is that our economy, like no other in the world, is dependant on gasoline. This is especially true for the small business economy, which everyone knows makes up the bulk of the economic activity in America.

When the Dow recently went over 11,000 for the first time since June 2001, I was worried that my corollary was about to be shattered. Today, I stand on my prediction. As long as fuel is above a buck fifty–and certainly while it is above two bucks–the Dow will remain around 10,500, give or take five hundred.

In lieu of fuel prices receding, the only thing that can kick off a significant surge in the stock market is another technology bubble that everyone will scramble to get in on. Irrational exuberance I think it is called.

UPDATE: Dow down 174, NASDAQ down 50, due to spike in oil. Google down 8%

FINAL: Dow down 210, NASDAQ down 54, oil settles over $68, Google down 10%

Dayum!

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Once every week or three I’ll get someone who finds their way to my little corner of the blogsphere and over the course of two or three days the read literally hundreds of my articles. So I figure they either really like and appreciate my work, or they are doing research in an effort to build some kind of civil case against me.

Either way, it would sure be nice if they would leave a comment or two. It’s not like I am asking for money or anything.

Oh, even if you only stay a moment and only read one article, comments are still welcome and appreciated.

one more thing…

I hope no one is offended by me pointing this phenomenon out. I’m not faulting anyone for reading my blog and not leaving comments, I’m just saying that comments are appreciated.

To everyone who has visited my blogs and especially to those who leave comments, I want to say your patronage is very much appreciated.

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Some crazy kid had an idea for an internet ad gimmick called Million dollar website. It paid off.

Here is the million dollar site. Here is a site of a wannabe who is trying the same gimmick.

Who knows, maybe lightening can strike twice. But I doubt it.

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Check out this Lindsay Lohan animation. Permanently fixed with a deer in the headlight expression. Could you imagine having to talk tot his chick every day? “Quit looking at me like that, dammit!”

The animation is so controversial that the site where I saw it, eBaum’s World, has been under an international cyber attack for running it.

Some people are just too sensitive.

Update:

I was informed that eBaum’s World gave in and removed the animation. Oh well. Now you can see the lohan facial animation here. It really is a must see.

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This is some good stuff right here. Consciousness.com. Here is the lead in: “Since you are among the few people on our Planet who can actually spell “consciousness” you are probably interested in attaining higher states of consciousness??? Good, then you have come to the right place!! “

Don’t look at me, I found him through a Google search. Then after clicking to look at his pitch he concludes:

consciousness.com averages 7 hits per day
It’s curious, the only e mail I get is from people who want to buy the name www.consciousness.com
I’m wondering **why aren’t people exploring their consciousness and the Universe with the Universal Aziums?? I’m not a rocket scientist, I’m just a regular
guy, and if I can get benefits from this technique, so can you.**
If you consider starting up a dialoge with me about these techniques, please leave ‘consciousness’ in the subject line of your e mail.
If I don’t answer in a couple of days, re send your e’mail.

If this fucker gets to any higher level of consciousness he may eventually figure out how to get some traffic to his site.

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Ever since I rolled an old company 401K plan over into a Fidelity IRA a couple of months ago, my inbox has been loaded down with investment spam. I am pretty pissed about it too.

I know, I know. Spam is a fact of life. Everybody should be used to it by now. Well here is what really burns my ass. I used my personal email address that I host at my domain, doncallaway.org, when I performed the rollover transaction. You know which account I am talking baout. It’s the special email address that you rarely give out. The one you give to your friends and such. The one you never use for purposes like free newsletters, myspace, jmeeting, job bulletin boards, chat, and all the other online crap that requires an email account.

For all the online crap, I use a throw-away email account. When a throw away account is to the point that I have to delete 100 messages for every one I read, I consider that account burned and I throw it away and replace it with another throw-away account. The nice thing about gmail is that I can forward the throwaways to my personal account. When the throwaway is burned, I just create another one and forward it to my real account.

Several years ago when I owned Overnight Recovery, a financial services company, I went through a dozen variations of Overnight##@hotmail.com, where ## was 20, 40, 60, 80, etc. Then the spammers got clever and for every base word, like ‘overnight’, for example, they would just stick on infinite suffix and prefixes. Maybe one out of a thousand variations would hit a valid email. What did the spammers care, they weren’t uing their computers to do the work.

Anyway, with the spam filters that hotmail and the other outfits have implemented over the years the problem is not near as bad as it used to be. The majority of spam ends up filtered out and then deleted, never to be seen by human eyes. Now you can go years with just a few throwaway email accounts. But still, an account can get burned if it winds up on the wrong spammer’s list.

This is where I think don at doncallaway dot org is at with the fucking investment scam spammers. Thanks a lot Fidelity. Obviously I expected more from such a supposedly prestigious organization. If I had known Fidelity was in league with the spammers, I would have given them a throw down email address. Or more likely, I would have chosen a different investment company with whom to do business.

Oh, and Fidelity, don’t try to deny you sold my email address and don’t say I agreed to it. The coincidence is too great and I am suspicious of even tiny ones. Furthermore, I have never, ever knowingly agreed to having my email address shared so other affiliated companies can send me ‘valuable’ information. So if I did agree it was because you scammed me.

Other stories on this site related to spam:

• Sentence handed down in spam case
• Our government at work: The Can Spam Act
• Progress in fighting spam
• Cookies, anyone?
• We are at war with the spammers
• Whose Cookies Are In My Cookie Jar?
• UPDATED: PSA- Beware unscrupulous cyber-marketers

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I am at my wits end. I really do not think I should have to be a fucking CSS layout expert to write on a blog.

Regarless how tacky the site looks, for the time being I hope it is at least readable in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. I will try to figure this nonsense out later.

Right now, a cold beer sounds pretty good.

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For the past couple of months, Firefox crashes about four or five times a day, eventually bringing the whole system down. I knew something so sweet was too good to last.

So… I am using IE to donwload Firefox one more time to attempt a re-install and I notice my background image doesn’t display. That’ll lean me for being lazy and not checking changes to my CSS file on multiple browsers.

Cheezus H… Well, I think my site looks good in Firefox anyway. Unfortunately 85% of my visitors come in on IE. Cheezus H…

Seems that this:

html {background-color : #fff;
              background-padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
              background	: url('.../bkg_brick.jpg')  ;

is okay in Firefox, but not IE.

More…

Also evident is that the margin settings are fine in Firefox, but cause the right column and center column to overlap in IE.

UPDATE: It’s now Thursday afternoon (a day later) and I got my site about 90% worked out on IE, but now the background tile does not show on Firefox. Argh!

Sorry about that to my Firefox readers, but I’ll have to work on foxing Firefix, err, fixing Firefox because like I said yesterday, 85-90% of my visitors are still blissfully using Internet Explorer.

The formatting is not a Firefox problem per se, it is a CSS compatibility problem between Firefox and IE. The crashing problem that this thread started about is probably not a Firefox problem either, more of a crappy computer problem. Seems the uninstall and reinstall has made a great improvement as Firefox has not crashed once Today.

If you are one of those browsing in IE bliss, take this recommendation to look at a different browser platform, preferrably Mozilla based. I know corp users have little choice in the matter, but if you can change from IE to almost anything else you’d be doing yourself, and the world, a big favor.

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