What is it that makes people think its okay to enter an animal’s enclosure at a zoo? It boggles the mind that people are so stupid.
Gu Gu the panda got some noms in on his third human. Third, folks. Why do they keep doing this?
If you look over to the right, at the archives, you’ll see a huge gap from January 2005 through August 2006. Luckily, I realized that all of it is on archive.org. So, if I don’t manage to find a backup on a CD tucked away somewhere, maybe I can scrape my old stuff off the Wayback Machine.
UPDATE: Well, no lost backup anywhere in my pile of CDRs. So I’m manually pulling the posts of archive.org, formatting them as MobableType export files, then importing them here. This is gonna take a while. Luckily, I’m enough of a pack rat that I have the original image files floating on my hard drive so that the articles are complete.
I also realized that June – August 2006 simply don’t exist, because I didn’t post anything those months–long story.
UPDATE: Turns out archive.org was missing posts for March, June, July and September 2005. But that’s okay. I didn’t post much important stuff. I also am not sure what to do about the comments on some posts. For now, I’m gonna let it slide because my brain is a bit fried. I’m off to do other stuff now.
I didn’t want to post this article when I wrote it — in the wee hours of Christmas morning as I dealt with a minor stream of comment spam. I didn’t want to mess up the nice Christmas post I did by moving it below this relatively negative one. I wasn’t happy, and I have a plan.
There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child. — Erma Bombeck
May every Christmas morning find you with the heart of a child.
I mentioned that people are starting to link to SciSpot from other sites, and I ran across another today while checking my site on Technorati.
It felt weird to see someone link to my site again, like I’ve been caught mumbling to myself. For the most part, that’s precisely what I have been doing, but not because of a disappointing lack of readers. When I set up SciSpot, I had no illusions of wide readership. I thought that SciSpot would be a place for me to post my musings and store a few projects I’ve done that I might one day want to revisit. SciSpot really was my glorified lab journal — if someone stumbled upon it, that’s okay by me.
To have someone link to SciSpot with the phrase “at the usual joints” and be included in the same sentence as the Guardian and Ars Technica, well, I kinda want to barf. Not because I don’t like the site that mentioned me, but oh-my-ghod, people are starting to visit my site. For real.
So what does this mean for me and SciSpot? I don’t intend to be a shrinking violet, but maybe I’d better get my act together and start typing some more meaningful words into this blog. And get off my duff and finally tweak the site’s design, as I’ve been threatening to do.
I suppose that I shouldn’t take a couple of links as some portent of future popularity, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared, either. I probably should think about the topics of my posts more, too. Should I post entries like I did about voting, or go back to strictly science? What do the other big-name bloggers do? (Well, they do post slightly off topic stuff so maybe I’m okay.)
I’m still in post-election depression/anxiety, so maybe now’s not the time to think about it. “Fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow’s another day,” to paraphrase Scarlet O’Hara.
I’ve been getting hit by a lot more comment spam lately, and while Movable Type has been catching and holding it, I wanted a more complete solution. So today I installed MT-Blacklist. We’ll see how it works out.
CNN has a glowing review of Larry Niven’s new “Ringworld’s Children” and that reminded me that I need to do some good old-fashioned reading. Quite some time ago, so long that I’ve all but forgotten it, I read “Ringworld,” but I haven’t read any of the following novels. So off I go to buy a new copy of “Ringworld” and will follow up with the others: “Ringworld Engineers,” “Ringworld Throne” and finally “Ringworld‘s Children.”
Or I could get the first title in audiobook format from iTunes. Or I could get it directly from Audible.com for $9.95, since it would be my first purchase from them.
That reminds me — what ever happened to the SciFi Channel production of “Riverworld?” I guess I missed it completely — it even was nominated for a Saturn Award. Well, I guess there are some reasons that should make me reconsider getting cable.
