Chuck-ese

I just gave my senior project presentation, and I passed with flying colors (45, 45, 44, 43 out of 45). You can see the results eventually at the new piece of crap added to the Chucksphere. Thus ends everything project-like I have to do until college. Now I can finally write some stuff I’ve been meaning to.

Motherfucking done! Woo hoo!

Let me tell you a little bit about this post. Way back on the 17th of March in the year 2006, I anounced to my non-existent readership that I would be doing a post called “What’s the Deal with Blogs?” I envisioned it as a sort of article or essay where I could provide my view on a subject which was getting lots of coverage.

It ain’t gonna happen. I’m cleaning out the “Your Drafts” bar at the top of the Administration screen, and this has to go. Granted, now that I’ve semi-fulfilled this part of the prophecy, look for the Three Kingdoms wargame! (Don’t, actually. You’ll die of disappointment.)

At the time of this writing, there are 167 comments on this blog. One hundred sixty-seven. Spread over 55 posts, that’s over 3 per post. I had no idea I was so popular. However, I closer look at the statistics reveals the truth we suspected all along.

Although the average spread of the above comments would be three per post, the article “Clutter” has an astounding 162. All of it is spam. Why that article? It could be that at one time, it was in every single category this blog had to offer. Since then, I’ve added more, and I seem to have deleted any evidence of comments on that post from before the date of the expansion. Also of note, every damn spam is a trackback. I thought those would be a good idea, but they turned out oh so wrong. 99 of the Spams are for Tramadol (which word will probably cause this post to outstrip the other in spam comments), including “snorting tramadol” and “canine tramadol.”

Well, we only have five more comments to track down.

I have one super-spam trackback on “Momentous Day in History.”

There is a spam trackback on “The Primaries Begin” that at least had a small amout of effort put into it. Here’s the originating site, if you want to see it. Note that what generated the spam was a short aside about Paris Hilton.

The trackback on the page “This is odd…” came from this very site.

And, finally, behold! Two legitimate comments! From my good friend Lauren.

And, as I hit the “publish” button, eight more useless comments will be created as trackbacks from this site. I think I’m going to turn them off.

I have another registered user, Alexis_Yost, who registered on 23-September-2007 and has yet to post a comment.

[ETA: Turned off trackbacks, and purged the hell out of comments!]

I mostly just posted this to get that euphamism for Valentine’s Day into the English vocabulary. I made some crappy home-made Valentine’s cards for some females I know, and they were a mild success.
I paid my server bill yesterday. $60 bucks for a slice of internet anonymity and obscurity! What a bargain!

I know I haven’t updated this site in a while, that’s due to a few things. Exams were three weeks ago, and studying for those took up my pseudo-creative time. Then, the post-exam S.T.A.L.K.E.R. experience, which will be the subject of my next Games article. I still have to finish my essay for the U of M Honors College, and I have to read 200 pages of Great Expectations for A.P. English by the end of this four-day weekend. Top that off with more research into my senior project so I have some progress to report on Tuesday. So, all of the stuff that hasn’t been done is not going to be done anytime soon.

So, if I were to type in a url in my domain that doesn’t exist, such as http://www.chucksphere.com/infos.html, I don’t get that crappy little 404 page I made. No no no! I get redirected to my blog. This is clearly not my intention, and I’ve remarked about a similar phenominon in this post. Driving me nuts.

Also, if I were to forget how to access my webmail account outside of CPanel, and mistakenly type mail.chucksphere.com into my address bar, I will be taken to a website that is not in any way affiliated with me, at all. How does this happen? What the hell is “Enchanted Coyote.com” doing? How are they sponging off my domain? Why, how, since when? They’ve been active since 2005, if you believe the copyright notice, which is before I started The Chucksphere.

I want some damn answers.

As you can see, this blog is having some formatting issues (Why is everything centered? Why is the below article all bold?). Minor bug and my lack of commitment mean I will probably be jumping ship for something else soon.

So, I’m sitting here in front of my computer, looking at the four different iterations of the Chucksphere homepage, wondering “why do they all suck?” Their purpose is simple: provide links to all the sites I am responsible for* and showcase the exemplary ones**.

* As if I’d really want to take credit for this shit
** “exemplary ones”: A joke, really.
The first iteration had the title at the top, with a giant picture of a hat. Beneath that, I go into a short exposition as to myself and the site. Next comes the list of websites in all the myriad versions. Below that are the lists that appear on the Information page.

The revised version decreases the size of the hat picture, crams the exposition to one side so room may be made for an inline frame to showcase any page from my site that I choose.

Chucksphere v3.0 does way with the bio, and stuffs the list of sites in its place. The other lists were banished to the info page.

In the most current version, the side-by-side format has been trashed, along with the lists of the different versions. The iframe has been expanded, so that the pages displayed therein don’t look any more like shit than they naturally do. I even unified the title, so “The” wasn’t abandoned way out at the top of the page. It’s a good, clean layout. But it still doesn’t do the trick.

Then, flash of inspiration! It’s the hat. It doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t look cool (which is what I thought at the time), and it kind of looks faux-artistic and douchbaggy. So, it’s gone.

Cheers.

All obligations have been completed. P&P is due in 12 days, more than enough time. No major projects except for those that are self-inflicted.

To Work!

Also, Republican candidate Mike Huckabee spoke in Owosso today. Too bad it wasn’t a candidate I wanted to hear.

So, I was reading this article over at Ryan Holiday’s website, when I came across the list of things that matter. I realized that I don’t meet a single one of those criteria:

[*] Smart, intelligent people do not read by work. I read my work. I’m deathly afraid of anybody reading it, so nobody knows about this. Simple as that. Can’t even say for certain why I’m writing this now.

[*] I get email from spammers. (Where “spammers” include all institutions of higher education in North America and Dennis Kucinich.)

[*]  OH, OH, I do write about non-tech things! But still, 0 readers.

[*] Wow, I also have sucess and interests outside of the internet. That’s the only place I do have sucess.

[*] Flying under the radar? Check.

[*] Yes, people take my suggestions, but not from here.

[*] I hate looking back on what I’ve written. I can’t stand to be in the same room as somebody else who’s reading my work, even if they do so silently.

Oh, 2/3 of blogs have only one RSS subscriber. Me? Zero.

In short, I’m killing this. All of this. If Dress-Stephen doesn’t take off (or even get completed, which it probably won’t), I’m not paying my server bill and damn it all.

Well, the bumfucking is over, sort of. I got the Pride and Prejudice monkey off my back [belated warning: switching into uncomfortably inapropriate anaolgy] in a way, by convincing it to only spoon me (i.e. Mrs. Young pushed back the due date). College app to U of M went out Monday morning.

Oh, I found a cool template for Dress-Stephen.co.nr over at Mashable.com, “Groovy Blue.”

TTFN.

[EDIT at 8:19 - Finished the template, Steve C’s doing something to it.]