Various and Sundry: Now Everything But Photography

Like every other blog out there, this one carries ads. I don’t hard sell them, but you’ll see them at the top of the page, along the right column, and in a few other scattered places. Hopefully, they’re not too obtrusive. And if you’re really annoyed by them, you’ve likely already installed a plug-in to Firefox to block them.

If you haven’t done that — lots of them are Amazon links. And every time you click through one of those graphics (or one of the cover scans you see on the weekly DVD release list or the occasional book or CD cover) and buy something, I get a wee tiny bit back. You buy what you were going to buy and pay the same price; I get credit for referring you.

It’s a lovely little system that’s helped me pay for, oh, one or two hardcover comic book collections.

Now, I’m upping the ante. I want to buy the lovely Harmony 550 universal remote controller (pictured at right). And I want to finance it partly through Amazon Associate points. I’m half way there already, but I need to earn one more Amazon reward certificate to seal the deal.

So I need your help. I’m not asking you to spend any extra money on my account or send me cash or anything like that. (I still can’t bring myself to put up a PayPal tip jar. That still seems a bit too much.) All I ask is that the next time you order something through Amazon and get that delicious free shipping over $25, just click on an Amazon link of any kind on this blog first. You’ll get what you need; I’ll look like a marketing genius by Amazon, who will reward me for all my incessant whining about home theaters, reality TV shows, and Apple computers.

What a system!

And I’ll even toss in a review of the thing once I get there.

If you’re looking for something additional to buy at Amazon, there’s a tiny link at the top of the page above the Amazon banner ad to the Various And Sundry Store, which has a bunch of links to DVDs, books, CDs, etc. that we’ve discussed on this blog over the last few months.  It’s also there in the right column, inconspicuous and lost in the masses of links.
Thanks in advance. I’ll let you know how this goes.

(And once this is over, I’ll beg you to click through someone else’s links for a little while. I believe in sharing.)

I have a plug-in on the backend of this blog that tracks what search terms are entered most on the search section you see to the right.  It’s always been handy to see what people are looking for, what older pages still get hits, etc.

It’s now functionally useless. The spammers have taken it over, too.  Nevermind that it does them no good, but their robots see a text box they can type their terms into, and so they do.

Sometimes, the internet doesn’t really feel worth it, you know?

I’m taking today off.

Have a nice day off, America. Have a nice Wednesday, everyone else.

VariousandSundry.com will reopen for business on Thursday.

There’s no ROCK STAR in the CBS schedule anymore.  I have Big Brother, and I imagine we’ll discuss some of that around here, but –

Dangit, I miss ROCK STAR already!

I’m so proud of you all. Check out these stats from the VariousAndSundry.com logs:

More people are using Firefox than IE.    I’m so proud. Nearly half of all people browsing this site use Firefox or Mozilla.  IE is at 39%.

There’s some talk out there that web browser records such as this one are picking up activities from an Apple iPhone web browser type.  No such luck for this site just yet, though we are getting 8% Safari stats.

It’s still going strong:

The VandS Tumblr

This could be the home of all future link dumps.  It’s wonderfully easy to use.

I have a Tumblog now.

Check out vands.tumblr.com

Think of it as a multimedia extension of the link dump.  I’m just playing with it now. Don’t know how serious this will ever get, but it’s a good place to dump little links that I don’t bother compiling for this site. . .

Regular blogging begins tomorrow.

But, first, look what I saw on my honeymoon:

PIRATE SHIP!

And I’m getting married. Today. This afternoon.

Normal posting will resume someday. In the meantime, I’ve preprogrammed a lot of stuff for you for the next week and a half. New content is still coming, so I expect you all to keep posting!

Also, we have a Guest Blogger! The first guest blogger in the history of Various and Sundry will be keeping you entertained with his musings over the next week. Everyone please welcome Ron Richards, from iFanboy.com. He and I have chatted a lot in recent times, and he has some non-comics interests that should fit in well around here. I’m sure he’ll have an introductory post up sometime soon.

Please play nicely with the new kid on the block. Thanks, gang!

I do not do April Fools pranks.

I’m glad it fell on a weekend this year, at least. Less people on the ‘net means less people trying to make others look stupid.

Get off the ‘net today and return tomorrow when all is safe.  Have a nice day. =)

Meta:

• Sometimes I think I don’t work hard enough on writing for this blog.

American Idol:

• How Canadian Jory Steinberg can compete on American Idol, and why she was once touted as “The Next Alanis Morisette.” (via)
• And here’s the full story on the contestant whose father failed a murder/suicide attempt after catching his wife with another man.
• Which is worse? The scrawny Dustin Diamond (”Screech”) on CELEBRITY FIT CLUB? Or the fact that he’s been effectively kicked off the show for threatening Kimberly Locke?
• Idol contestants featured in the #1 (Daughtry) and #2 (Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls soundtrack) Billboard albums for last week. Impressive.

Technology:

• Take a look at these pictures of programming teams and guess: Are they using Perl, PHP, or Java? I did pretty well on this one, getting more than half right.
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 releases in February. It’ll be $199 through April, when it’ll go up to its full $299 price. It’s tempting for me. I’m going to need a program like this in the spring/summer. I had been planning on buying Apple’s Aperture, but if Lightroom is just as good, I could get it for $100 cheaper. I need to research this. Does anyone here have experience with either or both of these programs?
• An interview with the creator and maintainer of TextMate, the world’s greatest text editing program. It’s the one thing I wish I could use at work, but is Mac only.
• Is Google the new http:// ? It’s interesting to see human behavior at work. I’m not going to cast judgment on people here. After all, we know people have searched for Google on Yahoo.com for years. . .
• R.I.P. Floppy Disc. Now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve used a computer with a floppy disc drive in a few years. Oddly enough, it wasn’t all that long ago I ordered a Gateway desktop with built-in Zip disc drive. Those were the days. 100 megs of storage on one cart. Ooooohhh…
• Unreal Tournament III trailer.

Music:

• Billy Joel’s new single comes to iTunes February 20th. No, this is not a precursor to a full album. The song is getting some airplay in the NY area, but I haven’t heard it yet. I don’t listen to the FM or AM much anymore. Podcasts keep me busy enough.
• The Eagles have a new album coming out, too?

It’s the bane of the internet, but what can you do? Spam stinks.

For example: I had blacklisted hotmail.com addresses, until a kindly reader pointed out that his posts weren’t getting through. (Sorry again, Juan.) So I unblocked hotmail.com, as I know lots of people use it as a spam capture address. Guess what? Within 15 minutes, a half dozen spams from hotmail.com had made it into various comments threads.

Next, I went to the WordPress plug-in page and installed something called Akismet, which has come highly recommended numerous times. TechCrunch reports that it’s stopped a million spams from their blog. The second after I installed it, Akismet reported stopping 14,000 spams. I’m guessing WordPress keeps a spam database of the ones it’s blacklisted, and those were amongst the 14,000. (I learned a long time ago NOT to tag spam comments as spam, but rather to delete them. No use filling up my database with crap e-mail.)

In any case, let me know if you have any problems posting, or if anything looks weird to you on the site in the next few days. This site has been spammed like you wouldn’t believe since the new year, and an alarming number have made it through WordPress’ basic spam filters. I’m hoping this will stop that and make my job a little easier.

Related from the V&S Archives:

• Spam E-Mail Getting Nicer?
• The Joys of Blog Ownership (on test blog spam)
• Spam Spam Spam
• Best Spam Mail Name
• Spam Mail Quote of the Day

Welcome to 2007. I wish I had a graphic for this day like I did Christmas, but I wussed out. Sorry about that.

Any New Year’s Resolutions out there?

I’m vowing once again to spend more time writing for this blog and less time setting up link dumps. And I might have a technological solution to part of that problem, but that’s still weeks or months away. No promises. (I think I make this vow every year, and it lasts all of a month, at best.)

I’m also going to try to follow through on my promises more. I never did write up those reviews of the new Weird Al and Meat Loaf CDs that I said I was going to do. Crap.
I also want to get back to playing with Illustrator and working on lettering and maybe even a little more graphic design/artsy stuff. We’ll see how that goes.

Oh, and I’m losing ten pounds in the next four months. That’s all.

Abnormal posting returns tomorrow! Enjoy your day! =)

(Fonts from Comicraft, who are having their annual New Year’s Day sale in just a week.)

I keep forgetting to mention this one –

Coverville is one of my favorite podcasts, and the one I’ve been listening to the longest. It was one of the first I ever listened to, and the only one I’ve never unsubscribed from in two years. It’s a thrice-weekly show that plays cover songs. The host, Brian Ibbott, is a comics fan and even lists Pipeline on the front page of his site.

In any case, I recorded a generic song introduction for him, which he used on a recent show. Go download episode #274 and fast forward to about the 15 minute mark. Between the two songs, you’ll hear my voice. Pretty cool.

Thanks, Brian!