The World of Stuff .com

One hundred

This is my 100th post using WordPress. Its official number is 107, because when I installed WordPress, I made and deleted a few posts to test the software. I thought I was going to hit this mark yesterday — that would have been cool. One hundred posts in exactly six months. But, in my defense, February was short.

For the record, this is the 446th post overall (if I’ve counted correctly). Wow… 346 posts and a year and a half without blogging software. I don’t know how I lived like that.

I had some weird dreams the night before last.

In the first one I was on the run in some strange forest town, and I was seeking refuge by hiding in people’s houses. In particular, I was looking for cool air by hiding in air-conditioned rooms or refrigerators. And I was kind of nervous and all, being on the run. I don’t know from what.

In my next dream I was in a room with George Harrison and some other guy. The other guy, who was a nutcase, wanted to kill George. He had a gun. I had a gun. George Harrison did not have a gun. Apparently the guy he was going to kill me if I didn’t kill George for him. Seeing as I had no choice (I wanted to live, after all), I shot George Harrison. He slumped over. I then proceeded chat it up with him as if nothing had happened. After all, I wanted to meet a Beatle, and it didn’t seem like he was going to die right away. I started to apologize for trying to kill him and all, and right then and there he died.

I suppose it would have made sense if the second dream had come before the first, but the mind works in random ways, and apparently the dreams had nothing to do with each other.

Let’s do a bit of Ask Jordon.

Karren: what is the most common first name in the world

How soon they forget. Though I don’t expect you to Read The Friendly Archives before sending in a question, I did in fact answer this (to the best of my ability) a few weeks ago. In turn, please see an even earlier post.

Yellow Chicken: Didn’t you mention something about making a computer timer? How’s that coming?

Ah, the Yellow Chicken strikes again. Yes, I did mention that I was going to work on a program that notifies the user to look away from the monitor every so often. Basically I got it to work, but there were a few issues I couldn’t work out. Let’s see if I can remember what they were.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the program to count down the seconds properly. And getting options to stick would have been tricky also. Not to mention giving it a snappy icon and distributing it properly (someone finally noticed I was distributing my CheezySlots under the GPL but without the source code, and distribution has ceased). For the meager proportion of my meager number of viewers who have Windows XP and would want to use the software, it didn’t seem worth the effort. Invest in an egg timer.

And now, a public service announcement to all Internet users. When entering a fake e-mail address (say, as a demonstration), don’t use the domains asdf.com, none.com, nobody.com, etc. People actually own those and, odds are, they’re getting pelted with spam because of you. As aoeu.com explains, there are officially blessed domains for that sort of thing. (“aoeu” is the Dvorak keyboard’s equivalent of “asdf.”) Please use example.com, example.net, or example.org instead.

And if you’re curious, here is the oh-so-exciting example.com. The other example sites show the same message.