To the spammer who hit Simple Tricks hard in the wee hours this morning:
Telling me that my blog “sucks big black ass” over and over and over again is not an effective way to get me onboard with your ill-conceived marketing scheme. Not that I’d do it anyhow, but there’s no way I’m going to publish your offensive and most likely virus-ridden little URL after being repeatedly insulted.
I’m just sayin’.
Now kindly go screw yourself while I delete your 200 pointless wastes of bandwidth.
Briefly noted, I’ve culled a bunch of the links I previously had in the right-hand sidebar. They no longer served much use for me, and I imagine most of my Loyal Readers are getting their bloggage through an aggregator these days anyhow. If there was something over there that anybody used regularly, just let me know and I’ll put it back.
Stashmatic is a database site for cataloging one’s collectibles. I actually signed up with the service several years ago, around the same time I discovered LibraryThing, but I’ve never found the time to do much more than play with it a little. Which means the “stash” I’m linking to represents only a tiny, tiny sliver of the fabulous Bennion Archives, and not the comprehensive accounting I dream of someday having. Even so, I thought what’s there might still be of interest to someone.
“My DVD Collection” remains dead, as I still haven’t found a suitable substitute for DVDSpot.com, the late, lamented movie-cataloging service I enjoyed for only about a year before the Internet gods pulled one of their capricious tricks and shut the thing down. One of these days, somebody will build me a decent alternative. In the meantime, I’m keeping the placeholder.
Finally, let me call your attention to a new arrival in the “Pimpin’ My Friends” category (formerly “Miscellaneous Coolness”): Pretty Little Pixel is the portfolio and business site for a terrific graphic designer of my acquaintance, Stephanie Swift. We both share a fondness for old-fashioned signage, and she does this neat-o thing where she transforms ordinary photographs of old signs into striking works of art. I’m proud to say she’s given the treatment to some of my own photos, and I have my eye on a couple of her pieces that’ll be perfect for my kitchen, when I finally get around to remodeling it. Hop on over and check out her work. It’ll add some nostalgic color to just about any setting!
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve all given up and gone home for dinner by now. I hope you haven’t, but Simple Tricks has been out of commission a long time, and attention spans are short these days. I get it.
Still, if somebody is hanging around out there in the darkness, patiently waiting for my return, you’re in luck, because we’re back in black, five by five and ready to boogie. I’ll spare you the technical details of what happened — to be honest, I don’t really know them myself — suffice it to say the outage was caused by a mechanical problem with the rather elderly server on which these premises are constructed. Parts had to be ordered, shipping delays occurred. You know how it is.
Being blogless for a week proved to be a very odd experience. As I said in a comment over at Brian Greenberg’s blog, it was almost like a vacation to be free of the thing for a while, an unexpectedly welcome break from the pressure of having to produce and the frustration of not having the time to keep up with it as well as I’d like. But on the other hand, I really missed my soap box — all week long, I was spotting things on the ‘net that I would’ve liked to post, or comment on, or rant about, and the sensation of being unable to reach out to my audience was… well, not painful or anything so melodramatic as that, but I certainly didn’t enjoy being silenced. And I also missed whatever tiny community action I have going on here. Facebook offered some compensation, but it’s different over there… much more superficial-feeling, I guess. Facebook is all about the pithy comment, the “hi” as you pass someone in the virtual hall. This place feels like a conversation to me. Or at least that’s what I’d like it to be.
The strangest part of the past week was remembering how, when my buddy Jack first told me he’d built me a blog as a Christmas present, my initial reaction had been, “what in the hell am I going to do with that?” When he told me last Monday that it would take him a few days to fix the server problem, my reaction was, “what the hell am going to do without it?” I guess I hadn’t realized just how big a part of my routine, my identity, really, this silly little time-waster has become. And I don’t know if that’s cool or kind of lame…
The usual irregular posting will resume shortly. In the meantime, here’s a video that’s been going around and which everybody has probably already seen, but hey, I’ve been out of the loop for a week, remember? Besides, it cracks me up enough that I think it’s worth another look…
For a few years after Jim Henson’s death, I thought The Muppets had become irrelevant and unfunny, and ought to be retired. Whoever is running the brand these days is proving me wrong each and every time one of these virals is released. I think they’re hysterical. Jim would be proud, guys…
Some of you may have noticed something missing from your lives the last couple of days… namely this entire blog! Sorry about that; we’ve been having some server issues here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense. If it’s any consolation to those loyal readers who had to sweat and shudder their way through those uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms, I couldn’t even get into the back-end functions myself. It was as if this place never existed… [Imagine, if you will, the sound of a cold, mournful wind blowing across a vast plain that is alien in its desolation and very, very creepy.]
However, my ever-vigilant webmaster Jack informs me the problem ought to be fixed now and regular bloviation may continue.
A couple days ago, I got an email from someone called Amy at something called Blogged.com, informing me that “[her] editors recently reviewed [my] blog and have given it an 8.1 score out of (10) in the Entertainment category of Blogged.com.” Suspicious, cynical man that I am, I naturally assumed that the message was some variety of spam or maybe even a highly targeted phishing scheme. However, the fact that everything in the message was spelled correctly gave me the sense that it might be for real, so I thought I’d do a little googling when I had a free moment and try to determine what this Blogged.com thing was all about. It turns out that it is indeed a legit operation. This site describes it as “an online directory for all the blogs in the world. …a catalog that offers information on the entire blog and its overall content.” Which is actually a pretty cool idea, if rather ambitious (all the blogs in the world? How many do you suppose that is? Would it really be possible to catalog them all?).
I must admit, I’m flattered that my humble little scribblings here (a) attracted the notice of this sort of organization, and (b) that I scored quite highly in the eyes of those mysterious editors, whoever they may be. It’s a nice pat on the head to have some maybe-professional say my stuff is “great.” However, I’m not sure what to think of Simple Tricks being pigeonholed as an “entertainment blog.” I know I write a lot about movies and TV, but I think of this place as my personal blog, not an entertainment blog in the sense of something like, say, ScreenRant or even Jaime Weinman’s Something Old, Nothing New. My purpose here is to write about whatever happens to be on my mind… which I suppose the evidence would show tends to be movies and television. I don’t know… maybe it’s just the idea of being so easily categorized that rubs me the wrong way, or perhaps it’s the notion that I might be somewhat single-minded (and hence, potentially, kinda boring). Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Hey, folks, just a little housekeeping note here: I’ve noticed that lately the bloody spambots seem to be drawn to several specific older entries, so I’ve decided to close comments on these garbage-magnets in the hopes of saving myself a little aggravation. Fortunately, they’re all older entries that I doubt anyone is going to want to comment on at this point, but I thought I’d put up an official warning anyhow, because you never can tell what people are going to run across in their surfing. If for some reason you do want to remark on one of the closed entries, just send me an email and we’ll work something out…
Hey, kids, if you’ve been hanging around the blog today, you may have noticed some weird stuff happening format-wise, culminating in this new three-column arrangement. I’ve been wanting to try a three-column format for some time now; basically, I haven’t liked the aesthetics of all that sidebar information stacked up in a single place, and I also suspect a lot of people never scroll down and thus miss out on stuff. (Perhaps I underestimate people’s willingness to scroll, or overestimate the significance of my sidebar crap, or both. Still.)
Anyway, a little bit of tinkering from me and a big assist from Jack resulted in what you now see here. It’s not perfect — I’d prefer not to have all that white space below the sidebars, and there may be some problems for people using smaller displays (but isn’t pretty much everybody on at least 1024×768 monitors these days?) — but I’m going to give it a go for awhile, especially since Jack has advised me that switching back isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
Let me know what you think of the new look, especially if you’re experiencing any big problems. I’ve tested it on both Firefox and Explorer, so browser choice, at least, shouldn’t be an issue…
Just trying out a new toy, a way to embed photos in my entries without the tedium of saving a copy from the source to my desktop and re-uploading it to my blog server, and without breaking InterWeb etiquette by “hotlinking” to other people’s bandwidth. Details here, if you’re interested in techy stuff.
Some of you may be asking, “why an old photo of Al Gore holding a brick-sized mobile telephone?” Well, why not? I remember when brick-phones were quite the novelty, and it amuses me to see how far we’ve come in such a relatively short time…
Hm… according to this, Simple Tricks and Nonsense is ranked 2,393,955 out of however many sites there are out there in the vast, vast InterWeb. Not too bad, I suppose. Hey, I beat Greenberg, so that’s something. (Just kidding, Brian…)
I’m thinking I may have to get a commemorative t-shirt to mark this occasion. How geeky would that be?
From the Department of Stuff I Mentioned Months Ago and Then Forgot to Follow Through On (DSIMMATFFTO), may I now present my new and improved photo gallery? It’s got a whole new interface (which I find much more aesthetically pleasing than the old one) and I’ve even reorganized and added some new sub-albums, so if you’ve ever been curious about what I or my world looks like, go have a look. The link over there in the sidebar has been updated, too…
