My cousin posted a link to this on Facebook tonight and I thought it was kind of neat… 😉
movie thoughts … Iron Man 3
It took an extra week, but I finally went to see this last night.
…and there’s no way that I can write about this one without talking about SPOILERS!!!!!
Space Oddity, Revisited
ISS Commander Chris Hadfield comes back home to Earth today, but not before sending us one last song from space … quite the fitting finale!
Note that he re-wrote some the lyrics to better fit with his journey, not to mention the entire last verse to give the tune a little HAPPIER ending… 😀
BTW, here’s a great article from The Guardian chronicling Chris’ last five months aboard the ISS and the impact he’s made with everything he’s shared online from that unique view above the world. Here’s to hoping this is a trend that continues with the next astronauts to take his place!
Humor Revisited
Some may have noticed that I’ve been kind of neglecting my humor column as of late.
It’s not that I’ve stopped writing it altogether, even though that’s pretty much what a look at the archives might suggest. I guess you could say that I’ve just been … busy … and humor hasn’t been getting the priority it deserves for about the last year or so.
For what it’s worth, I have still been writing … I’ve got bits and pieces scribbled down for a lot of the columns that I’ve missed, but it’s just going to take some time to organize and pull them all together. It’s going to be a ton of work, but that’s not what I wanted to write about here…
This weekend I started working on the next redesign of comedic-genius.com, and so far I think I really like what I have. It’s kind of a tricky redesign because right now there’s a bunch of really old stuff on that site that doesn’t directly relate to The Humor Column. It’s mostly other random columns and writing that I’ve done over the years, and even though none of them ever found the same traction as humor did, there’s still a sizable volume for a couple of them.
So part of the problem is that I don’t know what to do with that stuff. Some of them I honestly couldn’t care less about, but others I look back on and really appreciate for where I was in my life when I wrote them … and yet I’m not sure if they really belong on a site that’s supposed to be dedicated to humor writing going forward.
And yet on the other hand, I’m kind of really enjoying creating a site that’s solely dedicated to just that one feature because after almost 15 years of writing this stuff, there’s actually a lot of different things that I can do with all of that old content now! Not only does the new design that I have so far do a bit more to highlight by older recent columns beyond just the latest one, but I’m also looking forward to going back into my archives a bit to bring back to light some of that older content as well. This is the year when I’m going to break 500 humor columns published, which from what I’ve been told is a pretty big number for a weekly feature, so I want to take better advantage of that and not just show off whatever I’ve written most lately.
Of course, I also need to build a proper store into this site because the # of books that I’ll have for sale by the end of the year should be really getting up there … I’m not nearly as excited about building that simply because I’ve looked into it before and have yet to find a store plugin for WordPress that I really like. And it doesn’t help that a lot of them aren’t free, making it tough to try anything out because I’m not exactly going to drop $80 on a plugin that I don’t end up liking!
I think it’s going to be an interesting year, even if it still takes a couple more months to really get my humor game back where I want it to be. I’m not happy that I’m not publishing a weekly column at the moment, but I think when I finally get back in gear, it’s going to be a much better presentation and hopefully that will help keep me a little better motivated to stay on track in the future.
(not actually from Mark Zuckerberg)
I’m not sure which is weirder about this – that actual humans with brains would honestly believe that “share this photo if you don’t want video ads” is how a billion dollar company like Facebook would choose to survey its users, or the fact that some random dude spent time in Photoshop putting this image together for no personal gain whatsoever.
What’s the goal here? To mislead users into thinking that Facebook is going to inundate them with (more) ads so that everyone will leave? Are their bragging rights to be earned from being the guy who created that fake Mark Zuckerberg announcement that a bunch of clueless people are sharing around? I don’t get it.
❓ ❓ ❓ ❓ ❓ ❓
Domain Registry of America = a Bunch of Jerks
I really hate crap like this.
Admittedly I haven’t gotten one in a while, but I literally renewed some domain names with GoDaddy two days ago – albeit not for the domain listed here – and the final purchase price for one .COM came to a whopping … $10.38.
Or, you know, I could pay these shysters 337% to renew and transfer my name to them – you know, because they took the time to send me this kindhearted, completely non-misleading notice!
What grinds my goat about these types of things is that while *I* knew that it was a ripoff and not worth more than 10 minutes of rant-blogging here, they send these things out in bulk and I’m sure there are plenty of other unsuspecting recipients who don’t know any better, thinking that these are actually coming from their own registrar … I mean, the word America is right there in the name and everything! No way that an American Company could possibly scam a hardworking small business that barely even knows how to get to its own website, much less what all is involved with running it.
People see this, it looks official, and so they act on it, not even realizing that their domain name fees are about to triple and they’re turning over the address to their online home to the sleazy, door-to-door snake oil salesman of the domain registry.
The last time I ever paid $35 for a domain name was to Network Solutions back in 1999. It was for 1 domain – justlaugh.net – and I promptly lost it when I moved to Florida in 2003 because it expired and they immediately put it back on the open market without so much as an e-mail reminder.
Funny, I had a handful of other domains that survived the trip just fine … because they weren’t registered with Network Solutions.
In comparison, I just let a domain that I had purchased for my sister expire and not only did GoDaddy send me reminders every two weeks leading up to the expiration date, but I also got four more in the two weeks to follow after the expiration date – just to make sure that I definitely didn’t want the thing anymore.
Please don’t be a sucker. Find a domain registrar that you trust and then ignore anything you receive from anybody else telling you how to manage your domains.
👿 👿 👿
“Please remove my link from your site…”
So apparently this is a new SEO thing now.
Last week I got a strange request out of the blue to remove a source link from a post that I made last summer…
I work for InsuranceQuotes.org, and our site has recently been penalized by Google for an unnatural link profile that violates Google’s Quality Guidelines. As part of an effort to get back in their graces, we are removing all links to our website so we can start fresh.
We are making changes to our site to build better content for our audience. I am contacting people who have linked to us in the past to remove any doubt that Google views the link or anchor text as overoptimzed or unnatural.
Therefore, I am respectfully requesting that you remove all links to our site on scottsevener.com including:
scottsevener.com/blog/2012/ser
ving-sizes-around-the-world- or-damn-americans-sure-are- pigs/ That says insurancequotes.org and goes to insurancequotes.org/serving-si
zes-around-the-world/. I appreciate your past efforts to link to our content, and I am excited to launch our improved content very soon. We understand that this request takes time and effort, but we would sincerely appreciate your help.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. If you could be so kind as to respond that you have removed the link, it would really help out with my efforts. Thank you in advance!
Admittedly it seemed a little odd, so before doing anything I shot back a quick reply…
Are you going to take down the original post? (http://www.insurancequotes.
org/serving-sizes-around-the- world) I find it odd that the infographic is still there and still contains the embed code at the bottom for people to link back to your site, yet you’re asking people who used it to stop linking to your site.
Now after not hearing anything back for a few days, considering that my reply was within a couple of hours of the request, I pretty much forgot about it. My first theory was that maybe the request was somehow from a competitor of the original site and they were trying to sabotage them by submitting link removal requests seemingly on their behalf. It seemed a little weird, but I kinda chalked it up to all of the other targeted email SPAM you get and that was that.
Until I got another one this afternoon, this time regarding a completely different post … which stood out to me because it was then that I noticed that they were both concerning infographic posts, so from there I decided to do a little digging…
First of all, I couldn’t help but find it conflicting that in both scenarios, while the requester was asking that I remove my links to their site, in neither instance did they actually remove the post on their site, or even the embed links that they were offering up to anyone and everyone just like me to include their content on our sites! It seemed counterproductive to waste all of your time asking for link removals when the link code itself is still being offered up freely…
And as it turns out, it would explain why this isn’t exactly a well thought out plan because it’s really a (relatively) new SEO thing that’s come up in the last year or so where apparently Google made a new tweak their search algorithm and now “SEO Experts” are scrambling to comply … which amuses me because here over the last couple of years, these are the same sites that scrambled to throw up infographics and memes and anything else they could offer to encourage sharing with attribution, and now that the pendulum changed directions yet again, they want everyone else to change and help reverse the link juice – good or bad – that they’ve created for themselves.
Maybe I would be a little more sympathetic if the sites themselves were making a little more effort – i.e. actually removing the link-hungry content itself – but they’re not doing that because these are outside “specialists” who probably don’t even have any control over the site’s actual content; they’re just shooting out these letters in bulk, hoping that enough random blogs will comply and it’ll adjust their customer’s page rank enough to justify whatever they’re charging for their SEO expertise.
The odd thing about it all is, I posted those infographics because I actually liked them … so it’s not like I was part of the problem by just posting anything and everything that I could find for content … over the years I’ve really only done a couple of them, and it was because I enjoyed what they had to say and in some cases, I had a little bit of commentary to add myself. I mean, it was pretty obvious what they were doing and I always felt a little reluctant when I added that attribution link at the end to some random, topically unrelated website because it was clear that they just wanted the links at the time, but like this other site also replied, it’s part of fair use that we cite our sources when posting something like that from another site and it just wouldn’t be right if later we went back and took the link off, but left up the original post.
It’s funny because in my research, I also came across this marketing post that explains the exact process that these SEO folks encouraging people to do these days and includes a few dozen comments from fellow SEO professionals all discussing how this Google change has been such an inconvenience for their clients, and it just makes me laugh because here’s an entire industry segment that’s been built up to sidestep website owners from what should be their #1 goal – making better content!
I’m all for SEO strategies for the basic stuff – making sure that the structure of your site at a code level is in a format that all of the search engines can crawl and index the most effectively through tagging and sitemaps and proper HTML structure, but what’s the very first point of Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines … “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.” These stupid link-bait content farms don’t do users any good, and so thankfully Google has finally caught on and started penalizing all of these sites that only exist to drown search results with junk articles that will get their owners quick page views and ad impressions.
As not only a content creator myself, but also a longtime resident of the Internet, I hate those kinds of websites and anything that my favorite search engine can do to help wipe them out of existence is a welcome change to me.
Another amusing notion – in digging through all of this today, one other thing I found was this post from Google about a new tool that webmasters can use to disavow links for what sounds like pretty much this exact scenario, so in a way that begs the question of why these “experts” are wasting their time begging me to change anyways if they can get more effective results themselves from the people actually assigning their page rank in the first place! Mind you, I didn’t do any sort of testing myself because I’d rather be creating my content than constantly monitoring my page rank, but it might be something worth looking into before shooting off 1,000 retarded removal letters into the void! 😉
TL;DR – Please don’t waste our collective time sending me these requests to remove your links from my posts in the future – as a rule, they’ll all be going in my spam folder going forward and you will never get a reply from me.
Also while we’re at it, please stop crapping up the Internet with your SEO-infested garbage. If you want to run a website, make actual content worth reading for it; otherwise, we don’t want you here and your flailing attempts to game a constantly changing system currently monopolized by a single corporation isn’t working anyways. 🙄
Laptop Recovery Fun
I found out a couple of days ago that Sara’s laptop hasn’t been working for a while.
As in, the thing just hangs at the Windows start-up screen until either you give up or the thing manages to overheat itself because its fans aren’t exactly what they used to be. I mean, we did buy the thing in 2007 or something, so it is probably getting pretty close to its end of life, unfortunately…
I did some digging last night and came to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with the hard drive, though at this point I’m not sure if the whole thing has gone bad, there are just a few bad sectors, or maybe even just a key file or two got corrupted. At one point I got it to boot into Safe Mode, but it wouldn’t let me run chkdsk from there and got stuck in a loop trying to restart to run it via DOS. When I try to just access the command prompt via Safe Mode, it hangs trying to load crcdisk.sys, which reinforces my theory that it’s got to be something hard drive-related that’s to blame.
Besides, I ran all sorts of BIOS tests last night and everything but the hard drive test passed with flying colors. Unfortunately, after pouring through boxes out in the garage, I can’t seem to find the extra laptop hard drive that I bought a few years ago for another laptop and then never ended up using, meaning that I don’t really have any quick fixes unless I can just get that one working right again.
So today I tried downloading a couple of different bootable ISOs to see if I could maybe repair the errors that way, but I didn’t really have much luck. The best I found was this one that included a “Mini Windows XP” option that allowed me to actually pull up the drive itself and copy over to a flash drive most of my wife’s files, so at least all of her stuff for school & work is safe.
After all of that and watching my options rapidly diminishing, I finally decided to bite the bullet and try re-installing Windows just to see what would happen. Surprisingly, everything installed just fine (even though Windows wasn’t smart enough to completely wipe the drive first), and so now I’m trying to do every other test I can think of to see if the thing will still float on its own before giving it back to Sara to have her start re-installing all of her other stuff again.
- I just finished installing something like 132 Windows Updates, and surprisingly those all went in just fine.
- Now that I’m able to finally run chkdsk like a normal person, I’m hoping that I can once and for all figure out if the bad stuff was just specific files or areas of the disk that can be isolated.
With any luck, maybe I’ll just be able to run chkdsk a couple of times … once to correct the errors and a second time to validate that they’ve been cleared (because I had issues earlier where it would pretend to be fixing errors, yet they’d keep popping up).
You know, when I stop and think about it, I haven’t had to do this kind of stuff for a long time! That said, my own desktop PC is arguably just as old, so even if I can resuscitate hers back to life here, that may not be the end of the ordeal … but for now, let’s just try to focus on one problem at a time!
*fingers crossed*
Social Anxiety
I’m sure you could say that to an extent I’ve always been troubled with some sort of social anxiety, though it seems like in recent years it’s starting to get worse and I don’t exactly understand why.
Case in point – last night Sara & I spent the day over in Orlando and ended up at one of those mystery dinner shows because she’s been itching to check them out for a long time. I was willing to go because she wanted to, but I’ll be honest, I was pretty apprehensive leading up to dinner and even a good portion of the way through the show itself because it was the kind of show where they sit a bunch of random people at a table together, and in this case, it was pretty clear that we were going to have to work together to solve the mystery!
By the end of the night, I had pretty much gotten over it and ended up having a really good time, but it still baffles me as to why this has gotten stronger in the last couple of years.
Like when we went on the cruise for our anniversary last year – we had Anytime Dining and there were only two of us, so it was known that there was always the chance of us being seated with whoever else was waiting at the time … and I hated it! Realistically, I think we only ended up sitting with other couples maybe two or three times and in each instance, they ended up being ok, but … I don’t know.
Same thing with those Japanese steakhouses where you all sit around the grill and watch the chef do tricks with your food … my wife and I both really love the food, but unless we’re going with a group big enough to take up the entire table, I’m always worried that I’m going to get stuck making small talk with some random stranger.
I think that might be part of the problem because frankly, I really don’t like small talk – I just don’t see the point of it. Having a conversation just for the sake of having a conversation with another random person has always felt kind of meaningless to me, whether I’m checking out at the grocery store, sharing a waiting room with somebody, or an elevator, or whatever. If we have a legitimate reason to talk to one another, then I usually don’t have a problem … I’m sure there are plenty of times when my wife wishes that I’d shut up for a change with her! … but if we just happen to be occupying a space together for a short period of time? It’s all just talk about the weather or where you’re from or how’s your day (fine), and personally I’d rather just stare at the wall and wait for the time to pass if I had it my way.
…which admittedly does seem a little bizarre when you consider all of the blogging and tweeting that I do, but then again, maybe those are safe because for the most part it’s a one-sided conversation of me just posting things that I find funny or interesting … very rarely would you ever find me posting about the weather…
You know what I meant. 😛
Anyways, I wanted to write about this just a bit under personal challenges because it really is something that I want to get over, or at the very least try to get a little back under control so that my anxiety doesn’t end up preventing me from doing the things that I want to do. I’ve wondered for a long time if it’s something that I should actually be taking some sort of medication for, although those kinds of drugs kind of freak me out because it scares me the idea of having to rely on something like that to manipulate my brain into taking it easy. Sara, being the loving, overbearing nurse that she is, suggested years ago that maybe I should be on prozac on an as needed basis because every now and then I’ve also been known to temporarily go off the deep end and it usually isn’t pretty, but I’ve avoided that for the same reason, and besides, can you really just walk into your family doctor’s office and go, “Hey, doc – every once in a blue moon my stress gets the best of me and I go a little crazy … can I please have some pills for that?!”
I actually got a lot out of the PATV episode where they talked about both Mike and Jerry being on Lexapro and how it’s essentially changed their lives, but I’m not sure if that’s the point where I am with all of this, and what it would take to get me to that next step.
At the end of the day, drugs are scary and I don’t want to feel like I need something like that in order to live my life. Just food for thought, maybe I’ll exude more on this one another day… 😳