Every man who walks past this tries to make it launch.
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Non working demo
Student dropped at orientation
This is what I see when dropping Tommy of at college.
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From the mouths of babes
One of neighbors is named Betty. The children address her as Mrs. Betty. Recently Evan started calling her Mrs. Betsy. I would correct him placing emphasis on the second T.
Evan, 4 years old: "Mrs. Bet see."
Me: "Say Bet-T"
This Betsy-Betty back and forth has gone on for weeks. So Evan has taken to really adding pause and emphasis to the second part of her name "Mrs. Bet TEA." Today I understand why.
Evan: "Noah won’t take me to Mrs. Bet Tea’s house."
Noah, 13 years old: "Evan, it’s Bet SEE."
Me: "No Noah. It’s Betty. Bet TEA."
Noah: "Oh."
The boys leave to visit with our neighbor and I chuckle having one more mystery in my life solved. They promptly return.
Evan: "Noah still won’t take me to Mrs. Bet TEA’s house."
Noah: "Mrs. Bet SEE isn’t home."
Of Grasshoppers
Student: I’m doing a lot wrong.
Master: Better than doing nothing, right.
Becoming a Google Adwords Professional
In 2000 or 2001, I was working with a company that needed an advertisement campaign manager. I stayed awake for fours days straight drinking gallons of coffee and taking only power naps to write an ad campaign manager from scratch using ColdFusion and MS SQL. This was before the days of keywords so instead ads were organized by categories. Each ad could be categorized and subcategorized. Campaigns could be scheduled for date ranges with multiple ads meeting IAB industry standards and the particular place on the page could be dynamically specified. Personally, I was pretty proud of the end product and impressed with how it turned out for being built so rapidly.
The experience of writing an ad campaign manager helped me appreciate the complexity of such an endeavor but nothing prepared me for the awe inspiring product that is Google Adwords! Prior to yesterday, I thought Google Adwords was just the name Google used for selling ads that appeared on sites of publishers using Google’s Adsense and in search results. Google’s Adwords is such a complex product that they offer a certification exam for people wanting to become Google Advertising Professionals. I spent yesterday reading, reading, and reading, and watching video after video after video to learn as much about running efficient campaigns as possible. There is definitely an art to writing an effective Adwords campaign and not wasting money.
I was going to give an overview of what I learned yesterday but I have so much more to learn and Les Jones has does an excellent job already. Read Les Jones’ post My quick advice on getting the most from Google Adwords.
Summer is officially over
I had my first carpool to school today. School officially starts on Monday with a half day. But today the high schooler had class pictures. She and her best friend are on the outs because of a boy. Isn’t that always the reason? So it appears that I’ll be driving to the high school everyday. (Actually a friend of ours works at the school and has offered to do some carpooling.) Today was a dry run.
WordPress 2.8.3 broken! Upgrade to 2.8.4 immediately!
In case you missed it, WordPress 2.8.3 has a programming error which allows anyone to reset your administrative password and takeover your WordPress blog. With administrative access, the hacker could destroy your content, lock you out, and repurpose your website for wrong doing, spamming, pornography, slander, or whatever they want. Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 immediately! Learn more at darknet.org.uk.
This vulnerability could be prevented by securing the /wp-admin directory.
BlogSecurity has recommended before that the /wp-admin/* directory should be password protected or restricted to IP address. This would mitigate this problem. See our advisory here for details. [Source, BlogSecurity, WordPress <= 2.8.3 Reset Admin Password Vulnerability]
See details of the exploit at milw0rm.
There’s Always an A-Hole on the Internet
Remember, if you can’t say anything nice…
School Costs How Much?!
Ooops. I screwed up the paperwork. The financial aid office has explained that we have to pay 100% out of pocket for my son’s Fall college…on Tuesday.
I’ve explained it to the younger children like this: "Since your brother is going to college, we are going to be eating Ramen…lots of Ramen!"
Taking Google Adwords Advice
Today I am becoming an expert on Google Adwords campaigns. I am welcome your advice and input.
Update: Les Jones offers some sage advice and Google has an excellent Adwords Learning Center. Google even offers the ability to become a Google Advertising Professional complete with a certification exam.
WordPress 2.8.3 upgrade bizarreness
I decided to take some time to make sure that all of our blogs and websites relying on WordPress were brought up to version 2.8.3. Everything seemed to be going well until we started testing Cathy’s blog Domestic Psychology. She can post but cannot add tags. Categories work find but clicking in the "Add new tag" tag box acts like it is disabled. She can type words in the box but the Add button does not function. Tags do not get saved to the post.
So I jump over to Reality Me to see if it exhibits the same behavior. On Reality Me, I can create a post with tags with no problem. But on the dashboard under Incoming Links, Plugins, and WordPress Development Blog, I get a fatal error:
Fatal error: Please call SimplePie_Cache::create() instead of the constructor in /home/www/htdocs/realityme_net/wp-includes/class-feed.php on line 13
I have not tested the other blogs and sites yet. For both Reality Me and Domestic Psychology, I went back and deleted almost all files with the exception of the wp-content directory, the robots.txt, and the .htaccess. I rebuilt the WordPress installation and yes cache directories were removed. WP-Cache is not used. I also repaired and optimized all database tables. Active plugins on Reality Me: Audio Player, Seesmic, ShareThis, SimpleLife, Spam Karma 2, Subscribe to Comments, WordPress.com Stats, and WordPress XHTML Validator. Active plugins on Domestic Psychology: Audio player, Get Recent Comments, Lifestream, ShareThis, Spam Karma 2, Subscribe to Comments, and WordPress.com Stats.
In typing this, I realize that the SimpleLife plugin uses SimplePie and is likely to be the root cause for the Reality Me problem.
Update: Deactivating SimpleLife fixed the Reality Me problem.
Update: Disabling all plugins on Domestic Psychology did not change the fact that Post Tags could not be added to to the post.
Update: I’ve narrowed it down to Cathy’s theme. None of the active plugins on Domesticp Psychology are causing the problem. She is using a Woo theme called irresistible. Disabling this theme fixes lets her use tags with posts again. Time to see if Woo Themes has posted a fix. Yes. irrestible 2.0.0 fixes the post tag problem.
Hitler Response to the FriendFeed Sale
Dave Winer Hits One Home
From the beginning I’ve described social media (mostly under the guise of Twitter) as a large party. You enter the scene. You hear a lot of noise. You focus on some conversations and it gets exciting. You still hear a lot of noise. You make some friends. You bond. You make some people angry with flippant remarks. You lose some friends. You shout at the crowd. Everyone talks about you. You step off your soapbox and rejoin the conversation. Everyone forgets you. You step out of the room to go to the bathroom. When you return, you find the conversation continued without you. You try to get people to tell you what you missed. Eventually you figure out you just have to pickup where you left off. You learn that you cannot follow everyone in the room. You realize that even though you aren’t following everyone in the room some of those people are still listening to you. Some people get to stand on the stage and everyone follows them. You think it is unfair that you aren’t on the stage. You meet some of the right people but still aren’t lucky enough to get on the stage. You don’t understand. You resent the people on the stage. You decide to ignore them. The conversation goes on. Eventually you follow the people on the stage again because everyone else is talking about what they said. The conversation goes on. Eventually we all return home.
Dave Winer, you know, the guy who brought us RSS, explains here.
So what is, what was, FriendFeed? Let’s say FriendFeed was that room at the party were the people who started the party hung out and other party goers would look in the room and see that it was different but couldn’t really grasp if it was different good or different bad and most would never really enter that room. In the words of Eric Rice, "the punk rock indie era is over." Facebook bought FriendFeed today. I won’t comment further but to say I agree with Think Jose that Facebook bought the staff, not the software. But this was about Dave Winer’s post to Robert Scoble.
Btw, you should follow me on Twitter here.
ps. Not great words of assurance:
What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. [Source, FriendFeed Blog, FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request]
From the mouths of babes
I hugged the wife then Evan, the 4 year old, ran to us with arms stretched wide and exclaimed, "group hug!" Where’s he get this stuff?
Hiding in a Thunderstorm
Be advised. I am drowning everyone out with Simply Noise’s thunderstorm. Phone calls, tweets, emails, instant messages, washers, dryers, fire alarms, and fighting children will not be heard until this proposal is finished.
