I have no idea if anybody is out there reading this, but welcome back, one way or another.
I Need Your Help
I know this blog is all but dead (I do most of my writing elsewhere), but I needed to resurrect things for this. If you know me at all, you know I’m not one to seriously ask for help, especially financially. I also don’t usually chat publicly about my family and kids much, leaving their lives private for the most part. That changes today as I need your help.
I’m Still Blogging, Just Not Here
I had a conversation a while back with somebody who was convinced (because of my lack of activity for exactly two years on here) that I wasn’t writing or blogging any more. I am, I’m just doing it at the day job more, specifically, on Weston’s blog where I’ve written the content on there for quite a while now (even some of the stuff under somebody else’s name, but don’t tell anybody).
While much of the content there is targeted towards our managed clients or prospective managed-service clients (business in Central Oregon with 10 or more employees running Microsoft-powered desktops and servers), there is some content there that my past regular UtterlyBoring.com readers might find interesting — like my monthly tech headlines posts. So if you’re looking for me, you’ll find me over here.
I Know, I Know…
I suck.
I’ve all but abandoned this site. I’ve seen the comments, I’ve read the emails and I know: I haven’t been giving this site and my loyal few readers the attention they deserve. My professional and personal life have been chaotic — death in the family, wedding in the family, acquisition at work that required a truckloads of hours (but was a good thing), periodic illness, family obligations, professional obligations, etc… . It’s just been a nutty last several months, and the likelihood of it getting better anytime soon is fairly slim.
That being said, I wanted everybody to know I was I alive (as I’ve gotten that email, too). I rarely turn on my computer in the evenings when I get home, preferring to spend time with my family and relax. I rarely post on Facebook (which annoys people as well, I know), and we all know my general feelings on twitter.
I can say that I’m going to post more on here, that I’m going to commit time to this, but, honestly, I don’t know if I can or will. Not all of us can be as cool as Jon (I kid, but Jon is a cool guy, he really is). And if I had more free time, I’d probably spend it getting bendblogs.com back up and running as that did more for the local blogger community than most of the projects I’ve worked on.
Or I’d do none of the above, as nobody knows where life is going to lead.
Meanwhile, I’m going to do what I’ve always done and take things a day at a time and see where that takes me. Hopefully that will bring me back to this site again so I can start writing some more (which I dearly miss), but we’ll just have to see what happens. Thanks again to all of you who are still checking-in.
NCAA Pick ’em Time
So here’s the deal. Unlike previous years’ pick ems, I’m totally unorganized, busy, and a general mess. Personal and professional life are totally chaotic, and the last thing I have is free time for posting stuff on this site (I’d rather spend the free time I have with family — sue me). So I haven’t been able to organize prizes or anything fun like in years past. My apologies.
So this year, bragging rights are on the line. Join up here (password, if it asks, is utterlyboring20). Your brackets need to be filled out by Thursday morning. Scoring remains the same as in years past. Since there are not prizes, the rules regarding prizes don’t apply.
I won’t be posted scoring updates like I did in the past. See lack of free time warning above.
Good luck! And hopefully sometime this week I’ll put out my quarterly-ish link dump.
Every-three-month(ish) Link Dump
OK, so I know I’m totally neglecting things here. My new job at a local outsourced IT company is going well, but keeping me busy. And yes, I did just try to give them some SEO linkage there because they need it. But after dealing with computers and people’s issues with their computers all day long, sometimes I just don’t feel like turning mine on in the evening. But otherwise, it’s going well, the people are cool, and I have health insurance for the first time in 11 years (which would have came in handy nine years ago).
That being said, I’m still collecting a link pile, and have some to share, so enjoy!
- 2601 People Wrote This Song
- 6 Alternatives to iGoogle For Personalized Homepages
- A ‘real’ Myst book
- Android niceties
- Animated GIFs the Hard Way
- AskPatents.com – A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
- Athletable
- Balancing things on my asleep girlfriend
- Banthapug
- Bernanke Vs. Woodford In Gif Form
- Bodyform Responds The Truth
- British have invaded nine out of ten countries – so look out Luxembourg
- Chocolatey Gallery
- Christopher Walken Reads Honey Boo Boo!
- Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 12 Weeks to Save the World
- Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. Business Wire
- Family Guy Panel – SDCC 2012
- Ghost From Fiction to Function
- Go Pro and your eyes will thank you
- Good Movies Streaming on Netflix Instant
- Grandma is an awesome photo subject
- HeTexted
- HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA – WHAT’S GOING ON!
- How claw crane arcade machines work
- How much do cats actually kill
- How to Crack a Wi-Fi Password
- How to Create a Program Shortcut to Run Without the UAC Prompt in Windows 7
- How to generate more revenue from your web application today
- Hurricane Sandy — David Letterman Performs Eerie Monologue to Empty Studio
- Hysterical bubbles (slow motion)
- I am Adam Savage. Co-host of Mythbusters. AMA
- IMDB Top 250 in 2 12 Minutes
- Living in a Van
- Make 2560×1600 pixel displays the norm
- Music videos without music GANGNAM STYLE
- Notfound.org
- OOCSS + Sass = The best way to CSS
- Outside the Amtrak Window, a Picture of the U.S. Economy
- PHP The Right Way
- Pixel-Based Websites Resources, Tutorials, And Examples
- plotting – xkcd-style graphs
- Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie On Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More
- Random Shopper
- Realistic Fighting Game
- Say Cheese!
- Schrodinger’s Cat
- Simple Grid
- Ten Formal Complaints in Six Months
- The Amazing iOS 6 Maps
- The Bard’s Tale
- The F–kometer
- The Sexiest, Coolest, Most EPIC Bus Commercial Ever
- The Tiniest GIF Ever
- TL;DR — Faster News
- Todon’t
- Tray, Your Powerful Email Assistant
- Twilight – a summary by kangel
- Where the f–k did I leave my keys
- Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
- Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks
- World’s longest televised putt ever
- World’s Best Father documents what an amazing parent he is
- xkcd Click and Drag
Mass Link Dump
Something old, something new, all in one big pile. Enjoy!
- .Mail, redesigning the email client.
- 13Bills, The easy peasy bill splitter
- 2 Hamsters 1 Wheel
- 2012 San Diego Big Bay Boom Fireworks Bust
- A Yahoo Search Calls Up a Chief From Google
- Amazon Glacier Cloud Storage For Archives And Backups Launched
- Amazon same-day delivery — How the e-commerce giant will destroy local retail.
- An Unexpected Ass Kicking
- Animated Pizza Gifs
- Anti-Piracy Group Caught Pirating Song For Anti-Piracy Ad
- As promised, here’s the photo of $211,223 in cash we raised for charity
- Beautiful Weather Graphs and Maps
- Beck ‘Produces’ A Genius Innovation That Appeals To The User-Generated Generation
- BendBroadband Acquiring Chambers Cable KEZI
- Best Shovel Ever
- Bones – The HTML5 WordPress Starter Theme
- Breaking Bad in CSS and JS
- Burner â?” temporary phone numbers for modern lives
- Clouds for People, or the Consumerization of the Cloud
- Combine 3G and 4G And WiFi To Download (And Destroy Your Data Cap) Faster Than Ever
- Complete MSL Curiosity Descent Interpolated
- Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML
- Converting a simple website to Python Flask
- Dear ICO, Sue Us
- Dear Marissa Mayer
- Do fonts affect people’s opinions
- dubgif
- Email Newsletters Worth Subscribing to
- fontBomb – Stylishly destroy the web
- FuckItJS uses state-of-the-art technology to make sure your javascript code runs whether your compiler likes it or not.
- GIF Sound the Video
- Google Fiber (I Want0
- Guy thinks his sister is hot
- helvetica, my hero
- How I cracked my neighborâ??s WiFi password without breaking a sweat.
- How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths
- How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly
- How the Cyanide and Hapiness creator was bullied growing up and how it inspired him.
- How To I Migrate Google Data from One Account to Another
- How to Run Mac OS X Inside Windows Using VirtualBox
- How to suck at your religion
- httpie is a cURL-like tool for humans
- Instasham
- JavaScript for Cats
- Knight Capital accidentally deployed test suite into production
- Make Your Computer More Self-Sufficient
- McSweeney’s list of suggested BuzzFeed articles
- McSweeneyâ??s Internet Tendency Song Reader.
- Modern Block Quote Styles
- Netflix’s lost year — The inside story of the price-hike train wreck
- NYT visualization on the history of the Olympic men’s 100m sprint
- Offensive Facebook Cover Photos
- On Patents…
- Optimal siege tactics for taking Magic Kingdom’s Cinderella Castle
- Personal Analytics for Facebook
- Photoshop Troll
- Plunk – An easy way to test clicks on a mobile phone.
- Privacy monitor hacked from an old LCD Monitor
- Revenge is a dish best served pink. (little girl’s room prank) – YouTube
- Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox
- Silly gifs of animals being jerks.
- Sorry, Mario Balotelli Didn’t Really Make This German Fan Cry
- Source Sans Pro, Adobeâ??s first open source type family
- Suggested BuzzFeed Articles (suggestedbuzzfeedarticles) on BuzzFeed
- Super Resolution From a Single Image
- The Internet Defense League – Protecting the Free Internet since 2012.
- The Most Annoying Things You Do with Your Phone That You Should Quit (or At Least Be Aware Of)
- The Saddest Story of the Olympics that American TV Neglected
- This is How You Paint a 150 Foot Tall Batman
- This is now!
- Thunderbird Stability and Community Innovation
- Type Worship
- Where Microsoft geeks go to ‘Do epic $#!+’
- Why You Should Start Using a VPN (and How to Choose the Best One for Your Needs)
- Wildebeest – YouTube
- Winning Solitaire
- Wired on the design of the Def Con 20 badges
- yanmania.com… games
- Yoda power generation
- “But The Client Wants IE 6 Support!”
Dren Shares His Loser Shirt
The Dren, the dude that lost our last Pick ‘Em (third time he’s done so — see here and here) sent me a picture of the special shirt I made for him:
If you can’t read the text:
Thanks Dren for playing and sucking so bad!
Stupidly Massive Link Dump
So obviously my life is far too chaotic at the moment to post here much, but that doesn’t mean I’m not collecting links to share. To keep everybody occupied for a bit, enjoy;
- 20 lines of code that will beat AB testing every time
- 21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity
- 40 Of The Most Powerful Photographs Ever Taken
- A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self 20th Anniversary Edition
- A set of top Computer Science blogs
- AeroFS – Cloud file sync without servers
- Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
- Anno NTK from the people who gave you NTK, exactly the same thing, 15 years late.
- Aw Yeah, It’s Movie Time!
- Being deaf
- Blow Job by TADAO CERN
- Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6
- Caine’s Arcade
- Carmageddon Reincarnation
- CCleaner Updates with a Built-In Context Menu Cleaner
- Chosen, a Jquery plug that makes select boxes better
- Christmas Eve Is the Busiest Time of the Year to Get Busy
- Code School – Try Git
- Crazy driving in San Fran
- Creative Dad Takes Crazy Photos Of Daughters
- Engineering Infrastructures For Humans
- Find the pointer
- Force Windows 7 to Use Wired Connection over Wireless
- Foundation The Most Advanced Responsive Front-end Framework from ZURB
- Fox News guest laments ‘mistake’ of letting women vote
- Fragglehunter Urbex – UK Urbex & Aerial Photography
- Free Icons Set designed by Brankic1979
- From Saucy Pics to Passwords, How to Share Sensitive Information Over the Internet
- Getty Images – New Watermark
- Gifolas Cage
- gmaps.js — the easiest way to use Google Maps
- Gmvault gmail backup
- Going Colo
- Greetings I am so excited I found your welbog
- How I attacked myself using Google Spreadsheets and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
- How I Ruined My Career
- How much data is created everyday
- How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
- How To Build A Real-Time Commenting System
- How we reduced our cancellation rate by 87.5%
- Hunting down my son’s killer
- Hypertext Style Cool URIs don’t change.
- In a Big Network of Computers, Evidence of Machine Learning
- Introducing DuckDuckHack
- It all began with a strange email
- JS Hotline (877) 300-2187
- Just My Type
- Ken Shirriff’s blog Apple iPhone charger teardown
- Lessons Learned from Cracking 2 Million LinkedIn Passwords
- Let’s Not Call It Computer Science If We Really Mean Computer Programming
- Long-distance running and evolution — Why humans can outrun horses but can’t jump higher than cats.
- Lotte Time Lapse Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45.
- Madeline dachshund puppy with Crab
- Man Upset Over Restaurant’s All-You-Can-Eat Policy
- Mario Goes Berserk
- mattdiamondfuckitjs
- Meet The World’s Most Downloaded Man, Bane Of Photographers Everywhere
- Microsoft is giving Flight Sim away for free
- Mrs. Doubtfire (Recut)
- Netflix aiming to cut costs with its own content delivery network
- Nine-year-old’s lunch blog shames school into making changes
- NTK, Fifteen Years On
- Pay attention to what Nick Denton is doing with comments
- QArt Codes
- Record-Breaking Rube Goldberg Machine Pops Balloon in 300 Steps
- Resumonk – Online Resume Builder
- RUJELUS22 Themes – Downloads
- Run Notepad as Administrator to Avoid Access is Denied
- Secrets to Lightning Fast Mobile Design
- Set Up an Automated, Bulletproof File Back Up Solution
- Sick, parts 1-17
- Stock Exchange Albums With Stock Photos
- Storing Passwords Securely
- The $4 Million Complaint Call
- The Biggest Cost of Facebook’s Growth
- The frequent fliers who flew too much
- The Girl With The ANSI Tattoo
- The Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment
- The Next Microsoft
- the origin of the blink tag
- Two Excellent, Customizable Start Pages Worth Trying (Now that iGoogle’s Going Away)
- Vizio reboots the PC — a quiet American success story takes on sleeping giants
- VMware Communities — ESXi and Cold Virtual-Machine-Backups
- What Twitter could have been by Dalton Caldwell
- What’s this A beer
- Why Your Links Should Never Say “Click Here”
- WiFi Web Login
- Winamp’s woes — how the greatest MP3 player undid itself
- www.jinglewriter.co.uk
- xip.io wildcard DNS for everyone
- Yay. That’s Why You Don’t Have Any Friends.
I Have A New Respect For Katy Perry
She does some amazing death metal work: