I’m in the process of getting everything setup on Yahoo! and getting my prize list all compiled (it’s going to be a great one this year — best list of prizes we’ve ever had, by far). If you participated last year, you should have already gotten your invite to join the group. If not, I’ll be posting sign up information, official rules, and the full detailed prize list sometime over the weekend. Stay tuned!
Category: Site Info
Looking For Prize Donations for The Annual Pick ’em
The NCAA March Madness pick ’em has been a tradition around these parts for quite a while, and this year will be the fifth year we do it. You can read up about last year’s winner and the prizes that were awarded, and if you really want to look back further, here are the pages from 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 (look at the track backs on each page to see scoring links and pages).
We had a good bunch of prizes last year, and I’m looking for prizes to give away this year (being our fifth year, let’s try to get some good stuff). Like before, you’ll get text links on the tournament page, plus a banner ad in rotation with all the other prize providers like we had last year (and of course my adoration, because local business is awesome). E-mail me at utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com if you have something to donate (I’ll be e-mailing last year’s prize providers again to see if they’ve got something to donate).
Update on 1/31/10: We’ve got some great prizes being submitted, and I have a couple good ones to throw in as well — this will EASILY be the best prize cache out of all the competitions we’ve had.
Why Are You Here?
Seriously, why are you reading this? Shouldn’t you be with your family or something?
Wait a minute — why am I not spending time with my family?
Have a Merry Christmas everybody. Hopefully it’ll be good to yours and your family. I’ll be back online in a couple days.
Come Listen To Me Pretend That I Know What I’m Doing
So the folks at Smart Solutions here in Bend run a monthly SmartGroup roundtable/seminar session, and this month’s topic is “Blogging: The Good, Bad, and the Ugly”. They’ve asked me, Jon Abernathy from HackBend and TheBrewSite (he also works for Smart Solutions), Andre Jensen from FreelanceSEM, and Meg Thompson from Audette Media to come and present. I would probably say that Jon = “The Good”, I = “The Bad” and Andre = “The Ugly” with Meg being “The Meg”, but I digress. I’d encourage you to come, as it’s going to be a good panel of pretty smart folks. The Facebook event page is here.
While anybody knows me knows how I can jabber with the best of them and have been directly interviewed several times about blogging before, I’ve never really presented in a setting like this. So I ask you, dear loyal readers (I know there are a few of you): If you were attending this seminar, what would you like to hear from me?
I’m About To Break Something
I’m finally getting around to moving this site up to Movable Type 4. I’ve been sitting on a Movable Type 3 install for a couple years, and there’s a lot of great plugins and features in Movable Type 4 that I’d like to incorporate on this site and its templates. But I can’t do anything until I get that base code in place.
I have a lot off code-level hacks done to my MT 3 install that I’ll need to make sure aren’t going to break when I upgrade. Hopefully it won’t. Unlike Jeff, I don’t have Anil helping me out — I’m going to try to wing it myself (but if you’re reading this, Anil, you’ve seen me on ProNet — I might need your help if I break something).
So tonight I’m hoping to upgrade to MT 4. If this site goes wonky and commenting doesn’t work, you’ll know why (but since MT is awesome and builds static pages, the pages will still be available). I’ll update this post accordingly when things work again.
Update at 10PM: Just in time for Top Chef, it appears the upgrade has gone through OK. Feel little oddball issues here and there, but it appears I’ve fixed 99% of them. If you notice anything weird, comment below or email utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com.
And The Google Voice Invite Goes To…
On Thursday, I had an extra Google Voice invite to giveaway. I put the entries into Excel, created a column full of random numbers, sorted by those random number (which changed the random numbers, which is why the screenshot ordering is a bit weird) and then had Random.org give me a random number. As you can see below, Shanlee was the winner!
OK, So I’ve Sort Of Embraced Twitter
While my personal Twitter status will pretty much always remain in its current state, I know some folks have given up on RSS feeds as a means of keeping track of blogs. While I’ve had the e-mail notification option for quite a while and I even have a mobile option, I’ve found that many folks are not surfing the Web unless they find it via Twitter or Facebook.
So I’ve created a UtterlyBoring.com Twitter profile, and am using TwitterFeed to feed it. Then I’m using the Selective Twitter App to pull them into my Facebook status update. I’m not using the regular Facebook Twitter app for this purpose ( though I know it can do this same thing) as I don’t want my Facebook status updates — on the rare occasions I make them — to show up in my UtterlyBoring.com twitter feed. I plan on keeping my personal twitter empty.
This post is mostly a test to make sure the whole thing works.
I’d been using the notes feature in Facebook to post blog posts automatically from my RSS feed, but it was just pulling my full site’s content and not making the link back here real obvious. I’m trying to get people to realize that there is a Web outside of Facebook.
(Full disclosure, too: Obviously ad revenue is down for everybody, and I have to pay for my server that hosts this site and Bend Blogs, so any way I can get people here and clicking on ads is always good. This is part of that.)
Two-Time UtterlyBoring.com Pick ’em Loser At The Pool
So in the 2008 NCAA pick ’em, The Dren lost and proudly displayed his loser shirt at Wrigley Field. He again lost this year’s pick ’em, but forgot to bring the shirt to a baseball game with him, so he’s wearing the two-time loser shirt at a pool in Palm Desert, CA:
Again, I’m sure his wife loves it.
If you’re wondering what the shirt says (the original is here):
If he loses for a third time, I might have to open up the design to the masses here.
Links For The Day
Long day at the office, but still have some good links to share.
- Six free PSD/(X)HTML Templates that are very nice.
- If I die, I want to make sure I have a final blog post written beforehand (thanks Barn for this).
- Northwestern University is getting Comp. Sci and Jcomm majors to play nice with each other (this is course work I would’ve loved to have been a part of).
- How many balloons would it take to lift a house (like in Up)? At the very least, 9.4 million.
- Somebody needs to port this Mac “virus” to the PC. (be sure to watch it in action).
- Mofuse has allowed me to create mobile/iPhone versions for both this site and Bend Blogs. Not a huge fan of outsourcing it, but since I can brand it with my URL, it’ll enable me to keep the URL should the service die. Now I just need to setup either .htaccess redirect or some PHP detection code. Will work on that…uh…sometime.
The 2009 Pick ’em is Officially Over
While the winner was declared after Saturday’s games, the tournament pick ’em wasn’t officially over until today when North Carolina throttled Michigan State. The final spreadsheet has been posted the places have mostly stayed the same, other than my co-worker jumping from 24th to 9th place (passing me in the process), because he picked North Carolina to win it all. I placed in the middle-bottom of the pack again.
A big thanks to everybody for playing, and a special thank you to all our prize providers (in no particular order):
Be sure to support these fine folks who have made this tournament more fun by throwing in some great prizes.
I have the shipping addresses for all the winners, and will be shipping off their prizes once I get them all collected from the prize providers sometime this week and get them shipped off next week.