Jenn’s Other Blog

Friday is your last chance to sign up now for BlogWorldExpo 2008 at the best possible rate, so don’t miss it! The Conference is September 20-21 in Las Vegas.

I went last year, and learned a lot, so I’m planning to go back this year. From the site:

BlogWorld features the largest blogging conference in the world including more than 50 seminars, panel discussions and keynotes from iconic personalities on the leading-edge of online technology and internet-savvy business. If you are currently blogging, vlogging, podcasting, producing other forms of new media content, entering the new media industry, or just want to know what the blogosphere is all about, then you need to be at the most comprehensive blogging convention–BlogWorld & New Media Expo. Located in the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at: 3150 Paradise Road, Las Vegas, NV 89109

Vegas, baby! See you there.

Note: You can support Ft. Hard Knox by signing up using one of the links from this site. Also, if you would like to become an affiliate, and register your own blog readers, click here, or on the affiliate link at the top right of this page.

This weekend, I tried to help my parents get a new converter box, so that they’ll be ready for the federal switchover from analogue to digital TV next year (February 17, 2009). The government, in its infinite wisdom (yes, that’s sarcasm), is issuing $40 checks to help with the expense for people who don’t have digital T.V., or cable.

The catch is that those coupons have to be used in 90 days, or the coupons expire - and the stores are having trouble keeping the “coupon eligible converter boxes” (CELB’s) in stock. I tried several places online, and they were also out of stock. So, what are you supposed to do, if you can’t buy a converter box before your coupons expire?

Well, you can re-order the coupons, and try again. That’s what we’re doing. We’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

What we don’t understand is why the coupons expire. We all know that the government has no money of its own, so it’s using the money it gets from us, the taxpayers, to give us either $40 or $80 (depending on whether you ask for one coupon or two - two being the limit per household) of our own money back to help pay for something it decided to do without asking us in the first place. But we only have 90 days to use our money - whether or not the stores have the merchandise. Then the oh-so-generous “offer” expires.

Good grief. Will Rogers was right when he said,

“Be glad you’re not getting all of the government you pay for.”

Thankfully, if you’re using cable, satellite or the phone company for your T.V., you won’t need one of these boxes. Everyone who’s stuck with roof top antennaes or rabbit ears, however, probably will. U.S. Rep Tom Cole (R-OK) has some very helpful information on his site, here, and the official coupon site is here (retailer list here).

(Also on GCV)

Buying (and in some cases hoarding) domain names is still a big business for some seeking to make a profit online. One of the most famous domain name battles was the one over the WalMart.com / Wal-Mart.com domain name, in which an early domain name speculator bought the Walmart.com domain name, hoping to make a huge profit when Wal-Mart finally went online. Wal-Mart turned the tables on him by adding a hyphen to its name and domain name, making the original domain name virtually worthless at the time. Lawsuits ensued.

If you type in either Wal-Mart.com or WalMart.com, you’ll see who eventually won that battle.

Another tactic used by domain name speculators is to grab up the alternate top-level domains (TLD’s) like .org, .net, .tv, .info, .gov of famous organizations, or catch-phrases that promise to be popular. Remember “Don’t Taze me, Bro!”? Some industrious person(s) went to GoDaddy.com, and grabbed up donttazemebro.com, donttazemebro.net, donttazemebro.org, donttazemebro.info, donttazemebro.tv…etc..

Well, as of today, there’s a new domain name craze. “.me” is the TLD for Montenegro, but has lots of possibilities for domain name speculators worldwide. (hmmm…I wonder if help.me, love.me, bite.me, and youdontknow.me are taken?)

Hat-Tip: Quick Online Tips

Also on Ft. Hard Knox

This post is dedicated to FHK’s Ron, our IT Guy, who has been trying to get me to use target=”_blank” in our outbound links for over a year. Sorry, Ron…you know…the ADD thing…

Now, where was I? Oh, yes! You know what’s really maddening as a blogger? When you research and post a great blogpost, with some great links, and when you check your “IP’s” and “actions” later on your stats, you realize, readers found your article, then promptly clicked out of our blog to your link, never to return. How can this be avoided?

Code your hyperlink to open in a new window (this makes it easier for your readers to get back to your article), by adding (minus the brackets): [target="_blank"] to your hyperlink, so it would look like this:

For more information about using hyperlinks, see “Adding Hyperlinks,” or the WWF Wiki.

Chad, of the Grizzly Groundswell, reminds us that if you are using the visual editor in Wordpress, one of the drop-down options available in the “link” box is the option to have the link open in a new window. Using this, you will not have to enter the code manually.

Also see:

• The FHK Hyperlinks Archive
• HTML Code Tutorial

Noah Shachtman: A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested ‘clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers’.

Since the start of the Iraq war, there’s been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs — and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops’ time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, “Blogs and Military Information Strategy,” offers a third approach…” (Continue Reading)

Yes, I fell for it again this year…for just a minute. Remember last year, when Google tried to sell us Gmail Paper? Complete with beta user testimonials?

Well, they’ve done it again. No, you can’t really pre-date your e-mail to pretend you remembered your boss’s birthday. This is, as the good-humored folks at Google said, “crazy-talk.”

Several of my friends on Facebook have joined FriendFeed. I did, too, yesterday, and am very pleased with what I’ve found. For one thing, it distracted me from the frustration of playing with a bunch of Google Gadgets that won’t fit into my already-too-crowded sidebar; but mostly because this is a very cool network.

Mark “Rizzin’” Hopkins, at Mashable, explained it this way:

…What goes on behind the login screen at FriendFeed isn’t indexed by Google or publicly discoverable, either, so a lot of the comments get a much more ‘behind-the-scenes’ raw and uncut feel to it….This opt-in discussion, thus, is seeming to be a much more common theme in the social media/Web 2.0 world. I must say that I like it. While services like this can be a time sink, it doesn’t compare to the type of time-sink an actual web forum would be. In fact, forums, for the last several years, have been completely cut out of my surfing habits due to the fact that simply don’t have the time to commit to developing the relationships inside several small communities. With FriendFeed, though, it’s a place that I can go occasionally that is doing some of my posting for me (i.e. grabbing my feed items and republishing them), as well as allowing me a place to have short exchanges with a lot of the folks I know and read on a daily basis.

According to its “about” page,

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends…FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.

I’m able to view my FriendFeed from Facebook, or from any feed reader, or even by e-mail. I can even add “imaginary friends” - friends that aren’t signed up for FriendFeed, but have feeds elsewhere on the web that I like to follow. This is a big time-saver to me, as a blogger, because so much of blogging involves linking to what other bloggers are doing, and now I can see what they’re doing all in one place. Sign up for FriendFeed here.

Remember how the calendar turning over to 2000 was supposed to bring on Armageddon? Then a few hangers-on said ok, that didn’t happen, but it was really 2001 when the world would be catapulted back in the technological dark ages?

Obviously, that didn’t happen, either, so now the virtual doomsdayers are warning us about the year 2038.

ReadWriteWeb, with tongue firmly in cheek, explains the theory:

The bug, being dubbed the “2038 bug,” arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number… Programs will fail…Since they will see times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901, erroneous calculations and decisions will occur.

This reminds me of a former boss, who (true story), called a staff meeting in early 2001 to help start the planning process to make sure that the glitches that happened in 2000 “won’t happen again, the next time.” The next time? In 3001?

Back to the 2038 bug, if anyone still thinks they’ll be using any of the same equipment, programs, software, or code in thiry years that we’re using now, then be afraid…be very afraid. Your only hope is that by then we probably will have melted from Global Warming.

The rest of us are going to lunch. Byeeeeee.