Chawlk

1. Drawar
2. Fenxy
3. Decaflon
4. Two Credits
5. Wriging
6. Loose Suits
7. Chixe
8. Dud3s
9. Wing Colors

 

At least as well as he, which isn't saying much.

Simple: never erase anything. Here's what I mean:

Open up a word processor (or your blog backend, if you're adventurous and know you won't accidentally click "publish"). Start writing. About whatever you want to write about. Don't like what you wrote? Hit "Enter" a couple of times and start again, from a different angle. Still didn't like it? Hit "Enter" a couiple of times and strt again, from a different angle.

Repeat this as many times as you need. The key is not to erase anything you just wrote, no matter how crappy it was. No one will see it but you, so don't worry. You'll find that eventually you can cobble together a fairly good story -- a sentence here, a phrase there, this paragraph, that angle -- and in the end wind up with exactly what you were looking for, quality and all. It may not happen immediately; you may spend a night doing this and not come up with anything just to sleep on it and realize you can actually use most of this stuff (or conversely, chuck most of it). I've done this more times than I can count. To be honest, those end up being some of my best articles.

The problem with most of us is that we're looking for quality in one shot. Sometimes it takes multiple swings at the bat, and even a strike out or two, to get those base hits and home runs.

It seems to be settled: PR4.

I guess you can call that "The 9Rules Bump"

*triupe*

*dupe*

Ok, so how does the voting take place?

Fan of J-Pop. A lot -- way too much of it -- might as well be rehashed English songs sung in Japanese (Dragon Ash = Linkin Park-ish Smash Mouth, for example), but some stands on its own spectacularly. My favorite up to now is Utada Hikaru.

Yeah, sounds like mine. When this whole thing started I had a few PR3, some PR5, and most PR0. As of now, I have...

PR4 x 7
PR5 x 5
PR0 x 27

Stuff seems to be moving, though, so that's good. The fact that I'm not seeing any PR3's, and that now the PageRanks are all 4's and 5's is a bit of a happy thought, overshadowed only by the darkness that is PR0.

Better than when my PR was dropped from 5 to 3. (A few months back.)

To keep a schedule.

The secret to the muse is to control it. Sometimes this just can't be done, but the muse should not be of its own will all the time. If I don't feel like blogging, but I know that I should, I sit down and force myself to write. If I've told myself I'll blog at least 4 times a week, I do. I find that once I do that for a little while, the ability to blog at will returns. I may not have anyting new to talk about, so look around the web, read a lot of blogs, and chime in. Ideas will soon come and you'll be able to put something out, even if it isn't all that long.

Of course, if you've made no such commitments to yourself, I third the question: why do you blog when you don't want to?

Younger than all of you.

At heart.

Hmmm... how long does an update take? I've noticed that my PR3 page yesterday dropped down to a PR0 in most datacenters, but some of them now have me at a PR4 (with most still showing PR0). Can I safely presume I'm moving up to a PR4, or should I, as Oli so aptly put it, "brick my pants"?

"Besides my eggs and toast, I love to read my blogs in the mourning."

Yes, when my grandmother died, all I could do is read blogs. I share your pain.

Nothing. I'm fasting.

*day 2. Grummble....*

@mike: It was a joke. Compare the pic of the device to the size of the guy pointing at it. :D

No. Way.

I mean, look at that thing. IT'S HUGE! They even had to build a fake giant hand to hold it. How am I supposed to carry it, on my back?!

Apple, please.

On a more serious note, that's a PDA, not a phone. Palm's LifeDrive has been doing the same thing for a year now, at $400 for 4 gigs. Of course, it's discontinued, but that's beside the point.

/wanting one.
//For $600 -- might just be worth it

Green, although Gala and Fuji apples are awesome.

Ubuntu all the way.

I have this little contraption I call the "MMMmmmm":

1 cup Starbucks mocha almost swirl coffee Ice cream
1/2 cup Kaluah
1/4 cup Baccardi 1873 (or any rum of your choice to taste).

Mix it up, get ready for a coffee/chocolate bang (with a tasty little crunch at the end). It has a bajillion calories, so don't drink it if you're trying to lose weight. Use more ice cream (or less alcohol -- pfft!) for a creamier feel.

@kar0Shi: Funny thing is that at the local Borderses (there's more than one) there are signs that say "Reading allowed for no more than 10 minutes". It used to be that a bunch of kids in the area would simply go to the store, read the stuff, and clog up their isles. They've since moved to the cafe.

Amazon. I buy the trade paperbacks, since I don't feel the need to know what's going on right away, and I prefer them as a series, instead of individual comics.

Speaking of which...

Hmm... 30 minutes a day promoting my blog and business...

Well, I actually spend a fair amount of time promoting my other business. (I don't like to mix it with my blog, so I don't much mention it there.) More than 30 minutes a day, in fact. As for my blog... well, Scrivs, what would you suggest someone in my position (which I believe you can gather rather well) do? Is there any suggested reading?

Only thing I can think of is link building and commenting on sites and forums, but maybe I'm missing something. An idea that's come to mind -- an I don't know whether anyone's done this here -- is to call the local news stations and offer my services as an expert in a given field (say, the intertubes or bowlogging?) and do some commentary for them in exchange for a bit of publicity. "Norbert Cartagena runs Gnorb.net, a blog about living in South Florida and -- DEAR GOD, WHAT IS THAT?!"

Tenjho Tenge. Watched it while on a trip to North Carolina to visit a few friends of ours that just moved up there. Horribly translated, anime, by the way, but only because it had been illegally translated. (The "Play All" option was renamed "Pall All", and the words "Party Time" in the intro were 'translated' as "Body Time".) Frankly, laughing at the translation made the whole thing worth it, even thought the Anime seems fairly entertaining. (Scantily clad, big boobed, sword mastering women -- a recipe for almost guaranteed success in Anime.)

1) The ability to teach
2) Experience in the field, outside the tower of academia

The ability to teach is self explanatory. If you can't get the message across then all the knowledge in the world is worthless, like having 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, or being stuck in a room with Alanis Morissette.

As for experience, too many professors I've seen underestimate the importance of answering the question "outside of this class, what will I use this for?" Or as one of my professors used to say, "I'll teach you the 20% you'll actually be using. Consider the other 80% to be extra credit." He was one of the best professors throughout my entire college years.

In theory, there's no difference between theory and fact. In fact, there is. This seems to be lost in too many professors, which I suppose is why Einstein once quipped that too much air flows through the upper levels of the tower of academia. Frankly, I believe people shouldn't teach a subject unless they have verifiable experience with it, but then again what do I know: I'm not the guy who came up with the statement too many take to be a commandment: "those who can't, teach."

Hmm... I just had a PageRank update about 2 months ago, when my page went from a hefty and mightly PR5 to a weenie little PR3. (Don't know why it dropped, but it did. I guess I just have to get more links out there.) I've seen a couple of quasi-dances recently where my page has again jumped to 5 for about an hour then back to 3. (What, Google doesn't believe in 4?)

According to this page...

http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php?url=about%3Ablank

...my page strength is a 3.5 for http://www.gnorb.net and 3.0 for http://gnorb.net, but I don't know what the deal is there, or for that matter how I could combine the two. (Tried using htaccess to redirect all www.gnorb.net to gnorb.net, but I kept getting an infinite loop error.)

Anyway, check out that page and this one:

seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/

(I dare not link it for personal reasons, but check it out. And for the love of god, turn off the 300 advertisements that page blasts out at you, unless you like looking at 100 parts ads/1 part content pages.)

@stefani: It's cool. It's a good thread. It's just that I've been noticing some of the threads have dates of October and November, then all of a sudden *WHAM* January.

Thread necromancy isn't all that bad when the dead are still quite lively.

By the way, what's with all the recent thread necromancy? New members discovering 3-month old threads?

"Hey, y'all watch this!"

or

"Aaaarrrrgghhhh... arrgghh.... ahhh...."

or

"With my last breath, I curse Zoooiiddbeeeeeerg!"

I hate to do this, but what's your criteria for "Important"? My list of "most important people" is *way* too long. The fire guy is definitelly up there, as is whoever invented the boat (or rather, the various inventors of the boat).

Muhammed, Jesus, Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Paul, whoever started Hinduism (Krishna?), all probably have a stake at the prize, if philosophy is to be taken into consideration.

Whoever invents the method of successfully reanimating people after cryonic suspension I'm sure will be up there, considering they'll have essentially developed a sort of vaccine for death.

**I hate/love pointless mental exercises involving hypotheticals like these**

I third Noir. Not crazy about Utena, though, but it might be just because I hate that anime.

I also second .Hack//Sign.

Those aside, I like some of the songs from the Ghost in the Shell movies (mostly the choral pieces), as well as the intro to the Love Hina series (where Megumi Hayashibara sounds TOTALLY different than in anything else she's done).

On a related note (and maybe this should be a new Note entirely), I like the stuff Utada Hikaru's done with the Kingdom Hearts series. Does anyone know whether she's done much in the Anime world? (Probably has and I just don't know it.)

It's funny: I used to love stuff like "Thundercats" and "Silverhawk" when I was a kid. Recently I watched an episode of both and thought to myself "Wow... so this is what my parents saw mne go ga-ga over?" I felt pretty embarassed right about then.

I guess as you get older it becomes harder and harder to suspend disbelief. Then again, I now like crappy science fiction (as in "unintentionally funny sci-fi), so there's the long-lasting effect of these cartoons on my psyche.

Interestingly, my wife still loves "He-Man" and "She-Ra", as well as "Thundercats," which is why I'll eventually end up buying her those half-hour long Matel commercials on DVD.

That aside, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, Star Trek pretty much shaped my childhood, at least after I moved to the US. Before then it was He-Man, Transformers, and Woody Woodpecker, which really wasn't an 80's cartoon, I guess, but since I was a kid during the 80's -- and as everyone knows, history started when I was born -- to me it counts.

Long story short: For years my friends had been telling me to grab the domain name "Gnorb.com", telling me that getting something that short was a dream. (Not true: I could have gotten jfirw.com just as easily.) Eventually I decided to listen and bought up the domains Gnorb.com and Gnorb.net. I dind't know what to do with the site, so I put up a practice site where I could mess around with Mambo CMS (no Joomla at the time) and keep reports and thoughts I considered important to know about and read on, like "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" by Bill Joy, and "The Unabomber Manifesto."

A few months after getting the domain, I did an interview with Wil Wheaton for a magazine. For weeks I had to "research" his site, WilWheaton.net (WWdN) and got hooked on the idea of doing something like that myself. I eventually switched my site to a blog, first using bBlog, then upgrading to WordPress, and started writing a lot of my own content, especially after I left the company where I had been working as an overworked (70+ hours, <$40K/yr) editor in chief. Eventually, Gnorb.NET was born. Fire rained from the heavens and the waters turned to blood -- standard affair, nothing special.

Summaries. I used to "let it all hang", so to speak, but I recently went to an almost all summary format for 2 reasons:

1) It looks cleaner with my theme. Super long pages are pretty annoying, and when you have 10 posts with an average word count of 1000+ words pages can get *REAL* long.

2) Better for cell phone users. My page is designed in such a way as to make it easy for someone reading the site using a cell phone to view the content without getting a "Incomplete Content Shown" message. This was precipitated by my inability to check my entire page using my cell phone, when I want to show someone something.

Series:
--------
Love Hina
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Serial Experiment Lain

Movies:
-----------
Millenium Actress
The Animatrix
Ghost in the Shell (the first one)
Spirited Away

I haven't been into anime as much as I used to be, so my list is pretty short, much shorter at least than it used to be.

Normally so do I. In fact, I still have some. Problem is the content I want to put up is sort of time sensitive, what with the new year and all.