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This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.
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| Saturday, May 11, 2002
The Other blog update I did manage to follow what seemed like a billion links and come up with a couple of sites to blogroll over at the Child Abuse Blog. A couple of breast cancer survivors, a child abuse survivor and another woman overcoming physical disabilities. It's a good start, but I want more! You're probably wondering why I want more, well let me tell you something. The absolute hardest thing for me when I was being treated for depression and dealing with the child abuse that happened was the feeling that I was some how all alone in dealing with this. That is a horrible feeling and it's one I want to help people see is not the truth. I want to be able to overwhelm people who read that blog with the number of people who are overcoming tragic and terrible circumstances just like they are. I want it to be the place to go for everyone who is feeling alone as they try to overcome and live their life. And most of all, I want to be able to point to, literally, hundreds of pages and say "Look, everyone of these people have overcome the sorts of things you're dealing with now, go take a look at their lives, see what is possible!". So let's create some flow, let's get the word out. I don't care if overcoming difficulties is the theme of the blog or not. I want to be able to point to all of the amazing people out there in the blogging community who are living their lives after terrible tragedies. Or, I want to encourage those with a similar story to start a blog. Let's get the message out to the thousands of victims of abuse, disease, and tragedy that they are not alone. If you ever wanted to pass along something you've read here, make it this entry. You, the blogging community that I've come to enjoy, and be educated by, can help this goal become a reality. Not for me, not for my own traffic and fame, but for every child being abused who feels like they're all alone in the world, for every adult who's ever felt like their life is no longer worth living, and that they could never survive and overcome. Use the power of the internet, for them. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 2:15 PM | 0 comments | 
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Friday, May 10, 2002
So here's the thing.. I'm still pondering how to make some sort of organization come out of the blogroll. I'm still leaning toward blogs that deal with technology mostly, and blogs that deal with other topics mostly. (Perhaps a News/Current Events category and a Everyday Life category?) I'm filling in more blogs as we speak that fit into all of these categories. Obviously, none of them completely fit into any category, but I think I can get a feel for whether the blogger is trying to portray news and current events, their daily life and thoughts, or they are tech obsessed as a whole. So, if you don't agree with my categories, well, that's the way I read these blogs, and it is a list of blogs I read, so I can categorize them according to how I read them, right? :) This is entirely my opinion and really shouldn't be taken very seriously at all. By the way, how do you like the weblog-related and freeware lists I've started? I'm also on the lookout for something that I've not yet found. I'm looking for inspirational personal blogs to link to from my child abuse survivor blog. Any suggestions? I really want to get to work on growing that site and incorporating some more things in an effort to help survivors of child abuse. Helping others has been a big part of dealing with my own childhood and overcoming it. I really have been feeling a need to spend more time concentrating on that. So you'll excuse me if these latest updates, once finished, are the last big improvements for awhile on this side of things, won't you? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:14 PM | 0 comments |
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Pardon the occasional fits.. I'm going to be moving some more things around and adding some links to the sidebars today, so excuse me if things look a little bizarre when you look at the page. Guess what Angela found around our house the other day? She found a Thathostingcompany.com pen that I had picked up at Gnomedex last year. I was thinking of getting a good digital cam picture of the pen and using it in a "I got screwed by THC" icon. It would be funny, but I'll have to find time to do that! It does, however, occur to me that I've got it good compared to the rest of the folks chatting about it in the forum. They've had nothing to show for their investment in a hosting contract since THC went dark last month. For my $89, I got a pen baby! Speaking of Gnomedex, Geek is planning on a little get together on Thursday before the convention starts on Friday. As for my plans, I'm looking at a 10 hour drive, leaving Columbus at 8AM, arriving Des Moines at 5PM local time. Obviously, that depends on how smoothly the drive goes, but I'd be up for a group outing for dinner on Thursday evening, definitely! (BTW, when did I become one of the "Four Gnomies"? And is that sort of like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? *L*) It's still more than three months out, so pretty much everything is tentative at this point, no? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:27 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, May 09, 2002
In the news this morning Community Groups Short on Tech -an interesting article because so many of these excuses are what I hear at my work. While not a "community group" we are a not-for-profit, so our budgetary constraints are a bit tighter than most businesses, and our vision and tech expertise is a little bit less as well. That leads to not using technology very efficiently, which drives me nuts! Seems like the klez virus has picked up an infection of CIH and is helping spread that around too! I'm thinking it's a good thing I sent out an email to staff a couple of weeks ago about klez and it's many variants. My advice to people was simple, if you don't know absolutely, 100% for sure what an attachment is or why you're getting it, call the person it's from before you open it and make sure it's not dangerous. That way I don't have to worry so much about making sure they all have the latest virus definitions or we're blocking the right attachment types on the mail server. I do those things as well, but that won't stop every virus from getting through, as we all know. This becomes a pretty effective backup plan. And yes, although I don't know if my little corner of the world is indicative of the rest of the internet, we're still seeing a handful of klez infected emails everyday. Luckily we've had no infections ourselves. (Via Lockergnome Bit's and Byte's) Dan Gillmor and Robert Scoble are both blogging their notes on the WWW conference. in Hawaii. Sounds like a tough life, doesn't it? Good stuff, though. Most interesting, to me, was Tim Berners-Lee's condemnation of the idea of having the internet run on patented specs and all users paying a royalty. "Royalty free is an essential ingredient to the Web phenomenon" Meryl presents us with an interesting little controversy. You can see my reply in the comments. For the record, in response to Jim's post of May 8. (Permalinks seem not to be working over there) I wasn't talking about his blog, nor am I down on ranting and display of raw emotion. We all have that in our online lives as much as we do in our offline lives, and there is a place for it in the blogging world, I think. I do plenty of ranting about things I hate here, I'd be a hypocrite if I expected everyone else to display anything less than their true selves, good and bad. My beef was more against folks who seem to have gotten obsessed with specific subjects, or have taken a sort of mob mentality within the blogging community. (My group of friends all agree with me, so we must be right and you must be stupid, etc.) I wonder about them, and worry that they are creating an atmosphere that discourages open discussion instead of encouraging it. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:54 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, May 08, 2002
That's that, for now Well I did get the 3 column design working, and I added some new stuff to the sidebars, now that I don't have to scroll down 3-4 days to get to the bottom anymore! The left side became more of a glimpse of my personal life. I noticed the up-tick in traffic to the other site when I referred to it as my "other, more personal site" as compared to other mentions. If you want some more personal info, well, there you go! That should give those of you who care a fuller picture of who's writing this tripe! I love having a basically free afternoon at work! Next I want to reorganize the blogroll. I was thinking about a section of tech blogs, news blogs, personal blogs, etc. But most of the blogs I read fall into all of those categories at different times, so I am still working out how that's going to work. Any ideas? I need to add some new ones too, right now it's mostly just a list of people who've linked to me, I want it to be a "these are the people I read" list. Hmm maybe a list of people I read and a list of people who've linked to me that I don't read all that often? Or something like that? More thought and planning required... I hope you like the additions and the changes, I'll be adding some more stuff over the next few days. I've got plenty of ideas but, like the blogroll, no real plans yet! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:40 PM | 0 comments |
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Well duh! I obviously was having a brain fade there for awhile. If I wanted 3 columns but didn't want to go through the hassle of putting all of the tweaks back in, why not just convert my current template into a 3 column design? Obviously, I figured that out and will be moving things around for the rest of the day, so it may look funky for awhile. Let me know if you have issues with the tables as they stand! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:04 PM | 0 comments |
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Good morning! So the wife was checking out Blogskins the other day and came up with a new 3-column layout for her blog. Her search inspired me to find a nice calm, comfortable skin for the Child Abuse Survivor Blog. So I got that going for me. The challenge now is to find a decent 3-column layout for this blog, and then adding back in all of the tweaks that are now along the left side but will be divided up and added on to, on both sides, in my dream blog. Now I just have to find the time for all of that tweaking, and getting around to changing the organization of the static pages of the site. I haven't really been in the mood for that, maybe I just need an all-nighter some weekend? *L* Speaking of my wife's blog, she's pointing out that Saturday is Stamp Out Hunger Day, where US postal employees will be collecting non-perishable goods along with delivering your mail. It's a good cause, and as someone who spent a short time living on the streets and needing to eat donated foods, it's something close to my heart as well. In other news, well there really hasn't been much of interest, at least that I've seen. Work has been rather dull too. My boss is on vacation, so there's nothing new and exciting being thrown my way, mostly I'm just here doing the routine stuff. I did get to spend 5 minutes this morning unchoking the network connection to the printer, (No you really can't send a 150 page .pdf with charts and graphs to the shared printer all at once, it chokes up the connection for everyone else!) but that was a simple enough fix. Some of the database stuff I need to do is on hold because of rampant stupidity. When a purchase/license agreement clearly states that this software is for internal use only, don't act surprised when you can't find anyone to sign the agreement and purchase the software after you openly talk about how you're going to make it available on your website. I wouldn't want my signature on the agreement either! Unfortunately it means were stuck with some outdated data until someone wakes up and realizes that we can't put it on the website, drop the idea already! Grr. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:08 AM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, May 07, 2002
Flame away! I've been doing quite a bit of thinking lately. And yes, it's probably going to get me in trouble with some in the weblog community, and it may even get me reamed in person at Gnomedex, but that's never really stopped me before. *L* As a student of psychology, (And after 3-4 years of therapy, I do know a bit about it!) I can't help but notice the various disorders that make themselves apparent online. I'm not going to name names, that's not my style, but I think most of us will be able to come up with some obvious examples of them. Also please know that I am not painting webloggers with a wide brush, there are some really excellent, well-written, intelligent blogs out there, people doing some wonderful work. But there are some that, to be blunt, have become so creepy I don't read them at all anymore. If you look hard enough, you can see obsessive personalities, group-think, mob mentality, social cliques, and even anti-social behavior all out there in full display online every day. In short, all the things that the internet was supposed to give us the ability to overcome, right? Giving everyone the "power to publish" was going to make more information and opinions available, help us all to understand each other better, help us not to be "elitist", and help us overcome such bad social behavior. It hasn't, for one simple reason, we don't want it to. We clamor on and on about growing out of a clique mentality, about being open to new ideas and accepting of different people, but in the end, we all end up being with people who agree with us and are just like us. Even online, where the opportunities to share ideas with different types of people are endless, many of us still just share ideas with those we are most like and revel in the feeling that if these people all agree with us, well then we must be in the right. I'd like to issue a challenge to all of my readers. Find one blog that you hardly ever agree with, and dedicate yourself to reading it everyday for a month. (That may be this blog for some of you!) For example, I'm going to try my darndest to read Shelley Powers blog everyday. Her liberal, West Coast biases run right up against my East Coast, working-class, conservative background, but she defends her ideas quite well, and is a very entertaining writer. Do I think reading her blog is going to turn me into a liberal? No, but reading it requires me to think about my ideas and why I believe in them, which is always a good thing. Will I be arguing with her in cross-blog writings? Probably not. I don't want this blog to become a political discussion. This is, after all, a blog about technology, and will always be one. You don't have to choose a political blog either, there are lots of blogs out there that are well done, but are written by people who you would normally have little time for, because they do not share your obsessions. Read them, see the bigger world out there! Let's see if we can use the technology for some good, and turn around what has become an alarming trend, at least to me. Be sure to let me know if you take up this challenge, I'd love to do some followup. Then again, maybe I'm the one with the problem? Hmm, maybe being on Paxil again wouldn't be a bad idea.*L* Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:23 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, May 06, 2002
Monday morning annoyances Just a couple of things that annoy me this morning with services that I used to use often and have been moving more and more away from because of stupid stuff like this. First there's Hotmail. I really only use hotmail as an anonymous address to subscribe to a few mailing lists, and I have it listed as the contact for some domain things, in case my domain should be unreachable. But I've pretty much accepted that it's crap. I have the junk filter setup to only accept messages that come from my "safe" list. The rest get sent to a junk mail folder that I browse through to make sure I haven't missed anything, and then delete daily, at least. When I'm out of town, I reset my preferences to delete junk mail immediately, instead of putting it in the folder for me to check, so I don't get a high volume of mail, taking up all of my allocated space. Yet, somehow, when I return there are always a handful of messages that get put in the junk folder and not deleted. How does that happen? What is special about those spams compared with the spam hotmail does delete? Secondly, there's Yahoo! I still use the free Geocities hosting for my other, more personal site. Lately whenever I go to login to a Yahoo! service, I'm prompted not only for my password but the answer to a question, like my zip code, or what pets I have, etc. Obviously, they are tying this together with the username to create a marketing profile. Right now, answering the "extra" question is optional, but it's not like Yahoo! hasn't developed a nice little track record of changing policies in midstream. I guess if they get much more intrusive, I'll just move all the content from that site and stick it in a sub-directory of this site. I'd rather not do that, it's been in existence for 5 years now, I might lose some readers in the move. But there is definitely a limit to what I'll put up with. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 12:26 PM | 0 comments |
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Sunday, May 05, 2002
Home again We're back home again after a nice weekend at Angela's parents. We enjoyed the spaciousness of their new house, and while I had every intention of doing some work on the site, well, I never really got around to it. Saturday, after we had all gone to see Changing Lanes ( A decent flick), Angela and I spent a good part of the afternoon doing software and hardware installs on her parents computers. (Well in one case, I spent a lot of time trying to do an install!) With the move they went from a cable connection running with a network that her brother setup for them, to living somewhere out in the country where cable is not an option. So they tore everything apart and have a dialup connection on one PC and another that is temporarily without a modem. Angela got the printer drivers for the HP printer and we got it installed properly, then she went on to reinstall PrintShop and a new mouse for her mom while I went to work on the Xerox combination scanner/printer/fax machine on the other PC. After numerous failed attempts on it, and even on my laptop, I came to the conclusion that what we had here was a bad install CD. (When you get the same "unable to copy file" on 3 different machines, despite the fact that you can see the file on the CD, well it's probably a faulty CD, right?) OK, I went off to the Xerox site, and found the install download for the model and thought to myself, "hmm, the download is 5.8MB. I need it to download over this dialup connection, and then I have to find someway to get it over to the other PC. This is not good. I can either try to find all the network stuff that they've packed away and recreate the network for them, or, even better, I can go home, download the install, burn it to a CD, print out the instructions, and mail it to them". I chose option 2! (I'm also going to send them our external modem. I don't need it anymore, since even when the cable goes bad, I use the laptop for dialup. They may want to have both PC's with internet access.) After that, well, there was some good documentaries on The History Channel International, which we don't get at home. So I settled down and watched that for awhile and never really managed to get the laptop out of the case again. Oh well, procrastination rules! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:02 PM | 0 comments |
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My Other Projects:
My Child Abuse Blog
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