My site supports what are called gravatars, or globally recognized avatars. Your gravatar is basically a small, square picture that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on a gravatar-enabled website. There are many, many websites that support gravatars… and version 2.5 of WordPress (the most prevalent blogging software on the internet) was recently released with gravatar support built-in.

On Negative99, you will see gravatars used in the comments section of my blog posts. I have included a sample screen capture here of some blog comments… I have marked people who have an active gravatar image with a green arrow, and those that don’t with a red one. You can see that the default placeholder for someone without a gravatar is a light-gray, androgynous silhouette. Don’t let this be you!

Signing up for a gravatar is FREE and painless. All you need is your email address. You’ll be able to upload any image you like and perform zoom and crop functions inside their website. You can also “store” more than one gravatar for later use - I have five gravatars that I’ll rotate through when I get bored. It can’t get much easier.

hacked// asite NEGATIVE99 infidel

negative99 infidel hav hack pages ha ha

w. bush = 666 and satan _must disembark away the holy peoples oh to glorious allah

And when you go to Negative99 you see a page that has most certainly been hacked! Oh no! But all is well… it’s April 1, and this blog - which sat out the last few April 1’s - decided to celebrate this one.

April 1 is a day of fun on the internet… when websites will post fake stories and feature special surprises. For example, Google started taking volunteers today for its Mars colonization program in partnership with Virgin Airways.

So after I posted yesterday on my blog about the recent Fitna movie controversy (which was critical of radical Islamism) I decided that a GREAT April Fool’s Day joke would be to hack my own site! I opened up Photoshop and went to town putting together what I would do if I were to hack someone’s page (a weird feeling indeed). One of the hardest things about pretending to be a Muslim extremist - incredulously enough - was finding extremist material on the web to use on the site!? Indeed… what I thought would take 30 seconds actually took 30 minutes of pouring through google search results to try and find SOME terrorist website. I had to settle for grabbing images off of the terrorist groups’ MySpace pages (you can’t make this stuff up). I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like the next time I try and fly in an airplane after all the colorful search strings I sent through Google.

So, I took the hacked-site-image I created and made a special site theme (called “Infidel”) which would ONLY show a “hacked” webpage of my creation, but that would allow my RSS feed to continue to work. This morning before work I initiated the hack.

I was very heartened by the outpouring of concern today via cellphone and email. Many friends and colleagues picked up on the “hack” quickly and started calling me. I was also very flattered that most (about 80%) thought the hack was legit! Cool! And really… in the hustle and bustle of the daily grind who has time to pay attention to the fact it’s April 1? I don’t always… and in fact one year a local radio station’s morning show (Wakin’ Up With the Wolf on PYX106) had me convinced they were bought out and replaced with a Spanish-only show. Oops.

So rejoice, for what it’s worth Negative99.com has survived the clutches of fake Islamist ‘l33t h4×0rs.

As I stated in an earlier post (while alpha-testing the software) this is a major software upgrade with a gazillion improvements. As with any massive change there will be some broken WordPress themes and plugins to fix… but the sunshine on the horizon is nearly blinding. I really can’t wait to dive in on this release and start developing websites. I think the huge upgrades to the design and operation of the administration interface is paramount to customer adoption and usability (every developer knows that user self-sustainability cannot be over-stated, period).

And if the new release wasn’t enough, the WordPress website itself just got a sweet redesign too! Very nice, Matt!

From Matt Mullenweg’s official announcement:

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

Here are some stats from Peter Westwood that he just posted about:

WordPress 2.5 has been released and includes a huge number of changes over the WordPress 2.3 series. Rather than list the changes in detail which would probably take me some days to write out I offer the following statistics and information about the WordPress 2.5 release:

• In development for 185 days (6 months 3 days to be precise).
• Changes to 364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions for more detail you can view the diffstat output.
• Patches committed from over 110 different contributors.
• Over 1300 individual changes made for more detail you can view a complete changelog.

I used to use (until 17 minutes ago) 1&1 Internet Hosting for all my websites, including this blog. Now, I’ve had problems with them frequently, but the past 3 days have been beyond anything readily comparable. Over the weekend the server that “hosts” my web content was up… then down… then up… then down. Since yesterday morning it’s been down - 19 hours and counting.

You may ask, “If you’re site is still down how are you blogging right now?” Great question. You see… since my site has been down I’ve had plenty of time to:

1. Call GoDaddy.com and order REAL web hosting
2. Migrate all web content (that I backed up manually with Adobe DreamWeaver) to GoDaddy
3. Create new MySQL databases on GoDaddy’s servers and run SQL population scripts
4. Change the domain’s DNS listings from 1&1 to GoDaddy
5. Wait for the so-called internet to propagate my new DNS info
6. Blog about the colossal suckfest that is 1&1

And I’ve made plenty of calls to 1&1’s Technical “Support” during my run with them… not the fewest of which were the recent salvo of a half-dozen hopeless inquiries. But calling 1&1 Tech Support puts the cliché back in worthless.

I have to go to bed for now… but I will update this post soon.

Here’s an update after a few days of calming down.

My entire set of internet property has been fully migrated - files and databases - to GoDaddy. Everything went smooth and is now working fine (there’s always a few rough edges at first).

After over 48 hours since I formally filed a complaint (which can ONLY be done by actually sending an email to complaint@1and1.com) they finally got back to me.

Thank you for contacting us.

I apologize for the delay of response. I understand that you have experienced downtime with your website. This is something I can only apologize for. The reason for the downtime was due to the issue with the server your sites were on. Our administrators were aware of the issue and have since resolved this matter. As a gesture of goodwill, I have added a month of hosting to your account.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

They added a month of hosting? I lost more than that in advertising revenue! And I like the part about the administrators being “aware of the issue”… yeah, every time I called them I heard the EXACT SAME spiel - “Our server administrators are aware of the issue… they are currently resolving the issue so it won’t happen again”. Whatever… I guess won’t happen again doesn’t include two hours later.

I love WordPress. I use it for several websites (including the one you’re reading and my personal site). It is easy to use, very extensible, is open source, and you can find metric-butt-tonnes of plugins and ready-made themes for it. As a developer and designer I have been able to create websites whose very core functionality is purely built on WordPress and its hefty list of extras built by the masses for creative goodness sake. Trés cool.

Now, version 2.5 really does to the next level. The back-end admin interface is completely rethought from an admin’s perspective. The design is yet more intuitive than before, and the added features blow your mind. How about single click plugin version upgrades? Built-in Gravatars and photo galleries? Pretty sweet.

It’s still in alpha (I keep telling myself) so you won’t see it on Negative99 for a while… and even when you do you might now be able to appreciate from the front all the beauty and genius that went into the inner-workings and into the back-end… but trust me, it’s there.

Here’s a snippet from WeblogToolsCollection.com.

WordPress Development Blog: 2.5 Sneak Peek I love the staccato description Matt uses to start the post: A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? The first Release Candidate for WordPress 2.5 is out for those that have been waiting patiently to try out the new features. Matt details out the updates and the new features of 2.5 on the development blog and the good news is spreading in the WordPress circles.

Another article from BlogHerald article.

State of Global Warming

Ha! It’s hard to believe anyone is still taking this seriously, but for those keeping score at home - it now appears that in addition to cows… moose are contributing to global warming more than automobiles?! You can’t make this stuff up. Some braintrust of researchers in Norway are concerned that moose are belching and tooting the environment into potential catastrophe. This instantly conjures scores of pointed questions targeting the validity of the research and the sanity of the researchers, not to mention the dubious scientific conclusions.

One question I might ask is… then why is it also getting warmer on Mars? Are moose belching there, too? And why does your comparison regarding the larger carbon footprint of a moose, compared to a car, lead you to the conclusion that moose are even a BIGGER threat… rather than the conclusion that, “Oh, maybe cars aren’t doing as much as we thought.” And why haven’t we seen the effect from moose before now… because surely with all of man’s atrocious macho-paternalistic pillaging of the world’s natural habitats wouldn’t there logically be FEWER moose today than there used to be? And better yet, how are the PETA crazies going to take this… do we wickedly hunt down and eat these tasty yet evil beasts of voluminous anal gas?… or do we honor their natural existence as it starts to boil the oceans?

See… it’s those Catch-22’s that make it so hard being on the left.

State of Sports

It’s great when the highlights of every major sportscast right now includes footage of Michael Vick. Actually that’s not great. Actually it’s a horrid picture of the journalistic sensationalism that consistently manages to displace actual news with repetitive drivel. And doesn’t it warm your heart to know that organizing dog fights is yet another act society scorns more than the plunging of cold steel into the base of a baby’s skull?

State of the Blog Spam

82,382 spam comments blocked… and counting.

State of the Blog Design

This may not mean much to some… but the new design will be a labor of progressive enhancement. So basically, I’m going to put up a new design that will function adequately and will look different… but will not be in its final state, nor will it have any bells and whistles. After I begin this process I will be tweaking the design over the next few weeks to “tune” it to what I want. This is in contrast to the usual design reboot that most sites do where the entire design is completed in a sandbox environment and deployed immediately in a near-finished state.

State of the Prison System

As much as the geographic snobs here in the Northeast love to snoot their beaks at anyone with a southern twang (which to us is everyone from Pennsylvania down), I can’t help but be reminded that folks down south got themselves a better way of gettin’er done. Take this story about a jail in South Carolina that is making inmates who sexually misbehave wear a pink jumpsuit for three months of their “stay”. I love that idea. I love every part of it. Here you got these inmates who are exposing themselves (and worse) to female prison guards… and the prison has thought up a very clever way of “marking” them as the deviants they are for the rest to see. Shame. Shame - used appropriately - is a great thing.

Of course, there’s a lawsuit against making inmates wear the pink jumpsuit. This lawsuit was filed by a current inmate serving time for assault & battery with intent to kill… and he thinks wearing a pink jumpsuit will unfairly “label” him and cause others to make derisive comments. [cue the violins] Somehow I don’t feel sorry for this felon… and somehow I don’t feel sorry for a criminal being shamed for acting like an animal. In fact, if anything, it blows my mind that inmates can expose themselves and throw semen on female guards without fear of punishment… and even in “progressive” South Carolina. Holy smokes… how in NASCAR’s name do inmates get away with that to begin with?

I mean seriously… let’s say an inmate throws a urine/feces mixture (which is common) on a female prison guard - you would/should whack them with your nightstick. If they do it again (for whatever insanely idiotic reason) you would/should whack them twice… and they do it a third time and you whack’em thrice… and so on and so on… you get the idea. Logically the greater the pain inflicted by strikes with a nightstick the less “attractive” the urine/feces throwing becomes. And again, logically the more severe and numerous the nightstick strikes the greater time will pass between urine/feces throwing events. One could even postulate that there is a critical number of nightstick whacks that would preclude any repeat urine/feces throwing events for the remainder of their sentence.

Now, the above reads a little totalitarian with a dash of sadistic fascism… and a pity it does. But it certainly puts the pink uniform in a better context. And we can only wish for the day when they’ll bring back the stocks.

As a note of trivia, currently I have had 67,814 spam comments caught by Akismet before they could see light-of-day.

You know… if you’re gonna’ be stupid, you gotta’ be smart about it.

I love one-liners, and the poetry of this one rang true in my ears as soon as it left my lips. I quickly Googled to see if anyone had ever officially said it yet (like Yogi Berra), and to my delight they had not. So I get to have my very own one-liner… my very own Yogiism. Well done me.

The event that stimulated this burst of reason was this - I was told of a group on the website Facebook (a social networking site similar to MySpace) that was entitled “Henry Mills sucks penis” [the name has been changed]. This group was started and joined by current and former members of a local Christian school… and the object of their wrath, Mr. Mills, is a well-respected official of that same school and church. The group’s Facebook page includes disrespectful and insanely inappropriate and infantile content that I won’t share here.

Now… how nervy do you have to be to create and/or join such a group actually using your primary Facebook account with your name and picture displayed for any school official or parent to identify… and to do this while having not yet graduated from the school?! While you’re at it why don’t you just set your diploma on fire right now?! And needless to say, once the school found out about this Facebook group just a few days ago, it was quickly put out of its misery.

So upon hearing this story I exclaimed, “You know… if you’re gonna’ be stupid, you gotta’ be smart about it!” There is harmony in this statement - it’s found in the mix of bumbling wisdom and denotative paradox. But as I pondered, I discerned some “deeper” force at work here. So I put my thoughts down in the form of a socio-algebraic law:

Mooradian’s Law of Multiplicative Idiocy

As the probability of an individual or entity to engage in an idiotic action increases, the faulty cognitive processes driving this increase also propend the same individual or entity to engage in further related idiotic actions, such that the original idiocy is amplified through a mechanism of synergistic multiplication. This described propensity incites a daisy-chain of idiotic action occurring independent of (and possibly in addition to) the coincidental succession of an individual’s or entity’s natural random idiocy as expressed by a Poisson distribution.

As a previous leader of soldiers, I truly saw this law in action. Anyone who’s been in the military knows soldiers and sailors sometimes have an affinity for mayhem. And certain sailors and soldiers have perfected foolishness down to a black art. Now, it amazed me how my soldiers would sometimes commit egregious acts of idiocy, and follow it up by recording their actions in photographic or audio-visual form - thereby supplying incrimination leading to their own demise!? That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

Recently, on a local blog, I was conversing with an argumentative and illogical fellow. No sooner had I soundly discounted all his faulty lines of reasoning, when a mysterious second fellow appeared on the blog and echoed the first fellow’s identical illogic. Little did “either” of them know that I’m an admin for the blog… and I could see that “both” fellows were posting from the same IP address! Upon greater inspection, a third and fourth troublesome fellow on the blog were also from this same IP address! When pressed for the truth, the original fellow claimed that the other “three” fellows were indeed real people (housemates) whom he shared his home computer with. Of course, he couldn’t then explain why when I tracerouted his IP address it routed back to a single-point external gateway for a local health insurance company (as verified by their IT security staff). That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

How about the lady who tried to pay for her Wal-Mart merchandise with a counterfeit bill? She used a bill of such a high denomination ($1 Million) that not only did the store have no choice but to examine the bill with such scrutiny as would certainly discover the fake… but the store wouldn’t have had nearly enough cash to even make change, anyway! That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

The robber who empties the convenience store cash register, but then pays for a soda with his credit card before leaving. The student who vandalizes school property, then brags about it to a teacher. The man who shows up to DUI court drunk. That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

For starters I put together a new design for a friend’s business. It’s just a front page for now but it suffices as a nice new internet face for their shop. I’ll be enhancing it over the next weeks with tabbed paging and additional content.

I also reached a trivial yet important milestone (does that compute?)… my humble little blog has accrued more in ad revenue than my total hosting costs to date for all my websites including future costs thru October 2008. As shocking as that seems try this one… after analyzing my traffic stats it would seem the economy of Negative99 is driven by UK school kids! Who’d of thought? God save the Queen!

Another milestone… I have passed 28,000 spam comments since around mid-2006. The reason you don’t see but a tiny sliver of them ever on my blog is because of a GREAT little filter from Akismet that checks every comment I get against its brilliant detection scheme. And be glad you don’t see them… car insurance, porn, gambling, porn, penis enlargement, porn, prescription drugs, porn, porn, porn… *yech*.

In terms of XHTML and CSS I had to rewrite some style to fix the layout of my theme. This custom-made theme I use employs very complex style markup and thus is very sensitive to change, and the upgrade to version 2.1 brought on some small syntax changes.

And then of course there was some PHP I had to rewrite… mostly because version 2.1 handles pages differently in the database schema.

And then I had to patch up my Jumps pages because version 2.1 totally handles link categories differently and also deprecated some primary link PHP functions.

Wow… I guess it was a lot of work now that I think about it.

This has been a bit of a crazy year. I am now on new servers for Negative99 so there’ll be no more limited availabilities or shying away from blogging due to bandwidth issues… I have about 50 times the bandwidth I did before for the SAME PRICE!

I’m also finally using the latest version of Wordpress (2.0.5) and have resolved to do all my posting in FireFox where I have automatic spell checking. It’s a beautiful thing.

My major task this first month of the year is to “reboot” my site. I plan on designing a new look and feel that I hope better reflects my growth as a web designer and my relative webview of the world.

See you all soon!

Every time someone comes to a website their browser downloads all the little pieces that make up a site… text, graphics, stylesheets, and other objects (like Flash games). These all add up. I usually have plenty of my quota left at the end of the month, but my traffic has steadily increased over the last year and I get thousands and thousands of visitors every month. So this month I am pretty close to my limit.

I know that refraining from posting is a lame attempt to avoid additional traffic and interest in a website (indeed, isn’t that the purpose of the site?), but that’s all I can muster. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a better excuse. In the mean time, know that I will post much more soon.

No, really… these past nine days have been a pungent combination of a full-time job (software engineer), various social functions and groups, and a slew of guitar activities and events. Last weekend (October 14 and 15) one of my bands, MCCLAINE TRIBE, played three times for the worship services at Grace Fellowship church. Then on Tuesday I played for a special Acts 29 Boot Camp event in Troy, NY. Then on Thursday another of my bands, Hundred Monkey Theory, played for an event at Russell Sage College (my wife’s alma mater) called Artists for Social Justice (never have I heard so many “positives” of communism). Then on Saturday both Hundred Monkey Theory and MCCLAINE TRIBE played for an event called Shine to benefit arts in the schools. Then Sunday (today) I played for the worship service at Terra Nova Church.

So, when I say I’ve been busy… I mean it. I’ll post something meaningful soon.

I know I haven’t posted much lately, but rest assured it’s not because my mental well is dry. Much to the contrary I have more material I need to blog on than I can even remember at any one time. Life has been busy and my more productive pursuits have gotten higher priorities… as well as the usual Autumn necessities like closing the pool. Now, my greatest fear is that perhaps my sparse posting could be construed for a waning desire to express myself in the face of all that is insane and illogical. Again, rest assured, I fear nobody… least of all the perpetual parade of clowns.

I do get troubled, though. I’m troubled by people all around me. I’m troubled that certain groups trumpet “free speech” and “tolerance” like it’s a religion… yet those exact same screwballs actively try to silence the speech of others they disagree with. You’d think this was a sick joke, but it’s no joke. I never thought to turn Negative99 into a political blog, but it may only be a matter of time. My good conscience cannot sit idly by while truth is trampled in favor of “correctness”. We’ll see.

Anyways… one particular irritant that has reared its ugly melon lately is that of “being offended”. Much like some use the race card, just about anyone has the ability to try and play the “offended” card. If they don’t like something, they simply say that they are “offended”… as if offendedness-prevention is something that should be everyone’s highest priority. As if being offended trumps candor, truth, accountability, and openness.

Having a blog means I speak… and as I’ve said before nowadays you can’t say anything of ANY substance without offending someone. Some have the guts to express it openly in the blog comments for the scrutiny of others… but not all. But not just bloggers… schools are open to parents being offended by an Easter Egg sticker on their kids’ papers… or a Halloween party. How many times has society changed what it calls minorities in an effort to continually avoid offending them??? I could count probably seven different ways to say Hispanic before even getting to the epithets. Does that even make sense? I could go on for hours listing some popular forms of “offense”.

And I only mention “being offended” with speech and blogging because they are connected. People all around us… whether in school, church, work, on the radio, in the newspaper… are playing the “offended” card. I recently read a whole chapter in Brad Stine’s latest book about the tyranny of the offended (my phrase, not his). It’s really just a form of control. It’s a way to stifle candor, truth, accountability, and openness.

Now, that’s not to say that nothing is offensive… what I’m saying is that what fools today are trying to pass as offensive really is not. For example, an Easter Egg is not offensive… until someone shoves it up your butt. Clear? So the next time someone dubiously plays the “offended” card… offer to give it back to them Easter Egg style.

The folks at Boca Java Gourmet Coffee & Tea have put together Blogger’s Fuel.com devoted to their blogging coffee fans and the fans’ favorite blends. Now, what I think really sets these guys apart is not just great coffee (at good prices even for the internet) but that they use people’s passion for coffee to channel passion towards rising up for various worthy causes (like fighting cancer and fighting evil). You can see how this thought pattern resonates well with bloggers as a whole.

The coffee… is great and fresh. My personal favorite? Definitely the “Bloggers Pajama Passion” which is kinda a gay name, but is flavored with hints of vanilla, caramel, and kahlua. MMmmmm…. It hits the spot with me, especially with a bit ‘o the creme. I’ve always been a fan of flavored coffees (unlike some of my more ‘purist’ associates) and this stuff does not disappoint. I suck it down and I feel great like the caffeinated epicurean I am! If you don’t like flavored they have an ample mix of regular blends from the richest coffee fields on this rock.

Now I am most impressed with their commitment to the troops. As a former officer myself I know the importance of having coffee out in the field… both for keeping me sane and keeping my troops going strong. They started an effort called Operation Million Cup whose goal it was to get coffee in the mugs of our troops. They let you buy a bag of coffee at production cost that they’ll send to the troops… and then they match your donation one for one with a bag of their own! Recently they just tipped a million cups donated, but they’re still going for as long as we have men and women out there busting their hump serving this country - so check it out: www.OperationMillionCup.com.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.
- Dr. Seuss

I am an outgoing person. I’m very extroverted… in fact my Myers-Briggs rating is sometimes a straight ESTJ, meaning I’m a war general. As such I have always spoken, whether it was time to speak or not. You will hear it said that it’s much better to be quiet than to speak. You will hear people say “I’ve often regretted my speech, but never my silence.” You will hear sermons preached on the third chapter of James about taming our tongues and the massive damage our words can inflict on others.

This is all fine, but it is perilously lopsided to the point of being deceptive and dangerous. If you want to bring the Bible into it there are more of examples of Christ tongue-lashing than tongue-holding. The Book of Proverbs lauds speaking the right words at the right time. History is replete with examples of evils that were allowed to occur because of the silence of millions of people.

A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.
- Proverbs 25:11

Don’t let anyone tell you that going through life having never offended anyone was the holy way to live. There exist many with wacky beliefs and ideas… and if none of them are offended by you this is to your discredit. They say that defeat is just part of the road to winning… and the the only true losers are the ones who never try. I think the same is true to some extent with the expression of our ideas and principles… and that the only true losers are the ones who think that by staying quiet they’ve performed the more honorable and tolerant action.

Absolute tolerance is impossible for anyone, unless, of course, you believe in nothing.
- Brad Stine

So my blog is just an extension of how I do life. I decided a while ago that if I’m gonna’ go down I’m going down swinging. If I’m going to err it will be by actively doing the wrong thing rather than by a lack of doing anything. Now, does this mean say whatever whenever to whoever and be damned if you don’t like it? No, of course not. Common sense is still a cornerstone of higher-order humans. The proverb above specifically exhorts the use of “aptly spoken” words. The key is this… don’t let fear of not speaking perfectly aptly 100% of the time keep you silent.

You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watching, sing like nobody’s listening, and blog like nobody’s reading.