The Flow of Consciousness

I didn’t blog as much as I would have liked to this year, mostly because of my crazy busyness.

My article on how to install Gears on 64-bit Linux continues to see quite a bit of traffic. I even host a copy of Gears, even though it’s likely out of date. Also in the Linux vein, my articles on how to buy DRM-free music online with Amazon MP3 on Linux and Android were moderately popular. I wrote an article on how to add CACert root certificates to Chromium on Linux and it sees more traffic than most of my other posts combined.

I wasn’t as active in the open source community as I would have liked, but I did make some contributions to Gwibber, Astrid, Celtx, and Lernid. I mentioned the first three in my Launchpad activity update. The latter is a newer development by Jono Bacon. I contributed the entire Esperanto translation less than two days after it was available on Launchpad. I have no way of verifying it, but I think that the Esperanto translation was the first complete non-English variant translation available.

I recently wrote two brief articles on how to automate some tasks on Facebook. One was how to rapidly expunge friend suggestions, and the other was how to select all friends in a friend select dialog.

I met Tom Dickson of Will It Blend? fame at CES last year. He was really cool and friendly.

I also wrote a few articles on politics, my favorite being A Comment on Socialism Defined, a comment left on a friend’s blog, Strike the Root!. I’ll not go into how much I think Obama and his friends have screwed up the country already (it’s not all been bad—he has done some good things). That’s something for another article.

A new hobby this year for me has been stock trading. I’d saved up some money and decided to use some skills I learned in middle school to make a buck or two on the stock market. Ironically, not 12 hours after I blogged about my flagship stock being up near 200%, that stock, SPNG, dropped 27.66% in one day, costing me $23,000 of value on a $10,000 investment in 65 minutes. It recovered, and I still made out with a profit, but I learned a very, very valuable set of lessons. I still kick myself occasionally because of this and probably will for a long time. My goal of getting into stocks was to generate enough money that I could pay off my student loans really quickly. I could have paid off more than 2/3 and I didn’t cash out when I should have.

I did meet many, many new people in the stock world, especially Stockguy22 and the Bulls on Wall Street crew. I said goodbye to StockTwits after I was temporarily banned for cheering on Vonage (VG) when it was less than 50 cents, riding it to 80 cents, and cashing out. They called it a worthless, crappy penny stock. A few weeks later, it spiked to ~2.20 and has been above a dollar since. HA!

I got some neat advice from friends while considering the purchase of a MacBook Pro (which I got and love) and the acquisition of a PS3 (which I did get).

The biggest changes in my life were in my location and work. I got a new job in March at Vivísimo, a search platform maker in Pittsburgh–I even wrote a post on the corporate blog! I moved in with some friends in May, but realizing we were a little cramped, I moved into a new apartment in July (I didn’t write about that!).

I wrote more than 28 articles for Bob Buskirk’s ThinkComputers. My favorites were the Masscool MP-1371RS Media Player and QNAP TS-809 Pro network attached storage device. I use the former alongside my PS3 for video formats my PS3 can’t stream from the latter. The NAS has become the central storage hub for all of my computers, replacing the QNAP TS-109 Pro I reviewed two years ago.

BIOS LEVEL was fairly inactive this year, largely because of a major server outage from May to August. I did write an article on the Orbita Mouse, which I still use to this day at work. I did record and post several videos from Ohio Linuxfest 2009, including Linux Journal editor Shawn Powers’s keynote, Jorge Castro’s talk on building a community around an open source project, and more on licensing, making money from open source, democratized design, and talking to policymakers and legislators about open source. All Ohio Linuxfest videos with a write-up are available on BIOS LEVEL, or on BIOS LEVEL’s Blip.tv channel.

Jon Daniel and I spend most of November cranking out a beta version of Profyle.at, a personal profile directory service. We’re not entirely finished yet, but sign up for our Profyle.at beta and you’ll likely get in! We want to help people find you on the Internet so your friends and family can follow you on whatever sites and networks you like the most. We pitched for funding and didn’t get it, but were cordially invited to present again during the next round in a month.

Brigette and I are still together, and going strong. We’ve spent most of her winter break together, driving throughout western PA to be with friends and family, too. She’s been working on her web site for her beagle and vizsla show dogs, Glade Mill Sporting & Hound. She’s come a long way, from using a completely WYSIWYG editor to redoing it with a mix of code and WYSIWYG with Adobe Dreamweaver. I’m eager to see what she’s planning for it.

Vivísimo’s Search Done Right™ blog posted an article I wrote a while ago entitled It’s All About the Metadata, Baby: Search Engine Optimization On The Intranet.

Here’s a snippet to whet your appetite:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic these days. SEO consultants are paid well for their expertise in telling a company how to improve its web search engine ranking. A high rank often means more traffic, which means more business, which means more money.

However, SEO consultants focus primarily on the World Wide Web. After all, it’s only the public that needs to find information on the company’s website, right?

Wrong. This fact is well established. Vivísimo and other vendors entered the enterprise search market years ago and their growing number of clients shows that employees need to find data within the company’s intranet sites and storage networks using a unified, easy-to-use interface.

Click your way to SDR and read the full article, It’s All About the Metadata, Baby: Search Engine Optimization On The Intranet. You can also check out my Search Done Right author page.

Update: Fixed the links. Thanks, pookiewookums.

The most recent change to my blog theme is one which most of my readers will never see. I added a print media CSS style sheet to all pages on the blog. Go on, try it. Use your browser’s “print preview” function to see it.

Rarely do folks actually print a post from someone’s blog. If it is a blog which does see some kind of readership with an unusual habit for printing articles, e.g. a blog about education which professors frequently print and distribute to their students, then the author or designer usually provides a “print preview” link or the printing user simply deals with the output, however many extraneous pages it may be.

However, accessing this printable version, that is, a version that prints without advertisements or colorful site paraphernalia, requires that the user click on a certain location, an extraneous action often neglected by visitors in a hurry.

This most recent change came about when I actually did have a reason to print one of my posts, and I realized that I wasted approximately five pages of paper just to get a small post. Now, I could have easily specified a page range when printing, but who does that? Users want to click print and have the article in hand.

I hate wasted paper, and most sites use some kind of div as a constricting container for the body text of the site. These containers often occupy less than the width of a page of paper, so the content fills only a portion of the paper, rather than letting the browser decide the width of the text on the printed page.

Print media style sheets remove this extra action and allow the designer of the site to decide how the printed output of a site should look.

The WordPress Codex’s Styling for Print article mentions five key element IDs which are generally a part of every theme:

1. #header
2. #content
3. #comments
4. #sidebar (or #menu)
5. #footer

These elements, and their children, are the ones that need to be customized to give a WordPress blog a printable look.

One can append his or her new print style sheet to the bottom of style.css using the @media print{} enclosure, or editing header.php and adding a whole new line, like I did. I prefer to have a separate file for easier code maintenance.

The most key part of my print.css stylesheet is the part which hides elements which have little use in a printed copy of any page of my blog.

#sidebar, #headerad, .search, #hmenu, #content .navigation,
#footer, #respond, #commentform, embed {
    display:none;
}

This is a screenshot of my Blogger Health Insurance article so you can see my blog design even if you’re viewing this in a feed or on a mobile device.

I used Ubuntu’s built-in PDF printer to produce these two print-outs of the site: one with the print style sheet, and one without it.

• Blogger Health Insurance article print-out UGLY
• Blogger Health Insurance article print-out PRETTY

Open both of those PDFs side-by-side and follow the comparison table with me.

If you look at this post in Print Preview, you’ll see a message in the code block. My print format truncates after 80 characters (I think). While this is usually not a problem, since my code blocks are generally meant to be copied and pasted instead of typed, I decided to include a short message at the top for browsers which support :before on elements in CSS.

Designing a decent print style isn’t very difficult. That very simple design took me just short of an hour. That hour of time infinitely increased the readability of printed copies of my blog, and completely eliminates the need for any kind of “printer friendly” link within the article metadata. Visitors to my blog who are so compelled to share my articles via sneakernet and hard copy won’t have to waste paper or ink printing unnecessary parts of the site design and can focus on what they want the most: the article text.

Check out the Styling for Print article at the Codex for more information and tips. Also, check out my print style using Print Preview and tell me if it doesn’t work for you!

Libel insurance for bloggers has existed for some time, either in explicitly-purchased libel insurance or through homeowner’s insurance. The association with the latter confuses me, but I guess it has to go somewhere. Eugene Volokh wrote about libel insurance for bloggers in July of 2007, and the Citizen Media Law Project added to it.

However, there doesn’t seem to be a widely-available, or even narrowly-available healthcare insurance for professional bloggers. I think most insurance companies would consider bloggers to be self-employed, but most bloggers don’t make enough money to afford self-insured premiums (with exceptions such as John Chow, who is Canadian and has social healthcare anyway, and Shoemoney).

Before I muse further, I must disclose that I am not a lawyer nor insurance agent, nor do I have a keen understanding of the insurance market. I have no affiliations with any insurance company, other than being a consumer of services. I am musing, here, folks.

Healthcare is expensive—approximately $12,000/year for the benefits which PA teachers receive. I’m sure this much higher for the self-employed, such as bloggers.

However, if a group of bloggers banded together to get a group rate for health insurance, that group would certainly get a lower rate. Think of it as a union for bloggers.

TechCrunch reported March 17 that trade magazine Blogger and Podcaster would be starting its own advertising network and offering “access to healthcare” to members of the network.

Exactly what level of healthcare provided wasn’t specified, with Blogger & Podcaster simply saying that “this is a big issue for bloggers/podcasters looking to leave their day jobs and go full-time.” Ultimately the devil will be in the detail but immediately every US based blogger who blogs for a living is going to want to look at whatever they are offering; even if it’s a basic healthcare package it’s a whole lot better than having no healthcare coverage in country that (unlike most of the rest of the western world) does not provide universal healthcare.

While this might work, it’s tied to being involved with an advertising network. Not all bloggers want advertising on their blogs, and those that do might prefer another network, such as Federated Media or TTZ Media, or even simple ones such as Google or Yahoo!.

What I propose is this: an organization of bloggers who sign an agreement to abide by a certain code of ethics and agree to link to the organization’s site so that others can join. The group—a non-profit—arranges health insurance coverage for members (prescription, hospitalization, dental, etc.). They pay less for group health insurance, which is sponsored by the organization and served by a major carrier (I would suggest one that is based from a university, such as UPMC) or a health savings account. They could maintain the insurance so long as they abide by the code of ethics and maintain that link.

If the organization really wanted it to spread, there could be some kind of affiliate marketing scheme to go along with it. If someone joins using your affiliate ID, then pays premiums for so many months, you get a month free.

If the group grew sufficiently large, it could even consider offering 401K or other niceties offered by traditional companies.

I suggest the name International Union of Bloggers or Union International of Bloggers, because the acronym “IUB” works in almost every language which uses the Latin character set, even though some languages would reorder the noun and adjective, thus making it UIB. It could “IBU” or “BUI”, as well.

There might be a non-profit in existence that could handle this, too.

Does this already exist? Or am I behind the times and/or out of the loop?

Both ThinkComputers, run by Bob Buskirk, and BIOS LEVEL, run by Sean Potter and myself, have been very busy lately.

BIOS LEVEL

After a busy five-article February, BIOS LEVEL had four articles in March to-date. We might have another one out before the end of the month, though.

• StarTech.com WattSmart 750W Power Supply by Sean – one of the most stable power supplies I’ve seen, certainly worth investigating if you’re in the market for a new PSU
• Pittco’s Iron Storm 8 by Sean – Pittco held the largest LAN party ever in Pittsburgh in mid-March, and most of the BIOS LEVEL staff was there—some were even staff!
• Mini-Feature: Inside a Plextor DVD+-RW drive by me – a quick look inside an optical drive which I recently fixed myself
• Nexus Technology Cooling Supplies by me – in which I discover the quietest fans I’ve ever heard, or, rather, didn’t hear
• D-Link DNS-323 NAS Enclosure by Sean – a pretty cool Linux-based NAS
• GMC AVC-M1 Noblesse AV case by Sean – GMC’s neat HTPC case
• Vantec NexStar 3 hard drive enclosure by Sean – an excellent USB/eSATA hard drive enclosure
• Xigmatek HDT S1283 CPU cooler by Sean – a very cool (literally and figuratively) CPU cooler
• Corinex GameNet Powerline Network Adapter by me – a Powerline networking kit meant for console gaming, and it performed acceptably for console gaming

ThinkComputers

Bob has been posting four or five articles per week since CES! He’s really ramping up the coverage on ThinkComputers, and doing a great job even in the midst of moving. I’ve written a number of articles this month, with another coming up before the end of it.

• ASUS WL-520GU wireless router – another Broadcom router yearning for DD-WRT
• ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe – This review took me nearly a month because of all of the problems I had with the board. The largest of them wasn’t even the board’s fault: Windows can’t handle a motherboard swap, whereas Linux can. It’s a decent board, but I’m still having problems getting USB to work reliably on Gutsy. Hopefully, there are driver fixes in the Hardy kernel.
• Cooler Master Cosmos S – One of the coolest cases I’ve ever seen, I drooled upon seeing it at CES. It’s now the case for rahab, my primary workstation.
• Yoggie Gatekeeper Pico Security Mini-Computer – The Yoggie is a neat device which is plugged in to a USB port on a Windows computer and offloads network security functions—antivirus, firewall, etc.—onto the device, which is actually a tiny Linux computer
• Targus Grove Convertible Messenger Backpack – a combination messenger bag and backpack which looks a lot like a WWII rucksack.

In the coming month, I’ll have a bunch more reviews—several power supplies, an enterprise-level NAS, a video card, and some knick-knacks I’ve uncovered along the way. Keep your eyes peeled and feed readers updating!

ThinkComputers Feed
BIOS LEVEL feed

Happy New Year!

I’m going to share my professional goals for 2008 with you, interested reader, but before I do so, I need to revisit last year’s list.

• Graduate
  • Mission accomplished. I graduated in May with a Bachelors’ Degree in Computer Science and a minor in Writing, focusing on journalism.
• Go to grad school.
  • I’ve got one semester remaining at Robert Morris University before I finish my Masters’ Degree in Business Education, and another year before I finish the teachers’ certification.
• Keep writing
  • I haven’t written as much as I would have liked, but I did keep momentum on this blog. Actually, I’ve been doing more reading than writing, mostly on political things. I read Lew Rockwell columns daily and find myself on Wikipedia and other sites researching politics. I’ve written a number of letters to my senators and congresspeople regarding various bills and whatnot.
  • I’m still writing for ThinkComputers.org and other sites operated by Bob Buskirk. I’m going to CES under the ThinkComputers banner on Sunday.
  • Obsidian and I got BIOS LEVEL off the ground, and we’ve had a lot of traffic as a result of the review of the OLPC XO and the articles on uShare and the Xbox 360 and extending uShare.
• Keep coding
  • I did not code as much as I would have liked. I worked heavily on a web site design one night this month, but even then it was just modifying someone else’s design and implementing a few small WordPress plugins. I did, however, learn a lot about MVC from Jon, so I hope to use that this year. Hopefully, Jon and Zack and I will get back into development when we work on our replacement for Autonomous LAN Party, a once-great GPL project which recently went Qt-licensed and is a terrible mess of coupled and incohesive code.
• Learn more Esperanto and German
  • My Esperanto vocabulary is growing, and I’ve joined Esperanto-USA, a group which fosters Esperanto advocacy in the United States. As for German, I’ve picked up a little bit here and there. I’m not able to speak much of it, but I can read a little. I may be headed to Germany, Norway, or Sweden for a part of my student teaching in May 2009, so I’m sure that I’ll pick up even more if that becomes a reality.

Now, this year’s list.

• Keep writing
  • I love writing for ThinkComputers and BIOS LEVEL. I’d like to get back into fiction writing, but we’ll see where that goes. I’ve also had a little bit of interest in playwriting, but I’ll have to hold off on that until I make a Debian package of Celtx, an open-source screen/play-writing package.
• Get move involved in the open source community
  • I recently joined the ubiquity team for Ubuntu. Ubiquity is the live CD’s installer tool. I don’t like it very much, mostly because of its network usage and silly crashes without decent error messages. I’ve also said that I’d package a few things (celtx, firefox-sqlitemanager). I’ve been using Ubuntu nearly full-time since the end of October—I never realized the awesomeness of the product which I’ve been pushing for years.
  • Hopefully, Jon, Zack, and I will resume work on the Pittco LAN Administration System, which will be open-sourced.
• Improve social networking
  • CES will be a great opportunity for me to network within the computer and consumer electronics field. While I don’t intend to make my career in this field, I do plan to keep writing about it and maintain my enthusiasm for it. Perhaps if teaching isn’t what I thought it would be, I could make it my career.
  • Grad classes at RMU have built my professional educator network, and I’m sure it will continue to grow as I meet more people.
  • Unfortunately, the New Castle/Youngstown area isn’t wonderful for this, so I may consider moving toward Pittsburgh if I can find a roommate or a job which pays enough for me to afford it without affecting my graduate studies.
• Lose weight
  • I lost 30 pounds in the spring of 2006. I’ve regained 10 of that, and I hope to lose 25 this spring, putting me at an even 200 pounds. Living at home hasn’t helped, but I’ve advised my parents of my wish to lose weight, and they pledged their help.
• Read more
• I need to read more often. I have a book list longer than I’d like to admit.

Things have been busy lately for ThinkComputers and BIOS_LEVEL, two of the sites for which I write.

BIOS_LEVEL

Sean wrote two excellent reviews and even conducted an interview with a developer for one of them. He reviewed Tuniq TX-2 Thermal Compound, a thermal grease. He found a 22% reduction in heat when using the TX-2 compound. Sean also wrote a review of uShare, a Linux-based system for taking advantage of the XBox 360’s home media center features. There’s even an interview with a developer included!

As for my work, I’ve done two reviews of events, Ontario Linuxfest and Ohio Linuxfest. I really like the former, as I got better pictures and took more notes to aid my review. The latter, though, has videos of DJ Dual Core in action at the afterparty.

Sean and I are slowly improving the site and adding more content. It’s going well, but both of us are in school and aren’t able to devote as much time to it as we’d like. Check out the BIOS_LEVEL forums, too. There are a lot of lurkers willing to talk!

ThinkComputers

I’ve had a couple good reviews lately, but none as well-received as my review of the QNAP TS-109 Pro All-in-one NAS Server. If you’re a Digger, you should digg it.

I’ve got another NAS review in the works, and will probably play around with both the QNAP and the this one within their Linux environments and see what goodies I can find and benchmarks I do. Look for the review on ThinkComputers and the results of the playtime on both ThinkComputers and BIOS_LEVEL.

I haven’t written an opinion column for Newsvine in a quite a while. I’ve only written a few for the combination news, blog, and social bookmarking site, but I think this one will get some more traffic than the others.

Headline News is the MTV of 24-hour news

I’ll be attending Ohio Linuxfest in Columbus this weekend with Zack, Jon, and others. I’ll be taking pictures and posting a review/synopsis of the event throughout the weekend on the BIOS_LEVEL blog and at my blog, The Flow of Consciousness. Next week, I’ll combine the posts for an article at BIOS_LEVEL. Dave Grega, a Pittco regular, will be speaking on usability during the event, so I’m excited to hear what he’s researched.

There’s this new site called Dealdotcom.com that is basically Woot.com with two tier profit sharing. That means that you get a certain percentage, here 35%, of the profits of the purchases of people you recruit and you get 15% of the profits of the people they recruit.

Let’s say that you recruit two people who then also recruit two people. You’ll have six people in your tree. Let’s say they all buy something that is $100, but the profit is only $10. That’s $20 in tier one profit, and you’ll get 35% of that, or $7. That’s $40 in tier two profit, and that’s at 15%, so you’d get $6 there. $13 for not doing anything? Not bad. Not bad at all.

I did a little WHOISing and found that the guy who runs Dealdotcom.com is Marc Quarles, a somewhat well-Googled Internet marketer. Dealdotcom.com has a private domain registration, but the domain registration for Dealdotcom.com’s name server domain is in his name. I confirmed this by visiting the first post on the Dealdotcom.com blog, which is authored by Marc.

I signed up, as it seems like a pretty good deal to me. However, I would have liked to not have to give my address and phone number up front. I think Dealdotcom.com would have more users if visitors only needed to create an account up front, then were prompted to add an address/phone number after confirming. It’s also going to need a captcha!

Also, there’s a field for a Tax ID# on the account page of Dealdotcom.com. This means social security number for most people. I think Dealdotcom.com would save itself a little bit of hassle if it relied on its users to take care of their own taxes. I won’t fill this in because I don’t know Dealdotcom.com well enough to trust it—it’s a safety issue. Additionally, the form is not secured via HTTPS. There’s no way in hell I’m submitting my SSN via an unsecured connection. However, upon closer inspection, the Make Money page of Dealdotcom.com does say to get an Employer ID Number from the IRS since, technically, as an affiliate, you’re an independent contractor:

As an affiliate, you don’t work for us, you’re an independent contractor. That means we don’t withhold taxes on money we pay you – it’s up to you to pay your own taxes. Someone has to pay taxes on the money we pay you, and it sure as heck isn’t going to be us! Thus, we use your Tax ID Number to report your earnings to the IRS.

Another big missing feature is the ability to delete your own account on the account page. I fancy that an email to Dealdotcom.com customer support could handle that, but, nonetheless, I want to be able to delete my account and my information from the Dealdotcom.com system for any reason, at any time, and immediately. The privacy policy is very short and to the point, though, and it clearly states that Dealdotcom.com won’t give the information out except to shippers of the items you purchase.

I would really like to have a name attached to Dealdotcom.com officially. It would add to the credibility of the fledgling site, as well as generate interest in the man or men (or women) behind the site.

I hope to generate a stalwart and steadfast network of people, so have at my affiliate link and let the commerce begin!