Geek Stuff

How is the value determined?

So, if AOL or some other giant wanted to buy LBC, does this mean I can ask for $1 million with a straight face?

Addendum: TLA is worth close to $19,000.

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Check it out.

(Hat tip: Business Blog Consulting)

Also see Top Ten Design Mistakes. My biggest pet peeves: 1) Blogs with no “About” section. You don’t have to write a multi-page bio, just tell us something about yourself, even if blogging anonymously. 2) Difficult-to-find or no e-mail address.

Did you know that 6.4 billion people are blogless? Oh, the humanity!

Update (10/19): I hope no one thinks I’m calling them out with my pet peeves. LBC has some design and usability faux pas, too. As far as design is concerned, I prefer a less busy-looking, more streamlined blog, for instance, but I accept ads, which tend to look flashy. Between the minimalist look I want and ad revenue I need, I chose revenue. Bottom-line: design your site to your specifications.

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Absolutely wonderful, right down (up?) to the quill and ink favicon. LBC may be in the market for a face lift, too…

Lisa Sabin of Elegant Webscapes, who also designed my template, is highly recommended. Price page.

For your coding needs (every girl needs a good coder), I recommend Mark Jaquith of Tempus Fugit.

See the Geek Stuff category.

Update: I forgot to mention Mark Coffey at Decision ‘08. He left Blogger.com for WordPress.

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Have you ever wanted to be a programmer? I did. Back in 1984, I was “afraid” of the Apple computers sitting in the back of the classroom gathering dust. They seemed so complicated. At the same time I thought it would be cool to write computer languages, but I didn’t think I was smart enough.

Writing computer code for a living probably lost prestige a long time ago. Now it seems those and other tech jobs are being outsourced to the point where college kids are rethinking their career plans:

As an eager freshman in the fall of 2001, Andrew Mo’s career trajectory seemed preordained: He’d learn C++ and Java languages while earning a computer science degree at Stanford University, then land a Silicon Valley technology job. The 22-year-old Shanghai native graduated this month with a major in computer science and a minor in economics. But he no longer plans to write code for a living, or even work at a tech company.

Mo begins work in the fall as a management consultant with The Boston Consulting Group, helping to lead projects at multinational companies. Consulting, he says, will insulate him from the offshore outsourcing that’s sending thousands of once-desirable computer programming jobs overseas.

More important, Mo believes his consulting gig is more lucrative, rewarding and imaginative than a traditional tech job. He characterized his summer programming internships as “too focused or localized, even meaningless.”(Source)

Programming used to be geek territory, but with open source platforms like WordPress, even I know how to write code. And I’m not even that smart!

This is a little off-topic, but the story reminds of a Dell commercial that left me flabbergasted. I have a Dell desktop, and I’ve had to call support a few times. The first time I called, I couldn’t understand what the guy (Indian?) was saying. I’d heard that American businesses were outsourcing these kind of jobs, but my ears were unprepared. The other times I called, I got someone who had a better grasp of the English language.

So when I see this Dell commercial, I’m wondering if I misheard the word “Dell.” The support person was a white, Midwestern-looking guy with an all-American accent answering questions and cracking jokes. For shame!, I said to myself. Why don’t these computer companies make commercials with the kind of people who really answer support calls? Who do they think they’re fooling?

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Update: Have you ever tried to comment or trackback to LBC, and wondered why it never showed up? If you aren’t a troll, your comment was most likely blacklisted. Certain words and IP addresses are stored for protection against spam and trolls, and you probably used at least one of the words or part of it. I know it’s drastic, but the alternative is deleting hundreds of spam comments a day.

Thanks to a cool comment plugin, I can retrieve blacklisted comments from the database and approve legitimate ones (which also means I need to delete spam from the database). I just approved dozens from months ago, weeks ago, and today.
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Update II: The ultimate goal is strict XHTML compliance. If you’ve got the talent, I’ve got the need. Contact me.

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I’m supposed to be working, but once I start fiddling around with WordPress code, I can’t stop!

Last year when I moved to WP, I asked several users to critique my blog. The first template I had used tables. If you’re up on the latest web standards (and W3Schools), you know that tables are passé. Tables are great for data, bad for layout. Designing a site with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the way to go. Wikipedia has a helpful entry about CSS. The current template is stylesheet-based, more flexible, and loads easier in most browsers, including tiny browsers on personal digital organizers.

Back to the critique. I got so much feedback about the tables and how sloppy the coding was, I spent two days learning about XHTML and how to clean up the code. I also learned that WP geeks are serious about their code. I use the word “geek” in a good way, especially now that I’m becoming one. I’m even citing Wikipedia, another geek paradise. The more I understand how my blog functions behind the scenes, the more I want to learn about WP in general, PHP, and how to find better and more dynamic plugin for added features. (Also see the WordPress wiki)

I’ve spent the last two hours tinkering with code and downloading plugins from Tempus Fugit, run by freelance coder Mark Jaquith, and Cold Forged. Every now and then readers ask if I plan to install a comment spell checker. Well, I uploaded the plugin and couldn’t get it to work properly. Maybe I’ll try again later. I also want to add comment preview.

If you want to talk about WP, CSS, PHP, Movable Type, XHTML, the web in general — whatever — this is the thread to do it. Also see Why Should I Avoid Tables (for Layout)?

The tables vs. stylesheets discussion has been going on for years. I found a 2002 article by blogger Dave Winer, inventor of RSS. To find out if your site is constructed with tables (and you care), go under “View” in the toolbar if you’re using IE and select “Source.” In Firefox, select “Page Source.” Firefox gives you a color-coded view, much easier to understand. If you see “table” and a bunch of “td” tags, the page is made with tables.

About XHTML, you’re probably more familiar with it than you think. For example, if you’ve noticed that more sites are replacing the bold tag (b) with strong (strong) and the italics (i) with emphasis (em), you’ve seen XHTML. The new standards are one reason I used to disable hypertext and most HTML tags in comments. I couldn’t assume commenters knew XHTML. Now WP 1.5 supposedly fixes invalid code automatically.

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Jonathan V. Last wrote a fascinating article called, “The Case for the Empire.” Last is the online editor for the The Weekly Standard and a blogger at Galley Slaves.

[Note: I didn't realize the article was written in 2002. I wondered why it was spoiler-free.]

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed Sci-Fi speculation, analysis, and present-day analogies. Last turns the “Star Wars” morality play on its head, arguing that the Empire, not the Republic or the Rebel Alliance, is the best way to run a galaxy. He acknowledges that it’s a difficult case to make, given the Empire-in-black theme and apparently murderous activities of Darth Vader and his “Dark Side” minions. His argument is convincing, though.

At the beginning of the saga in 1977, we see a young Luke Skywalker, restless on his uncle’s farm, suddenly thrown into a galactic adventure. Episodes I-III (which I didn’t see) provide the back story, which is where Last begins. He discusses the ineffectiveness of the Senate and compares the Republic itself to our own ineffectual United Nations. The only “armed” protectors of the galaxy, run by the Republic, are Jedi Knights, whose power (The Force) is inherited. Separatists, who “seem genuinely to want to make a fresh start with a government that isn’t bloated and dysfunctional,” want to break away from the Republic and control their own destinies. Sound familiar?

Darth Vader’s “evil” Empire seizes control of the galaxy some time between “Attack of the Clones” and the 1977 movie. Last writes:

Lucas wants the Empire to stand for evil, so he tells us that the Emperor and Darth Vader have gone over to the Dark Side and dresses them in black.

But look closer. When Palpatine is still a senator, he says, “The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good.” At one point he laments that “the bureaucrats are in charge now.” [Sound familiar?]….Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator–but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It’s a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.

Also, unlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy. The Empire runs academies throughout the galaxy (Han Solo begins his career at an Imperial academy), and those who show promise are promoted, often rapidly.

Last presents evidence that the Empire isn’t the evil beast it’s made out to be, while acknowledging that it certainly appears so. For example, when the Empire destroyed Princess Leia’s planet, I remember gasping at the sight of it blowing up (80s-era special effects weren’t bad). A whole planet vaporized. Everyone on it, including those you loved, gone in an instant. But Leia was a rebel, liar, and lawbreaker who hid other rebels. And she was a spy.

About all the other killings, Last says, “Whatever the case, the important thing to recognize is that the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction.” Good stuff.

After the Jedi prevail and the Empire is crushed, the galaxy is back to square one: Run by a disparate group of regional authorities who answer to no one. At least under Darth Vader, they had to answer to him (or suffer unpleasant consequences). Like it or not, he provided order and stability.

Last concludes with perhaps an unintentional comparison to present-day politicians who fancy themselves rebels — Democrats (the way I see it, anyway):

In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe…Their victory over the Empire doesn’t liberate the galaxy–it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.

Isn’t order preferable to chaos even when scores of people (rebels) are killed in the name of “Empire?” The rule-of-law concept has proven to be liberating and better than any other system of government. Agree or disagree?

I could tell Last was really into writing this article, which made it all the more fun to read. Does that make me a Sci-Fi nerd? I can live with that.

Addendum: SPOILER ALERT! John Podhoretz hates the new movie. Very funny. But if you plan on seeing the movie, DON’T READ HIS ARTICLE.

Totally Unrelated Update: For someone on hiatus, Andrew Sullivan sure gets a lot of traffic.

He and I had a brief e-mail exchange a few months ago on the issue of homosexual “marriage.” We’re both firmly fixed in our respective positions, but I appreciated the dialogue.

Read Star Wars Memories.

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