Blogs

A couple days ago, I was checking out film blogger and columnist Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere and learned that his site was blocked by Google Chrome and Firefox because those browsers suspected his site contained malware. By that time, he had already gotten the problem fixed, but only after fretting over it for several hours during Christmas Eve.

Over the years, whenever the site was slow to load up, I always went through the same routine. I checked traffic logs to see if it was due to a sudden increase in traffic. If not, I would look at the mysql slow query log to see if there were slow queries bogging up the database. If that wasn’t the culprit, then I would take a look at the access logs to see if there were any irregular activities from search engine bots.

Lately, we’ve been adding more local news feeds to the site. Eventually, I want to have most of the major cities across the U.S. covered. What I had noticed since starting this local news project was that the more feeds we've added to the site, the slower the feeds on the homepage updated.

My 2-year-old and her cousin thought my laptop needed some cleaning while I stepped out to run an errand. The door to my home office was closed, but not locked. When I got back, I was told that my nephew was pouring water with a small bucket onto my less-than-a-year-old ASUS Zenbook while my daughter did the wiping with a towel.

When my mom discovered what had happened, she immediately wiped as much of the water off the laptop as she could.

According to this AP article, The year is 2030. Man will walk on Mars if everything goes according to plan, and if the government gives them adequate funding.

NASA plans to send six to eight astronauts. The trip would take six months each way, and they’ll stay there for 18 months. The mission “will give scientists the chance for unique research on everything from looking for other life forms and for the origin of life on Earth to the effects of partial gravity on bone loss.”

This is not the first rover to land on Mars, but the first one that I was able to watch via the internet. At least, that’s what I was hoping for. What I got was a streaming video of astronomers from NASA reacting to various milestones that Curiosity met as it lands on Mars. In the end, my reward was two low resolution black-and-white images of Mars.

Betaworks bought Digg, the website, for about half a million. It’s a complicated sale. Linkedin acquired the patents, and Washington Post got the talent (the engineers).

The first thing Betaworks did was relaunch the site on August 1st. I noticed because their RSS feeds stopped working on Wopular. They had rebuilt and redesigned the site from scratch in just six weeks.

Design-wise, it’s now a three-column site - like Wopular (and Pinterest) - with headlines and thumbnails spread within each column. It doesn’t look as organized as before when headlines only occupy one column.

I finally had to do it. I stuck with Digg for as long as I could. It’s the first social news site. Even after the infamous version 4, I stuck with them.

A decent number of Digg's hardcore users had already jumped ship since v4. I was too lazy to do the switch - mainly because the headlines I saw on their homepage didn't quite fit those on Wopular's. Digg was still providing me with relevant and interesting news.

I guess you just can’t be in the middle when you’re covering news: “CNN, founded in 1980 and now owned by Time Warner Inc, has tried to hold the middle ground in its news coverage, a position that some blame for its ratings erosion, while ratings have risen for competitors Fox News and MSNBC, which blend news with opinion and political commentary.”

Late last year, I had a virus on my Toshiba Satellite laptop running Windows XP. It’s been awhile, so I’ve forgotten what the virus was, but I think it’s the one that redirects search results to malware. I’m always surprised when I get a virus because I rarely download videos, music, or software. I’m mostly surfing websites for research for blog entries and whatnot. I have AVG Anti Virus installed and running. Still, every so often, I’ll get a nasty virus that’s difficult to remove.