Author: Greg

Hey, bloggers! Ever wish you had a permanent copy of your journal, laid out and bound like a regular book? Well, now you’ve got your chance… A new company called Blogbinders which does exactly that. Blogbinders is one of a growing number of new “print on demand” publishers here in the US, basically they hold an electronic version of your book at their offices, then print one copy at a time whenever you need one. It’s a great deal for self-publishers who often don’t need that many copies of our books but sometimes need them at a moment’s notice.

Even better, you don’t even need to collect up your journal entries to put in an order, just tell them the beginning and end dates of what’s to be included in the book, and their automated software will actually go to your site, pull the relevant text, and format it all into a trade-paperback book for you, color cover and perfect-binding and all.

NOTE: So far only blogs at Livejournal.com work with this software, they’re hard at work right now, though, to update the software to accept any journal powered by Blogger or Movable Type.

Much like other print-on-demand companies, once you’ve put in an order the electronic version of your book sits at their company’s hard drive, and they send you a link you can put at your own site, so that anytime one of your readers wants to they can just click on the link and order a copy themselves. They also have their own online store where you can choose to have your book promoted and sold through them.

The per-book price is a little expensive, so I don’t recommend it for people who are going to do full print runs of their journal i.e. more than 100 copies, if you’re just some regular blogger, though, and have always wanted to own a couple of copies of your journal in paper form, for posterity’s sake or to give out to friends and relatives, I highly recommend you check them out. Plus, it never hurts to give your readers a chance to buy your journal in a more permanent form; believe me, you can sometimes be pleasantly surprised by how many of your online readers will actually shell out a few bucks to own something like that.

Why didn’t someone think of this before? We have have an unclaimed day at the end of February every four years, this year no less… So why not petition to make it a fun day… A Pizza Party U.S.A. day! Sure it’s not a real day, but neither is February the 29th if you think about it.

And it’s such a great idea… SUCH a great idea. In fact I’ll go as far as saying “Best. Idea. Ever.”

Look at the facts…

Everybody gets the day off. No, I mean everybody. I don’t want to see any poor saps working at Denny’s or Wal-Mart during Pizza Party U.S.A. – we’ll pass legislation making it illegal to wear a nametag on Leap Day. The only people allowed to work will be the mail carriers charged with delivering the pizzas to neighborhoods around the nation (and each will receive a copy of the Shins’ “Chutes Too Narrow” for their trouble).

Then, at noon on Feb. 29, citizens from around the nation will travel to their local community centers, present photo I.D. (to prove they chipped in), and receive in return:

– Three slices of pizza

– A 16-ounce soda. And no diet soda, either – this is a pizza party, people!

– $2 in quarters for the video games

Community centers that don’t already have video games will be required to install Berzerk, Mappy, and the cool version of Discs of Tron where you actually get to climb into the cabinet.

What’s NOT to love about it? A day off and 3 slices of pizza… And a national database will list your likes and dislikes in terms of toppings so you’ll always get the slice you want!

So go forth, sign the petition, I already have…

I’ll have Ham & Pineapple on my pizza please, no Mushrooms…

I’m tempted to join in the 2004 May 1st Reboot “competition” but seeing as I’ve just redesigned this place it doesn’t seem worthwhile. Also shutting down a blog for the month of April doesn’t do much good… Except drive away readers, regardless of whatever cause the web design community thinks the reboot is worth doing for… I dunno. If I hadn’t done this on Monday I would be tempted, but I’ll most likely pass.

Besides, the “Reboob” parody is still fresh in my mind…

(big thanks to Tim Schavitz for keeping some old, old shit alive)

Anyways, we have visitors well, ummmmm, visiting I guess, this week… And it finally hit home that this is well, ummmmm, my home… It all came from a conversation (of sorts) with the waiter at the restaurant we were eating at, it went something along the lines of:

Waiter: “Ahhh, you’re not from here, are you all visiting?”
Friend: “Ohhhh no, us two (points to her partner) are but these lot (points to us four) live here…”

Which got me thinking “shit yeah, I LIVE here…”, which is something I hadn’t really thought about, believe it or not. I figured I was just here, end of story but yeah I live here and now it seems really cool, well to me anyway. Especially when I’m MSN-ing people back home and they’re asking how I’m settling and how life is and all that stuff, well except last night when Scott pointed out From Autumn To Ashes are rolling into Glasgow at the end of February… That kind of pissed me off as it’s a band I’ve been wanting to see for ages, but I can say with a certain smugness that they’re playing The Tabernacle in Atlana a week or so before the Glasgow show, which pissed him off as much as his news pissed me off before I found out my news which pissed him off etc. etc. etc.

Now to stick it in even further I’ve got to get a ticket for the Atlanta show and figure out how to get to and from The Tabernacle… And produce photographic evidence to piss him off even more.

Much planning and plotting is required here…

This little tidbit comes courtesy of Tractorgirl… And it’s both whimsical and disturbing at the same time.

US father names son “Version 2.0”

Yep, you read that right…

A proud US father and self-confessed engineering “geek” has named his son after a computer software term.

Jon Blake Cusack, from Holland, Michigan, told local newspapers the US practice of adding “Junior” or “II” after a boy’s name was too common.

So, when his son was born last week, he decided on the name Jon Blake Cusack 2.0, as if he were a software upgrade.

It’s different… I’ll give him that, but the best bit is

He is already planning for his son’s future.

“If he has a child, he could name it 3.0,” he said.

“The first [1.0] would have major revisions, then we have 2.0 and 3.0.”

Yes… I can see that happening.

Inspired by the recent post on R80o I’m kinda undecided as to whether Renée Zellweger is, in fact, hot or not…

Yes, this is what takes up a small piece of my day, which actresses are hot…. Or not…

Those who are are as follows (in my opinion) Kirsten Dunst and Kate Winslet. But Renée Zellweger kinds jumps inbetween the category depending which movie she is in… Let me demonstrate

As you can see… On one hand we have “Bridget Jones Renée” with a full figure and on the other hand we have “Down With Love/Cold Mountain Renée” who looks like she’d break in a strong breeze. It’s really hard to decide which catergory to keep her in… Personally I think she was pretty damn hot in Empire Records and Jerry Maguire but again, this is only my opinion, feel free to shoot me down if you so wish…

Of course, if I was Jack White I’d choose Meg over Renée any day of the week, but I’m not it that position to do so, much to my chargrin.

You like?

I though I’d lost this new look, but luckily a few files were still on my server so for the last 12 hours I went through everything with the virtual equivalent of a fine tooth comb and cleaned it all up and finally finished what I started some 2 weeks ago.

I think it’s much nicer, but then anything is much nicer than the old b2 default template, so it makes this place my own at last.

Before you ask, yes, it looks a bit unaligned in Internet Explorer, but it looks great in Mozilla Firebird and seeing as that’s the browser I use mostly, get used to it. If I can find a way to realign in IE I will, but until then it’s just cosmetic differences.

Never, ever underestimate the power of begging as I storm into the last 8 of the BlogMadness tournament, which is about 2 rounds further than I thought I would get, so thank you all, thank you, thank you… Well at least I didn’t burst into tears Sally Field “you really love me” style (that’s reserved incase I win).

So it’s February 2nd, that can only mean one thing!

IT’S GROUNDHOG DAY!!! Rise and shine, campers, and don’t forget your booties ’cause it’s cooooold out there today. Punxsutawney Phil, The Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators and Weather Prophet Extraordinary saw his shadow though, cursing us to a further 6 weeks of winter, but if winter is anything like the weather we had this weekend, bring it on.

It’s also the day after the Super Bowl.

Can the Patriots only win Super Bowls with the last kick of the game? Unfortunatley I wasn’t feeling so well and ended up missing the second half due to me sleeping soundly in bed, which kinda sucked. I think the excitement of seeing Janet Jackson’s boob at half time was too much for me… The only bad thing about the Bowl was CBS’ HD feed sucked ass, jumping all over the place and cutting out sound here and there at random.

But YAY! GO PATS!

Super Bowl Sunday to be more precise…

It’s been a nice sunny, relaxing weekend so far… We sat out on the back deck playing Uno for about 4 hours before retiring to the garage to shoot some pool.

If only all days was as nice as this. So seeing as I have NOTHING to blog about, here’s a panorama of the neighbourhood on a sunny Sunday morning.

Well, after a late rally, I pipped my opponent by 1 vote in my first round match up… Thanks to anyone who voted for me, it was much appreciated.

Now I’m in the second round bracket so do yourself, and me, a favour and vote for me here but again, read the other entry before you do vote.

In other news, I’m pretty much settled in my new home. I’m really loving it here thus far, I mean, what’s not to love with a 51″ HDTV in the lounge and a pool table in the garage?

Jealous? You should be…

Hopefully I’ll be able to get into downtown Atlanta soon, and meet up with Juju Dawnkeyotie to check out her pimped out orgy pad of a home.

The voting is up and closes tomorrow… so head on over and vote, but vote on the best one… But read both entries, because I think the one I’m up against is pretty cool and if it wasn’t up against mine I’d probably vote for it

I got an email back from FHM.com and they apologised and have changed their link to a new server, I wonder how long that will last since most barely last a day now… Also they’ve linked to a slightly different version where you can’t hit the penguin as far.

My visitor count ended out at 3,902 with 1.16GB of bandwidth burned up, so never underestimate the insane popularity of the best piece of Work Avoidance™ this year (thus far).

I’m glad I checked my stats when I did, otherwise I’d hate to think how much bandwidth would have been used up before my hosts pulled the plug on me.

Referrer Activity Analysis

Top 10 most active referring domains during period:
fhm.com with 728 referrals made (52.15% of all referrals)
yayhooray.com with 172 referrals made (12.32% of all referrals)
ex-rev.com with 71 referrals made (5.09% of all referrals)
okayplayer.com with 69 referrals made (4.94% of all referrals)
scamcity.co.uk with 68 referrals made (4.87% of all referrals)
ulc.net with 40 referrals made (2.87% of all referrals)
digitallsd.com with 31 referrals made (2.22% of all referrals)
ezboard.com with 27 referrals made (1.93% of all referrals)
covenantofswords.com with 21 referrals made (1.50% of all referrals)
boardnation.com with 19 referrals made (1.36% of all referrals)

The Mars Rover has done a Beagle 2…

Shame really… The pictures Spirit has sent back have been something magical and good to look at… So here’s hoping the rover ping’s back soon.

Or maybe the Martians have snatched it just like Beagle 2.