Alt + Ctrl + 0 This is probably where Jim and Pam should have tried to meet between NYC and Scranton, PA. Right around East Stroudsburg.
Archive for October, 2008
Anil has alway been one of my many internet heros. He has a great post up about how marage is awesome. Alot of the talk about marrage these days seems to be either from the gay community or the religeous community. Anil and I both come at marrage from an angle, one where the point is just chosing to spend all your time with one awesome person. So much of marrage has little to do with gender or race of the other person and much more about chosing someone to trust completly. I hope prop 8 goes well in California. I think it will but the polls seem relativly tight and I think if the libral state of California can’t pass this then a lot of other states are going to have an even harder time.
They are kinda of confusing and long so I will not be posting them here. Blue New Jersey has a post that says vote no and no. The Times of Trenton has an article that says vote yes and yes. The best over view is this League of Women Voters pdf (ick) that seems to have a fairly unbiased breakdown of why you would want to vote either way.
I am voting Yes and No.
Yes to the first question that seem like it will close a loophole in the law that lets the state take on debt without public approval.
No to the second question which would put more control to municipalities with join court systems when it come to choosing judges. This will probably stop more towns from joining court systems together (and thus cost more money) but all so lessens the impact corrupt apointies would have on local areas. I like my judges to have though a vetting process as possible and I think letting them go through the state senate would be best.
Long long ago Terry Goodkind wrote the first book of a great fast paced fantasy series called the Sword of Truth that everyone loved. And then he wrote another one and another one. 11 books later it finally ended and I hate the entire series. 4 books in I was so invested in the main plot I could not stop reading but Terry gets trapped in his own political views and his monologues get longer and longer. Those 11 books could have easily been 4 or 5 books and have been a solid series.
Then it was optioned for a TV mini series which a year or two later seems to be turned in to a “syndicated adventure series”. Will the show be any good? No and here is why. The reason the “syndicated adventure series” Hercules worked was because it did not take it self seriously. It was jokey and lighthearted and made you forget how low budget everything was. If anything is made clear by this 10 minute intro to the show it is how seriously it takes it self. But slow motion and fancy graphics will not save it from taking it self painfully seriously. Sadly the fact that Terry Goodkind took himslef too seriously is the same reason his books went so far down hill.
The only way this show can be any good is if it has great writing and acting but that tends to be where these productions tend to skip so they afford the graphics they want to have.
It premiers Nov 1st and 2nd and I hope my eyes bleed less then when I watch TinMan.
But that’s not actually what this post is about. This post is about building community. Because how better to reward to reward the people who got you on the bestseller list then with an email like this:
Subject: OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD
Body:
OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD
OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD
OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD
OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD
OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOver the five days between the release of Paper Towns on October 16th, and the completion of tabulation for the weekly NYTimes Bestseller List on tuesday the 21st…
John Green
Sold
Enough
Books
To
Be
Number
FIVE
On
The
New
York
Times
Bestseller
LIST!!!!!!!!!OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD
OMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHHAHWOWOOOOOOOOWOWOOOO NERDFIGHTERSSSSSS!!!!NUMBER FREAKING FIVE!!!
That’s five spots better than we had to do!
John just called to tell me and he is freaking ecstatic. “It can’t have happened…it just seems so impossible,” I think is the way he put it to me.
A lot of great authors go their whole lives without ever making the list and you, my friends, did that for John Green. It was indeed the best birthday present he has ever received.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t go buy Paper Towns if you haven’t already. The book really is fantastic, and obviously helping John get on the list was only one of the many reasons to buy it. I mean…it’s a really good book, I’ve read it twice already :-)
And I’m not the only one saying it…not only has it sold really well, it’s getting fantastic reviews. And all of these things that really matter to authors like John are starting to happen. It’s showing up in airport stores where there are only one or two YA books ever on the shelf. The displays are staying out longer, his publisher is pushing to get more copies into more stores. And those copies will be bought by people, who’ve heard about how fantastic Paper Towns is from you (or little notes stuffed into unsold copies…of course.)
SO EXCITING!
Thank you all so much for helping to give John the best birthday present ever. AHALKJHJL:KHGEUHSKDJH SO COOL!!!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR JOHN GREEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHA WOOOHOOOO!
If that doesn’t energize your community then nothing will.
For Books I Am Reading I have been using Get Satisfaction for keeping in touch with my users. It’s worked out pretty well and kept me from having to build anything myself.
Now they have released a widget that puts a “feedback” tab on the left of every page and brings up a lightbox where they can send feedback right from the page. Sounds like a cool idea and I’m up for trying it for a little while at least.
Being a bit crazy when it comes to how I want Books I Am Reading to look I’m not sure I love having that black tab on the left. The site is pretty sparce and I’d like to keep it that way. Originally I thought I would just put the widget where ever I wanted it to go. I figured it would be a good addition to the 404 page. Sadly that is not an option but perhaps it will be one in the future.
If I get more engadment out of the community I’ll think about keeping it around. But if not then I will most likly take it off and keep the design as minimal and clean as possible.
While I wasn’t looking my youtube subscriptions has surpassed 100. Why should you care? Because back when my bloglines reader first hit 100 feeds I knew that rss readers were going to be big. And yet there still is no good aggregation for online video.
Is 9:30 in the morning to early to say this is the weirdest thing I will see all day?
we each do have some good friends who have called us abnormal because of how happy we are in our marriage beds. Their attitude is that a wife should just put up with sex once a month or so to keep the husband happy. So for them to hear us praising our husbands and talking about how much we enjoy being with him, they do think we are “against the norm” so to speak. The secular world would probably find us abnormal as well. I mean think about it. We have all of these sexual desires and cravings and yet, we’re only focusing these thoughts on our husbands. We left our mothers and fathers and now are cleaving unto our husbands as God commanded. Our thoughts and urges are directed towards them. So for the people “of the modern, secular, world,” I’m sure they find us abnormal.
PhoneDog has a great series of videos reviewing the G1. It’s super positive. There are stuff that is not perfect but personally I think people over estimate how perfect the iphone is. You can view more in depth review about the phone here.
This video makes me seem lamer then I remember being. Perhaps I can be happy for high self esteem?
This is a direction Gray’s Anatomy could have taken.
MAN is an amazing short film about two sisters that is not afraid to avoid dialog and let the silence of real life seep in. Sadly it can’t be embedded.
If you’re not using Smush.it download it now. No respectable web designer can avoid this amazing firefox extension.
Smush.it strips out all the extra data that photoshop leaves in. None of the data effects the visual quality of the image. A quick survey of my sites show that PNG files created by photoshop can save from 25 to 50% of their files size. INSANE!
What kind of saving have you gotten from your sites?