Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

DeathForecast.com

On the heels of 6.6.06, I find this little web site that calculates your estimated time of death based on a series of questions. Not the cheery thing, but perhaps a little reality to snap us back into a healthier lifestyle is what we need.

LifeHacker

9rules Network has announced 111 new sites for the network. 111!? Before I go any further, let me say, that I’m not some bitter blogger that was part of the 589 bloggers that were rejected. I would never consider this blog something for a network. I don’t have a niche, I don’t post enough, I simply rant out loud, and a few people actually read it. Period.
But as someone who reads a lot of sites, I once took a site’s acceptance into 9rules as some sort of validation, that perhaps before reading a post, there was a strong chance that the author was going to know what they were talking about, or that the information would indeed be valid. But to water down the network, IMO, with that many blogs in one fell swoop, I can’t help but believe it was a publicity stunt for a group that had recently fallen off the radar, so to speak.
I mean, what better way to get the blogosphere to chatter about you than to “accept” 111 sites into the network. How much traffic directly from those sites is generated alone? Plus those, (I guess I’m buying into the hype by posting this) who comment on the recent events. I must say, I really have a hard time buying any of this, and will now take the 9rules logo on a site with a grain of salt, and that is an injustice to those who have been longer termed members of the network.
I’d like to say I haven’t looked at all 111 sites, and I’m sure they are all fine bloggers in their own right. I simply have a hard time understanding how that many are brought in at once.
I think I might create a snazzy little logo and start my own network. I’m sure at least 100 of those 589 that were not admitted are as good in their own right as the 111 picked. It could be called the Odd Man Out Network. Wonder how much ad revenue that would generate? Anyone interested in joining?

So I downloaded the bleeding edge version of Firefox, code name bon echo, to poke around a bit. Seemed a little snappier, but could have been because 98% of the plugins were disabled. Turn it off, open my regular firefox, and without asking me, it upgraded to 1.5.0.3. Bullshit, I say. I don’t want the latest version, if simply for the fact that the reason I use FireFox is the extensions. And this version, the extensions I rely on, are now disabled. So I might as well use Safari. I like to wait until the extensions catch up with the release. And I’m not at all happy with the new RSS icon in the address bar. This really was a bad move, and I’m not sure how it happened. A really bad taste, that’s for sure.

Update So I’m guessing they realized that 1.5.0.3 was borked, because 1.5.0.4 is now out, and my extensions work now. In the meantime, I checked out Camino, a Mac mozilla based browser, and may just well use that for everyday browsing. I don’t like the idea of using more than one, but now that I have Scuttle set up on my site, (I used delicious, but don’t like the idea of Yahoo controlling my bookmarks), bookmarking isn’t as big an issue with the 2 browser set up. Camino is faster, FF offers extensions that make working on web sites invaluable. So I may just become a 2 broswer guy.

I’ve updated my RSS reader, Gregarius, to the latest SVN. Which means the latest code. Not always a great idea, but this version has been in development for some time, and about to be released as .5.4. I’d like to thank Adam Kalsey for his help via IRC, and for his theme. I really want to look closer at the the theme system, I really think it’s similar to WordPress’s system. Adam’s theme is definitely an improvement in a lot of ways over the default theme, but I’d like to maybe soften it up a bit. For some reason, my eyes just don’t work with the grays. Especially the header image.
While I’m on the subject, I was checking out Dave Winer’s Share your OPML. I haven’t added my OPML yet, but I did discover Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick. I’m not a big basketball fan, but of all the interviews I’ve seen/read, I’ve found him interesting. Reading his posts left me with a similar feeling. I’ve always secretly wished he would buy the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from the Glazers. Who knows. Anyway, I’m off to the OPML site to find more feeds for my reading pleasure.

This is great. You too can tell George what to say