BTW, I only heard the term "blog" within the last 2 years, yet one of the quotes from the article said this guy ran weblog for 4 years.
Is the term "blog" newer then this guy's service?
When I want to see when a term first came into use, I search Usenet archives. In this case, I found that "blog" as a verb goes back to July 1999, and the first reference to blogger.com is August 31, 1999.
"Weblog" first appeared in 1996 to refer to - get this - a log of web activity - in mid 1994, but there's only one reference and then frequent usage starting in mid 1995.
This may be the first appearance of "weblog" to refer to a web surfer's journal of his cybertravels:
From: Jorn Barger (jorn@mcs.com)
Subject: Lively new webpage
Newsgroups: alt.culture.www, alt.hypertext, comp.ai
Date: 1997/12/23
After talking a lot about Frontier and Scripting News (www.scripting.com), I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html
This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture to politics to literature etc.
Jorn seems to be the only one who used the term in that context until March 1999 (there's one reference to a guy's website with a "new feature: weblogs" in January but I can't tell from the context whether he means that in the traditional sense or editorial sense).
That's NOT really your local police/sheriff/whatever department. If you call and ask, they'll say they are not affiliated with the collection group and receive no money from that group.
The worst ones way out west here are the "American Deputy Sheriff's Association" which claims that the deputies have to buy their own body armor and that the department does not pay for funerals of deputies killed in the line of duty. Both claims are totally bogus; the money received is used to line the pockets of the guys who run the association and they have been shut down by several states, only to reopen under a new name later.
I emailed my local sheriff's department after receiving such a call, and they said in no uncertain terms that I should not believe the marketers or contribute to them; a few days later an article came out in the paper pretty much repeating the text of the sheriff's email.
I'm with you on this one. I have been a database applications developer for 18 years, and XML is the pits. Why does the industry hate the ISAM format so much? You can do more with a single line of dBase/Clipper/FoxPro than you can with a page and a half of SQL statements. Try searching by last name + date of birth on a 200,000 element census database in under 2 seconds with an enormous, clumsy XML file and see how far you get. A pox on XML... long live Wayne Ratliff.
Another option to consider is to buy a conventional Diesel engine car/truck/whatever, and brew your own clean diesel fuel from used vegetable oil - imagine stopping at McDonald's on a cross-country trip, not to eat a greaseburger but to refuel from their discarded fryer vat waste.
See biodiesel.org and veggievan.com for info on biodiesel in general, or to make your own biodiesel at home. Also see Josh Tickell's book "From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank" for detailed instructions on becoming your own fuel supply without making any changes to your engine.
Better still, a knowledgable mechanic can modify a standard Diesel engine so that it runs on straight vegetable oil, no chemistry required, just as Rudolf Diesel intended his creation to work.
By the way, those of you living here in the specacular Rocky Mountain region might want to drop in at the Sustainable Living Fair in Ft. Collins, CO this weekend (09/12-09/13). Josh Tickell will be there to give hands-on demonstrations of making biodiesel; you can also see cars and vans that run on hydrogen in the form of compressed gas cylinders and fuel cells.
Back in '92 when I managed our small LANTASTIC network of 9 or 10 PCs, we had a problem of the server powering off at random intervals. I went out to inspect the server, which was underneath a low table on which the fax machine sat, just in time to see someone kneel at the fax machine... in just such a way that her knee hit the power switch on the front of the server.
This was a small office on a low budget; the server shared a circuit with the fax machine and front desk appliances. I also found out what else shared that circuit in December when half the building went dark several times while I was trying to run a time-consuming data repair. It turned out the Christmas tree was plugged into the same circuit, and after an hour or so of the lights flashing off and on the breaker switch kept turning that side of the building off.
When I'm doing computer geek stuff for friends and family, I don't even try getting into gigahertz and dot pitch; I have enough trouble getting them to grok "memory" and "disk space". How many of us have had conversations like this:
"Apart from the fact that you're running Windows, your computer keeps crashing because you don't have enough memory."
"But I deleted a bunch of programs today, and that didn't help."
"No, that's disk space; you'll never in your life use up the 120 gig the salesman told you that you needed. I'm talking about memory... how much room the computer has to do its thinking."
"Huh?"
I was in Houston several weeks ago visiting my mother, and her computer was sluggish due to the fact that she got it secondhand from a niece who had a bunch of [Windows] programs set to start up automatically and download the latest screen saver images from the web. Mom, not being connected, only saw the computer spend all its resources attempting a download it couldn't get to. So they brought in a homeless friend - I'm not kidding - who authoritatively decreed that the problem was there were too many "cookies", and deleting the cookies would fix the problem. She then proceeded to delete half the files out of C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM, apparently at random. I told my mother not to let this woman near her computer again, and I'm sure they think it's just because of my big ego that I don't like someone else doing my job.
Back in the Watergate era I heard the funniest PSA that I have ever seen in my life. It was set up just like the televised hearings that were going on at the time, and a prosecutor was droning on in a perfect imitation of Sam Ervin. He was beating up on a witness on the stands, and at first I thought it really was a continuation of those interminable hearings:
"Do you mean to tell me, suh, that you freely give out any kind of information to anyone who calls on the telephone, without any form of security or credentials?"
"Yes sir, we do."
"Does this oahganization of yoahs have a name, suh?"
Slashdot Mirror
The worst ones way out west here are the "American Deputy Sheriff's Association" which claims that the deputies have to buy their own body armor and that the department does not pay for funerals of deputies killed in the line of duty. Both claims are totally bogus; the money received is used to line the pockets of the guys who run the association and they have been shut down by several states, only to reopen under a new name later.
I emailed my local sheriff's department after receiving such a call, and they said in no uncertain terms that I should not believe the marketers or contribute to them; a few days later an article came out in the paper pretty much repeating the text of the sheriff's email.
Don't forget the US is also ahead of Brazil in coffee - after all, we invented Java!
I'm with you on this one. I have been a database applications developer for 18 years, and XML is the pits. Why does the industry hate the ISAM format so much? You can do more with a single line of dBase/Clipper/FoxPro than you can with a page and a half of SQL statements. Try searching by last name + date of birth on a 200,000 element census database in under 2 seconds with an enormous, clumsy XML file and see how far you get. A pox on XML... long live Wayne Ratliff.
See biodiesel.org and veggievan.com for info on biodiesel in general, or to make your own biodiesel at home. Also see Josh Tickell's book "From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank" for detailed instructions on becoming your own fuel supply without making any changes to your engine.
Better still, a knowledgable mechanic can modify a standard Diesel engine so that it runs on straight vegetable oil, no chemistry required, just as Rudolf Diesel intended his creation to work.
By the way, those of you living here in the specacular Rocky Mountain region might want to drop in at the Sustainable Living Fair in Ft. Collins, CO this weekend (09/12-09/13). Josh Tickell will be there to give hands-on demonstrations of making biodiesel; you can also see cars and vans that run on hydrogen in the form of compressed gas cylinders and fuel cells.
This was a small office on a low budget; the server shared a circuit with the fax machine and front desk appliances. I also found out what else shared that circuit in December when half the building went dark several times while I was trying to run a time-consuming data repair. It turned out the Christmas tree was plugged into the same circuit, and after an hour or so of the lights flashing off and on the breaker switch kept turning that side of the building off.
Brew your own custom flavor!
Is it just me, or is this discussion starting to sound like a scene out of Being There? "In the spring, there will be new growth...."
"Apart from the fact that you're running Windows, your computer keeps crashing because you don't have enough memory."
"But I deleted a bunch of programs today, and that didn't help."
"No, that's disk space; you'll never in your life use up the 120 gig the salesman told you that you needed. I'm talking about memory... how much room the computer has to do its thinking."
"Huh?"
I was in Houston several weeks ago visiting my mother, and her computer was sluggish due to the fact that she got it secondhand from a niece who had a bunch of [Windows] programs set to start up automatically and download the latest screen saver images from the web. Mom, not being connected, only saw the computer spend all its resources attempting a download it couldn't get to. So they brought in a homeless friend - I'm not kidding - who authoritatively decreed that the problem was there were too many "cookies", and deleting the cookies would fix the problem. She then proceeded to delete half the files out of C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM, apparently at random. I told my mother not to let this woman near her computer again, and I'm sure they think it's just because of my big ego that I don't like someone else doing my job.
Back in the Watergate era I heard the funniest PSA that I have ever seen in my life. It was set up just like the televised hearings that were going on at the time, and a prosecutor was droning on in a perfect imitation of Sam Ervin. He was beating up on a witness on the stands, and at first I thought it really was a continuation of those interminable hearings:
"Do you mean to tell me, suh, that you freely give out any kind of information to anyone who calls on the telephone, without any form of security or credentials?"
"Yes sir, we do."
"Does this oahganization of yoahs have a name, suh?"
"Yes sir, it is the Houston Public Library."