Lewies Blog

I’m getting to a point where I am at a loss for grabbing more traffic. I’m already using all of the blog traffic exchanges that I know of (Blog Clicker, Blog Crowd, Blog Explosion, Blog Traffic, BlogAzoo). That is where most of my visitors come from. I’m also listed on a ton of directories.

I try and comment on many blogs that I read along with leaving my Url. The problem is - those blogs are usually on the same traffic exchanges as I am listed on. I need to find blogs that are outside of my scope.

One thing that I find helpful is searching just about any term on google with the word “Blog” usually returns blogs that I haven’t seen before. I also link to those blogs that I found sometimes. The fact that I link to these guys gives them reason enough to come back and leave a comment.

If you have an idea for how to get new visitors, I’d love to hear about it.

Ever since I got one referral away from getting my free iPod, I’ve been hooked looking at my statistics and checking out my status more then once a day. I used to check it out about once a week. I think I have an addiction or something.

Sooner or later, you’ll find me standing in front of a small group of people admitting that I’m a statistihaulic. I’ll get a sponsor and go through a 12 step program. Either that, or someone will actually sign up for the thing and I can get past this phase.

Blogging has brought so many vices into my life. On another note, Why does my spell checker want to correct blogging into flogging? This thing is for a blog. It should have blogging terms in the dictionary.

With the kids visiting today, I didn’t get much time to work on my little Gravatar Program as I had wanted. My project is actually separated into two projects. The front-end contains the interface to the back end. The back end is the brains of what actually happens, and the front end controls what you can do and see.

The problem that I have been working on is that the front end contains some stuff that should be in the back. It’s a little too smart. I would like to be able to use this same functionality within an ASP.Net website, so the front end would be totally out of the picture. Did I lose you?

On a side note, I started working with delegated events for the back to communicate to the front about its progress. I created a small progress form as well. Have a look:

The kids will go home tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll be able to finish this up and get the program to run from the command line without showing itself. I really want my task manager to run this thing for me automagically soon. Also I would like to start digging into making this compatible with haloscan free accounts.

Sorry about the vinegar folks, but I’m having a really lousy day and this is the only way I can get it out without destroying something or making the situation bad around the kids. I’ll warn you now - Don’t read this post.

My mother in-law came over with the kids today and started handing out Ostara gifts to every one. I got a solid chocolate bunny. She is going to cook a nice healthy meal for us all too. It’s nice to have someone go through all of that.

My sister in-law cooked us a nice meal last night but served it with vinegar. You see, last night was Sci-Fi night. I watch Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and then Battlestar Galactica. Last night and next Friday are the season finally.

In the middle of Stargate Atlantis, she comes to me and says we need 3 pounds of butter in a tub, 2 pounds of stick butter, and a gallon of milk. I asked if it was needed now and she got upset. I walked out the door and picked up the stuff at the store.

I come back and set everything on the table and plan on putting it away during the next commercial. She comes up and is upset and puts it all away. She also cleans up the table and puts the meal that she cooked in the fridge and complains that I’m not eating.

Commercial comes on, I get my food, and then sit back down. It turns out she didn’t need the butter and milk anyway. I’ve just been getting really pissed about her mood jumping on everyone lately. She started jumping on me this morning for not saying “Thank You” when she does something. I don’t like vinegar in the morning especially when I’m about to do her a favor and bring her kid over to visit her.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I did say thank you for several things this week. I’m not going to go around and keep a tally on what I did and did not say thank you to. I already give her an allowance for cleaning up around here. I don’t charge for rent. I don’t charge for food. I lend her money for so many things that never get paid back (bus, medical, lawyer, fines, etc.). I don’t get a “Thank You” for bringing my niece to visit. I don’t get a “Thank You” for paying the bills.

I feel that she has no rite to get upset over such petty things. She has been leaching off of my wife and I for a place to stay. Now, she has somehow convinced my wife that she deserves $50 every two weeks for cleaning up around the house. She doesn’t have a job and gets upset every time I start suggesting it. She’s had a job in the past, but she always got sick just about every day that a few of her co-workers kept asking me what is wrong with her. At the moment, her current excuse is a lack of a car and drivers license. Don’t get me started on the drivers license thing. That is a bag of snakes in itself.

I must be getting famous or something. (Yea, I’ll just keep telling myself that.) I was looking at the links to my blog through Technorati and found that this fellow had linked to me on. I read through his blog and didn’t understand a word of it. This is what he wrote about me. Translations anyone?

Gero blogo pavyzdys

Tiesiog pavydas ima, matant, kaip kai kas sugeba (ir turi laiko) taip bloginti: Lewies Blogs

He appears to be a .Net programmer. My best guess is that this is Portuguese. Googles translator doesn’t make much sense of it though:

I generate blogo pavyzdys

Tiesiog pavydas ima, matant, kaip kai kas sugeba (to go turi laiko) taip bloginti: Lewies Blogs

Update

It appears that Vincas Stepankevicius (who is the blog author) has commented with the translation. I made some small edits (grammar, punctuation, etc.) here and there, but this is basically what he said:

Hi Lewie,

Yes, you are right. I just said that your blog is a perfect example of how a good blog may look if his owner has enough talent (& time). You are one of the best bloggers that I’ve seen, indeed!

I’m from Lithuania. It is time to say that there is a small play on words in the title of my message. The word “blog” in Lithuanian means “bad“. So in English, it must sound like
An example of a good bad
.

The text follows:

I’m just jealous seeing how some guys are talented (and have time) in blogging.

My respect,
Vincas Stepankevicius,
LithuaniaThanks for the translation and praise Vincas.

In a few months, I will hit the big three-oh. I was visiting the ~ Goddess in Training ~ blog and found a quiz that she took to determine how old she is on the inside.

I went ahead and took it as well. It said that I am 22 years old. Man, I wish I had that time back again. To be 22 again … I could avoid going through a few stages of my life that were not so grand. At least my real age and my hearts age were in the same range.

I didn’t see this one coming. Google is now showing off its source code to the public over at Google Code. So far they have four projects that they are starting with. The Core Dumper looks pretty useful.

Core Dumper

The coredumper library can be compiled into applications to create core dumps of the running program, without termination. It supports both single- and multi-threaded core dumps, even if the kernel doesn’t natively support for multi-threaded core files.

Sparse Hashtable

This project contains several hash-map implementations in use at Google, similar in API to SGI’s hash_map class, but with different performance characteristics, including an implementation that optimizes for space and one that optimizes for speed.

Goopy/Functional

Goopy Functional is a python library that brings functional programming aspects to python.

Perftools

These tools are for use by developers so that they can create more robust applications. Especially of use to those developing multi-threaded applications in C++ with templates. Includes TCMalloc, heap-checker, heap-profiler and cpu-profiler.

I got one of those papers in the mail from the state saying how much my land and house is worth this year, and shows the value last year. The value of the land and house combined has risen $47K US Dollars in one year.

I am shocked at how high it has risen. I purchased this house three years ago at $156K. It is now just under $250K. The price just sounds so high. Think of it. That is 25% of one million dollars. ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!! I can’t even imagine what it is doing to my taxes.

I lived most of my childhood in an old three story farm house on an acre of land that was worth $100K. Throughout the time that I have lived here, my house has increased by the total value of my parents old home.

I was astonished at the prices of houses when I started looking compared to the value of the house that I grew up in. My brother got his condo at $86K and it is small. My sisters don’t have there own homes yet. So this means I’m the sibling with the most expensive house, and the only sibling who actually has land.

Unfortunately, my house isn’t all that grand. I have a third of an acre that is a pain to mow. The wiring in the house is not all that great for a computer geek/dork/nerd like me either. One day I’ll upgrade to those new fangled 3 prong grounded electrical outlets.

I strangely feel that my wife and I deserve better. I would love to live in those fancy new houses that offer the following:

• Lots of space for sectional living room furniture
• A bay window for the cats to nap in the sun
• Grounded electrical outlets. If I’m lucky, they will all work as well.
• A dependable heating system that I am comfortable with such as a heat-pump
• A house that isn’t a “Fixer-Upper”
• A two-car garage connected to the house
• An attic that is accessible with real steps
• A shack to hold garden supplies and the lawn mower
• A nice wooden deck that isn’t deteriorating
• A back yard that is level and where the trees are a safe distance from the house
• I would love to have a fence that isn’t rusting, bent up, and overgrown with weeds
• A garden that actually gets sunlight.

Unfortunately, those houses are in the $350K - $500K area down here in Woodbridge, VA. Maybe if I wait five years, my house will be worth that much and we can move to one of those fancy houses.

Sometimes I get a kick out of reading Funky Fresh Freddie and his blog, Curse the Conscious. Every now and then he takes pictures of his feet along with his website. Lately, his visitors have been doing it a lot . I figured that I would join in on the fun. Unfortunately, my cell phone isn’t that great for this sort of thing.

I stumbled across this site that lets you Make Stickers. They have a wide range of sticker templates for you to start out with covering political, environmental, current events, Religion, Awards, Sports, etc. You name it, they got it. Ok, they don’t have everything, but they have lots.

If they don’t have what you want, then you also have the option of uploading your own image. They print the images and send them to you on some nice 3 inch x 10 inch adhesive. Just one costs $4.95 (ouch). As with any service, you save when you buy in bulk. You can get them as low as 62 cents if you go for the largest package of 500.

Here are a few funny stickers that I made up.

Bandwidth Conservation - It’s all about the spam.

Now drafting Repulican seniors for the U.S. ARMY

Lewis Moten - Best of Blogs 2005 (Unpaid for by the Moten administration)