Wanted to give a little link lovin’ to the folks at Global Atheist. It’s an aggregate blog that pulls in feeds from a number of different sites including SEB, which came as a bit of a surprise considering we’re not a purely atheist in our subject matter. Still I noticed them showing up in SEB’s referrer logs and thought I should send some traffic their way. Go check it out and see what you think.

I got up early on Saturday to attend the Podcamp Michigan event I mentioned previously and was pleasantly surprised to have my daughter come along for the ride. She’s not an early riser at all so I didn’t think she’d be too keen on getting up at 7AM on a Saturday when she could be sleeping in, but she dragged herself out of bed, got a quick shower, and then the two of us were off into the early morning sun.

We ended up only attending the first half of the day because most of the topics were for people who already knew what the hell they were doing podcasting-wise and were looking to take it to the next level. The first speaker, for example, talked about how good photography could really help a podcast or even just plain old blogging. The next fellow talked about how we all have a Personal Brand and why cultivating that brand was important. The third person talked about how the most important thing you need for your podcast wasn’t the hardware, but content, content, content.

All of that was interesting enough, but I already knew most of it. I don’t use a lot of photographs on SEB, but I try to make sure I use good ones for the sidebar and the occasional entry. I’m aware that I have a personal brand and it’s thoroughly tied to SEB now, for better or for worse. As for content, while I’m not entirely sure what I’ll podcast about, it’s not like I haven’t had seven years of experience finding something to shoot my mouth off about on the blog so I’m not too worried that I’ll come up with something half-way interesting to podcast about. Which isn’t to say that the talks weren’t informative and interesting, but that they were aimed at folks who had already figured the other stuff out.

What I needed to know was all the basic stuff about doing it with regards to: What’s a good headset that won’t set me back an arm and a leg? Should I even use a headset? Should I host it myself—and thusly drive up my monthly bandwidth usage—or is there a fantastic and inexpensive service provider out there that I should look into? Do I just use Audacity and do it solo, say 20 minutes of me spouting off on something, or would it be more interesting to try and get someone else to jabber at and use something like TalkShoe so I could have folks call in? Would Skypecasting be better? All of that sort of general this-is-how-you-should-get-started crap is what I needed to know. That didn’t look like it was going to be talked about much so we called it a day once lunch time hit.

But before we left I managed to sit down with another Les—that would be Les Zaldor of Zaldor’s World—who’s already been podcasting for some time now. I also got to meet BLUEeyedBanshee who has been an off-and-on SEB regular from way back. I’ve “known” both of them for years and it was pretty cool to finally get a chance to see them in person. We didn’t have a lot of time, they had to rush off to grab some lunch and get back for the second half of the day, but we got a few minutes to chat. Les showed me a wicked cool digital audio recorder he carries with him that looks like a small version of the sort of mic you’d expect to see on a talk show host’s desk and he used it to have me record a promo for his podcast. The kind of thing radio stations are always getting famous musicians to do except I’m not as famous or as well rehearsed as they are. Fortunately I remembered to bring my camera with me so the historic meeting could be immortalized in a pic:

As you can clearly see I am nowhere near as scary in real life as I seem to be on my blog. Les doesn’t look at all concerned for his well being and I have a big friendly smile on my face. I’m a nice guy. Really!

I’ve had a Flickr account for ages, at least a few years now, and I’ve never done a damned thing with it. I don’t remember why I signed up, but I did. Remembering recently that there was the ability to create groups at Flickr I opted to start one up devoted to Stupid Evil Bastard and you’ll find it here. If you have a Flickr account you can join the pool and submit your own photos and leave comments.

My primary reason for doing this was to provide a spot for people to upload photos they wanted to be able to post to the comments here at SEB so we’re not hotlinking to some other poor schlep’s blog or otherwise stealing bandwidth. I suppose we can also just use it for photos and crap that people think would be of interest to readers of SEB. They could relate to a topic we’re discussing or just be cool photos you’ve taken. Consider the fact that the group is open to anyone to see when uploading pics to it. Other than that, have at it.

Live in Michigan? Want a chance to meet me as well as learn a lot about podcasting? Then make plans to be at Podcamp Michigan this Saturday.

It’s free and hopefully will give me an idea of how to go about setting up an SEB Podcast. In addition to the amazingly underwhelming experience of meeting yours truly and discovering that I’m nowhere near as scary in person as I appear to be on my blog, you’ll also get the chance to meet another “Les” in the form of Les Zaldor of the Zaldor’s World podcast who knows more about music than I ever will.

That’s an opportunity to meet two Les’s for the price of FREE! Plus, you know, all that podcasting stuff.

... I make it through my entire round of Daily Reads and don’t find a damned thing to blog about. There were a few possibilities here and there, but nothing that reached out and grabbed me by the testicles and screamed I write something about it.

So you get this instead. A lame entry about how I can’t find anything I want to blog about. I’m literally blogging about my inability to blog. There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’m too lame to find it.

Anyway, perhaps I’ll remember something I forgot I was going to remember to say until I forgot it a little later and then I’ll blog about how I forgot to remember it.

I’ve updated my picture in the sidebar to something a little more autumn-ish as well as current (some of the other pics of me were a couple of years old) and I’ll be leaving the color scheme as it currently is as some folks seem to like it.

That pic was taken just this morning right outside our townhouse with the sun behind me which explains why my eyes are so puffy. It was a comfortably cool morning for early November. Fresh with the promise of a new day after an election that made history. As you can see I took the shears to my head last night before bed though I didn’t bother to apply a razor as I was already tired. The hair is about as close to the skin as you can get it with standard shears. I had an alternate pic with more of a smile and a bit of the sun flaring around the side of my head, but I wasn’t sure it was as good of a pic as this one. Maybe I’ll post it later if anyone’s curious.

On a totally unrelated note, but something I’ve been meaning to mention for awhile now, what the hell is going on with gasoline prices? Last Friday I filled up the tank at a station selling gas for only $2.09 a gallon! Checking MSN Autos’ Gas Price Finder there’s at least one station in my area selling gas today for $1.99 and the average price has dropped to $2.05! I can only figure the switch from the summer formula to the winter mix must be part of it, but that’s an amazing drop in price. Thanks to living so close to work and school I’m only filling up once every other week these days, but I’ll take the lower gas prices just the same.

My one concern is that some folks will take this as a sign that they can go back to buying big gas guzzlers as the “crisis” is over. It appears, though, that the shitty economy is keeping people from buying cars at all. GM’s sales in October plunged 45%, Chrysler down by 35%, and Ford was down 30%. Even Toyota saw sales fall by 23%. None of which is good news for Michigan. Hopefully when things improve enough for sales to pick up folks will make wiser car buying decisions and not rush back to the huge vehicles because gas is cheap.

So says the GenderAnalyzer which attempts to guess the gender of a blog author by the content of the page. I put in SEB thinking that with all the foul language I tend to use it’ll guess I’m a man easily. Nope, it guessed SEB is written by a woman.

Not sure how it goes about formulating its guess, but it didn’t take more than a moment to come back with a response so whatever it does has to be pretty basic. It’s true that my first full name is commonly associated with the female gender, but I don’t use it on my site so that can’t be it.

To its credit, it correctly guess that my mother’s blog was written by a woman and ***Dave Does the Blog is written by a man, but it thinks my dad’s blog was also written by a woman.

Thought I’d give a shout out to Stormin’ Norman and his blog Alligators in the Sewer as he’s become a regular around here and is hoping folks might find his own creative endeavors entertaining. I’ve had a little look see myself and I’m highly amused. If you’ve found Stormin’s comments here at SEB of interest then give his blog a shot and see what you think. Unlike most of what I post, the majority of Stormin’s content appears to be original material or at least plagiarized in such a way as to hide the fact from casual observation. Either way it makes for a refreshing change of pace.

So drop on by and tell him the Bastard sent you. I’m sure he’d appreciate the attention.

Are there any other Austin-area readers who want to meet at the Texas Freethought Convention on 10/26? Weather permitting, I’ll wear my SEB T-shirt.

Disclaimer: I’m not involved with the event or organizers in any way, shape, or form except for planning to attend.

SEB lurker Melanie wrote in asking what the hell happened to the SEB Podcast I mentioned I was going to do. It’s still something I want to do and am learning about, but we’ve had a small problem: I broke my headset I was going to use to record it.

When we made the move to our new home I somehow lost one of the feet on my computer case and so it’s been sitting in a pathetically lopsided manned ever since. A few days ago I took my headset off and set it on top of the computer case to get up and get a drink. As I got up my knee bumped the case and knocked it over with the headset sliding off first onto the floor and the computer crashing down on top of it. I wouldn’t have thought that would be enough to do any damage, but it was. The right speaker was snapped off and dangling from its wire.

Now I need to find myself another decent headset to use for the podcast and PC gaming. The last one was a Plantronics set that seemed to work pretty well so I’m thinking of trying the GameComPro1 PC Gaming Headsetfrom Plantronics as it looks a little beefer than the set I had previously and has gotten pretty good reviews. The problem, again, is that money is tight right now so it’ll be awhile before I can pick these bad boys up.

So, yes, I do still plan on trying to do a podcast once I figure out what I’m going to do it on, who I’m going to do it with and, most importantly, have a decent headset to do it with.

Here’s a list of the top 10 search terms that brought people to SEB in last month:

1. disney dive in underwear
2. stupid evil bastard
3. horus jesus
4. horus and jesus
5. sims 2 sex
6. americans are stupid
7. producttestpanel.com
8. stupidevilbastard
9. xorg driver s3 savage
10. angels trumpet

Some of those threads are surprisingly old and yet they continue to draw visitors, particularly the Jesus/Horus thread. This is interesting when we compare it to the top 10 search terms for the past year (I’ve only been using Google Analytics for the past year) which gives the following 10:

1. stupid evil bastard
2. chuck missler
3. horus jesus
4. sims 2 sex
5. producttestpanel.com
6. tony sinclair
7. stupidevilbastard
8. producttestpanel
9. hacker names
10. angels trumpet

I have no idea what this means, but it’s interesting to look at.

At least according to Wikipedia as they’ve decided to nuke SEB’s entry:

This is an article about a personal blog that does not make any claim of importance. It was marked as such for speedy deletion, and I deleted it. An established editor has objected, so with such divergent perceptions of the article, I have decided to take it here instead.—Ed (Edgar181) 11:46, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

• Delete . Fails NOTABILITY. Kittybrewster 12:18, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
• Delete Does not qualify or clear WP:NOTABILITY. Kalivd (talk) 13:32, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
• Delete Obvious problems with WP:NOTABILITY, and I would question if it passes WP:WEB. Ecoleetage (talk) 13:45, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
• Delete per concerns above.—Boffob (talk) 18:05, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
• Delete Personal blog that does not show any significance, possibly a vanity article Scapler (talk) 01:36, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
• Delete non-notable blog. JuJube (talk) 07:49, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Not that I’m all that upset about it. I was surprised someone created a Wikipedia entry for SEB to begin with (it wasn’t my doing). If nothing else it’s been educational as this reveals that there’s some pretty hefty guidelines on what should be considered worth including in Wikipedia as per their notability guidelines. If I’m not notable enough for Wikipedia’s standards then so be it.

I wasn’t as excited about being in Wikipedia as I was about finding out I was in IMDB anyway.

If you’ve ever wondered where I get my ability to tear people a new asshole when I’m worked up, well, I get it from my mother. She doesn’t normally do political posts on her blog, but she got worked up enough today to let loose with both barrels:

I am so tired of hearing ‘what is wrong with my opponent and the opposite party’.  I want to hear that the leaders of this country are aware that people are losing their homes, that not every citizen was able to get a degree in a job that is left in this country, That milk cost as much as gasoline, that people are getting sicker and even dying due to lack of descent health care.  I have sat through let us make fuel out of corn and then hearing that converting it is expensive.  Not to mention what do we eat when this is an accepted method for fuel.  How long will crops like beans, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. be grown when corn is the ‘cash crop’?

When do we stop hearing about the noise the wind generators make and the dangers they may present when we need all the alternative energy sources we can find.  What happened to using flowing water to generate electricity.  Surely every river, stream, or source of water has not dried up in this nation.

We seem to be the target of ‘make them run scared and you can lead them like sheep’.  Well I’m not a sheep!  I want my right to privacy, my right to make a living and pay my bills, to raise my children to respect other people rights and property.  To lead this country you have to have people who will take a chance, change an accepted way, yet still look back on the ideas that built this country. 

That’s my mom and I couldn’t be prouder.

I said before that I don’t really understand the economics of the financial crisis the country is currently in the midst of, but Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station sets me straight:

Hubris, the belief that great men dare greatly, and that should disaster fall, those great men should be rescued at the expense of others, set back on their feet, and allowed to try again.

And Hubris, my friends, is exactly what brings us to the current disaster unfolding in the United States financial sector today.

Just like with the Titanic, prideful greedy men set on us a course for disaster. Those captains of Wall Street, in their pride and arrogance, deliberately ignored the lessons of history, 1929, the S&L crash of the 70’s, the Dot Com bust of the 90’s, and all the rest of it. They ordered the boilers lit and the throttles pushed hard to the stops, in order to line their own pockets and to advance their own hubris, and they took all of us down here in steerage along for the ride.

And when we slammed head on at full speed into the iceberg, those arrogant bastards were the first ones to the lifeboats, - or the golden parachutes, choose your own analogy here - demanding safe passage from the crew, or in this case, the government, as they believe is their right.

And, just exactly like the pride of White Star Lines, there’s not enough lifeboats to go around, and a lot of us are going to be left to sink or swim in the icy wine dark water.

OK, I’ve pushed the Titanic analogy to the breaking point - but the comparison is apt.

Now that’s terms I can wrap my head around. Jim goes on to explain the why of why we need to bail out Wall Street even though it would be more satisfying to let it crash and burn. Jim doesn’t have a lot of solutions, but then, like me, he’s not an economics expert. He does have an excellent grasp of the situation and why it’s a problem and why we need to do something about it and how anything we do is going to be far from a perfect solution. All of which helps me to put it into sharper perspective myself. It’s a good read. I’ll be adding Jim to my blogroll.

The guys at Hop Studios have just released version 1.0 of their Defensio Combo module for EE. We’ve been testing it for awhile here at SEB and I’m happy to say that I like it better than Akismet. It makes use of the Defensio Anti-Spam service which not only learns from spam and flags it for moderation when it suspects a comment fits the bill, but also keeps track of how well it’s doing on your site and provides you with RSS feeds for tracking moderated comments.

It works more or less similarly to Akismet, but it gives a bit more control over how things are handled and a bit more feedback on how it’s doing. The guys at Hop Studios have been very enthusiastic about the development of this module and are looking to add even more features in the future (I’ve recommended an option that ignores comments from registered members). The module is free for use by anyone running EE 1.6.x so if you’re curious to see what it’s like then go download it and give it a whirl.