Stupid Evil Bastard » Blogging

The long delayed 8th SEB Podcast is now available!

Les — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:39:24 +0000

Blah blah blah...

Yes! As promised, this past weekend saw ***Dave and I sitting down in front of our respective PCs and attempting to pontificate at length on various topics including many that you supplied us with. We talked politics touching on Mitt Romney’s apparent nomination, Paul Ryan’s general obnoxiousness, and David Barton’s twisting of history and how the Founding Fathers were not perfect beings who made no mistakes. We spoke of classical music and our short-lived time as musicians. We chattered on about how much the new movie The Avengers sucks. Endless erections caused by BMW motorcycles. The really bad sci-fi movie The Lawnmower Man. And we round out the conversation with discussing the movie trailers ***Dave saw before his viewing of The Avengers.

In all it’s an hour and 16 minutes of non-stop meandering where we manage to stay on topic… mostly. This is the original unedited recording. I had spent most of last night editing it up a bit, but on reviewing the work this evening I decided I didn’t like it. I wanted it to sound more like two guys having a conversation than a NPR-ish recording and so I decided to abandon the edits and I didn’t even bother trying to find music to put at the beginning. I’m not sure why, but this just felt better to me than all the usual edits and additions I have done in the past.

Plus, it was less work.

You can either listed to the podcast by using the player at the bottom of this entry or you can download it by clicking here so you can put it on your MP3 player of choice or copy it to a CD and then bury it in the backyard. As always, comments/criticisms/compliments/complaints can be left in the comments as you see fit. Once again ***Dave and I had a lot of fun doing this and we hope you’re at least as amused as we were.

Need topics for the missing 8th SEB Podcast!

Les — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:28:04 +0000

Blah blah blah...

Seeing as it’s been several weeks since the original call for topics for the 8^th SEB Podcast it’d probably be a good idea to solicit new ones for it now that ***Dave and I have managed to settle on doing it this Sunday.

So I am once again turning to you, dear readers, for your suggestions/questions/topics that you’d like to hear two middle-aged white guys pontificate about at length. We’ll chatter on about nearly anything regardless of how qualified or (more likely) not we are to say anything cogent about it.

Opinions are like assholes and we have a lot of them… wait… that doesn’t sound quite right.

Anyway, you can either leave your suggestions in the comments on this thread or email them to me by clicking here. We’ll be recording the podcast this Sunday! For reals this time! Most likely.

So whatever happened to the last SEB Podcast?

Les — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:42:39 +0000

Blah blah blah...

You may recall that a few weeks ago I announced that ***Dave and I would be doing another SEB Podcast. You may also be wondering why it has never shown up on SEB. The answer is life. Life is why it hasn’t happened.

See, ***Dave found out he was going to be busy the weekend were originally planned to do it so we delayed it by a week. When then next planned date arrived I woke with one helluva migraine and forgot all about doing the podcast while I laid around and tried very hard to dull the pain. After that ***Dave was out of town for a couple of weekends and after that we both just kinda forgot about it. Plus ***Dave has been sick recently so I decided not to bug him about it.

We had every intention of doing it, but life got in the way. We’ll eventually get around to it at some point I’m sure, but I thought I should mention why it is AWOL. That and someone actually wrote me an email asking about it.

SEB should be a little easier to read on mobile devices now.

Les — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:20:36 +0000

If you’ve tried to access SEB on your smartphone you may have noticed that it’s not exactly easy to see much of anything. So to make things a bit more legible I have installed WPTouch which reformats the output when it detects you’re using a smartphone or other mobile device. I had the plugin installed previously, but somewhere along the way I took it out for reasons I don’t recall. Now it’s back so you can once again read SEB without going blind.

I didn’t have a smartphone to test it with last time I had it installed, but I do now and the difference is quite dramatic. Alas it does drop the template we use, but you don’t come here for how pretty the site is. You come here to see me say things out loud that most folks would be too polite to dream of saying. Not only is the site readable, but it even improves the ability to leave comments on an entry if you are an avid thumb typist. No idea if it changes things on tablets, which are arguably better suited to display the site the way it actually looks, so if you have a tablet and visit SEB let us know in the comments.

It’s time for yet another Stupid Evil Podcast.

Les — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:49:35 +0000

Blah blah blah...

It’s been a few of months since the last time ***Dave and I got together and rambled on semi-coherently and so that itch is looking to be scratched once again. And, as always, we’re asking you to provide us with any topics you’d like to hear us pontificate on.

Got a burning question on religion, politics, life, the universe, and/or everything you would love to hear us talk about? Leave a comment here or drop me an email with what it is. It can be almost anything as there are few things we’re not ready to chat about even if we’re completely unqualified to offer any opinions on it. That makes us just as fine of pundits as any of the talking heads on FOX News.

So loosen up those typing muscles and start tapping out your suggestions/questions and we’ll work on staying off tangents (yeah, right) and then ***Dave and I will sit down and record it all for posterity (you’re welcome future generations to come) this Sunday.

I’ll be turning off the importing of Google+ posts.

Les — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:51:00 +0000

It seems the inclusion of items I’ve shared through Google+ is confusing the hell out of a few people and I’ve had multiple complaints saying that folks don’t want to sign up for Google+ in order to read my posts. Ignoring the fact that there’s no need to sign up with Google+ to read anything I post publicly there or here, the extra but shortened content seems to be more problematic than useful for a lot of folks.

So I’ll shut off the importation plugin and go back to my usual much longer, but less frequent postings. The plugin(s) I was using for this process were a bit wonky anyway so it’ll be much less of a hassle for me. Perhaps this’ll motivate me to put more effort into posting by hand more often. Or at least I won’t have to keep repeating the same explanation to people.

Testing out Google+ Importer.

Les — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:58:50 +0000

You may recall that for awhile I was running the Google+Blog plugin right up until it stopped working. Which is odd, because it’s been working just fine for ***Dave on his site. I wasn’t entirely happy with how it formatted things, but I do share a lot of things from Google Reader which end up on Google+ which would be nice to have imported into SEB for a little extra content here. It’s mainly stuff that I don’t have enough to say about for a full-blown blogpost, but which I thought would be worth sharing with folks. So when Google+Blog stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why, well, I was a tad disappointed. Especially seeing as I’d paid a few bucks for it.

Today, out of curiosity, I did a Google+ search on the WordPress plugins database and discovered that there were a couple of other options for doing the same thing. One of those is the Google+ Importer plugin which seems to have most of the same feature set as Google+Blog, but actually works on SEB. It also seems to do a little better with the formatting. The one thing it doesn’t do, which the previous plugin did, is import comments from Google+. That’d be nice, but I’m less concerned with that than I am with just getting the content over here.

What does this mean for you? More new content more often on SEB. You won’t need a Google+ account to see any of it and I can selectively control what comes over by use of a simple hashtag.

SEB is now running on WordPress 3.3.

Les — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:44:53 +0000

Most of the changes are on the back end so it should be largely transparent, but if you notice anything wonky or not working properly then drop me an email and let me know.

Today Stupid Evil Bastard celebrates its 10th Blogiversary!

Les — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:01:33 +0000

It’s true. On this date ten years ago at exactly 7:27PM EST I wrote the very first entry on what would end up becoming Stupid Evil Bastard. It wasn’t called that at the time and the first entry wasn’t particularly special. It was also the only entry I wrote until the next month, mainly because I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with it. The first real comment happened on January 2nd, 2002 on my Crimes and Misdemeanors entry, which was also the first really lengthy entry I ever wrote. I don’t know who “Joe” was or if he kept reading beyond that one comment, but it was a milestone just the same. You can see a little of what the site used to look like way back then via the Internet Archive. The first page was indexed on October 4th, 2002 and the template for the site had changed several time prior to that. The next major template was recorded on January 26th, 2003. You can poke through the archive there if you want to see other layouts. Since that first comment to today we’ve racked up some 7,201 posts with 84,424 comments. Not the most prolific blogger out there, but not bad for someone who’s attention span often doesn’t exceed 20 minutes.

This blog started after the events of 9/11 and more than a few entries are devoted to that topic and our national response to it. If you were around on the 18th of January in 2005 then you know that was the start of the first real period of unemployment I had ever experienced after working as a contractor for 4 years at Ford Motor Company. It would be 10 months before I’d find work again and another 10 months later I’d head back to Ford for the shortest contract of my career — a whole two and a half months before being laid off again. You might have been around when I talked about the death of one of my cousins that brought home the problem of so many folks without health insurance. Or perhaps you watched as I raged over the death of one of my best friends. So many things have happened which I somehow took the time to document here such as when my daughter decided it was time to move out. Hell, I even managed to finally get around to doing podcasts like I’d been meaning to do for, quite literally, years.

I had more to say, but I lost most of it thanks to one of the cats helpfully stepping on my computer’s power button and shutting down my system in the middle of writing this. But you can always hit the archives if you’re curious as to what other stuff I’ve written about in the past. Most of it is pretty mundane, but there’s some major stuff in there. Some of you folks have been following me for a very long time and I am both grateful and humbled by that fact. Many of you have helped me and my family get through the tough periods and many of you just dropped me a note from time to time to let me know you appreciated my attempts at literacy. My thanks to all of you who have stopped by to see what I’ve been up to over the years. You’ve made the past 10 years worth every keyboard stroke.

Testing out the WordPress Android app.

Les — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:18:27 +0000

Don’t think I’d want to do a huge blog post using this, but it works for short entries with cat pics.

Stupid Evil Bastard » Blogging

The long delayed 8th SEB Podcast is now available!

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Need topics for the missing 8th SEB Podcast!

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So whatever happened to the last SEB Podcast?

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SEB should be a little easier to read on mobile devices now.

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It’s time for yet another Stupid Evil Podcast.

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I’ll be turning off the importing of Google+ posts.

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Testing out Google+ Importer.

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Testing out the WordPress Android app.

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