Chris Meller

Blah. I’m finding it harder and harder to come up with unique intros into my blog entries. I’ve finally started to notice that virtually every entry I’ve ever written has started with something to the effect of “I realized today that” or “I was doing blah today, when” or “It occurred to me today that”. I’m sick of it, as I am sure you guys are as well. If you’ve got suggestions for how I could start off my blog entries from now on, please, leave me a comment (or 12). I was thinking maybe random words… Blah is, of course, a tradition…

But I ramble on about the things I don’t really intend to talk about. I’m sure you’ve probably heard me mention Wil Wheaton before, most likely about how I actually cried while reading his blog entry about his cat dying. In any case, I was reading one of his new entries today. One of the most significant things I got out of his post, was this simple quote:

“… and that’s when I realized that I was really a writer: the day I started treating every experience I had as an opportunity to get a good story …”

Now, I really don’t consider myself a writer (and probably with good reason, I know). I did, however, feel a certain level of understanding when I read this statement. As most of you probably noticed if you’ve been reading my blog from the beginning, or if you went back and checked out the archives at any point, a large portion of the entries are just general ramblings about my day (like the first two whole months worth). I start at the beginning about when I got to work, and slowly make my way through the rest of the day, outlining everything that happened. Not only was this terribly boring for you guys, but it wasn’t the most exciting to sit down and write out every day.

When I started blogging back in September, it was mainly just to write up a few of my more popular stories or rants so that I could stop telling them over and over on IRC as different people showed up. At the beginning of the year, when I decided I needed to make updates more frequently, I was at a bit of a loss for topics to write about. I realized that quality was much more important than quantity, but at the time I really had neither, so I decided the best way to get started was by forcing myself to write for 30 minutes a day. I knew several people who did this in their journal or diary-type thing, and so I took a stab at it in online form.

Over the past 3 months (wow, can you believe I’ve been writing that long now?), I’ve slowly become what I hope is a better writer. It’s been quite a while now since I wrote an entry that just outlined my day, and I’ve been intentionally preventing myself from doing so, even if it means I just don’t get anything new posted for a couple of days. Instead, I’ve found that it’s become easier and easier for me to pick out something of at least minor significance and write a sizeable blog entry about the topic.

As Wil said in his quote, so many things change when you suddenly start analyzing every situation, picking it apart trying to pick up a story from all the different angles at work. As he goes on to say in his blog, he actually had difficult at a recent audition keeping his mind on his part. Instead of focusing on the performance he needed to give, he was too busy soaking up all the details of the encounter. From the physical aspects and description of the room itself and the comfortable feeling it inspired, right down to the emotions involved in acting on a stage.

This is the “curse” that I’ve somewhat begun to get aquatinted with. While I doubt that I’m anywhere near Wil’s level (I don’t see any book publishing opportunities coming up in the near future), I think that by blogging on a regular basis and forcing myself to think more clearly about some of the less noticeable aspects of my life, as well as by reading the blogs of others and experiencing those aspects second hand, I have and can help myself become more overall observant and in-tune with my environment. At the same time, these added senses of sensitivity can help increase my writing skill if by only giving me more material to work from.

…All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts…

As per usual, I jumped to read Mark Jen’s latest entry as soon as my RSS reader picked it up. Unfortunately, this time I can’t seem to agree with him on his take of the issue. Here’s the main part, (he’s referring to the Archos PMA430 BTW) for those that don’t want to read the actual entry (although I highly encourage doing so):

I suppose the only thing is that I don’t understand why it’s ~$700. I mean, if you can add extra functionality for minimal cost, go ahead. But I definitely don’t justify a huge pricetag with the fact that it does 4 or 5 other things. And it’s only 30GB?! What’s with that?! I guess I’m just not entirely sold on the “all-in-one” convergence devices. I’d rather have multiple items that each do their respective function extremely well and have the smallest form factor possible - I don’t mind having 4 or 5 separate devices if they are each best in class products. Then, I can choose what functionality (and thus devices) I want to bring with me everyday.

If you can tell me where to snag a PSP ($279), an iPod ($299), and a PDA ($449) for $700, please, do inform us all…

For those who can’t count, that comes to $1027 all together, and it was a PSP from Amazon, a regular iPod direct from Apple (oh come on, the Shuffle isn’t an iPod… it’s a pack of gum that hums), and a PDA direct from HP.

In all honesty though, I would go with the laptop option as well (well, no would, I HAVE). Not only is that thing ugly and overpriced, but come on, you could do all that among countless other things on a laptop and not really have it cost you all that much more space (assuming you’re carting around all the devices it replaces at once).

Sorry Mark, but this time I had to shoot you down. Your logic was just flawed…

OK, so I leave work about 2:30 to get some things done before I had to go to a Dr’s appointment. I come home and check the mail… In it is a check from the City of Greer paying me back for the 4 hours I spent at Jury Duty more than a month ago. I was expecting something like $20 for it, but had really forgotten by this point that I’d even gone.

I quickly open the envelope to check and see how much I’d made for wasting my day off. I was shocked. Inside was a check for $5.00. That’s right, you heard me… 5 lousy dollars. So, with my disappointment, I started doing that really dangerous thing I do occasionally… Thinking…

I was joking with my mom that with gas prices as high as they are these days, it’s barely worth me going to the bank to deposit the worthless check. After dinner, I quickly ran through some rough calculations, and here they are:

• Mailing Envelope - $0.05
  Staples - 500 for $23.78
• Postage - $0.37
  USPS - Ripoff for standard mailing
• Labor - $0.50
  This assumed a total of 5 minutes to: Enter Data into Accounting Program, Print Check, Fold Check/Envelope and then Mail Check. I assumed an average secretarial salary of $6/hour (mainly just to make myself feel better about my salary).
• Gas to Bank - $0.35
  The nearest Bank of America is approximately 2 miles away (4 round trip). Since they’re like CVS these days, it couldn’t be too much more than that anywhere. Gas prices in the Upstate of South Carolina currently sit somewhere around $2.15/gallon for Regular Unleaded. I assumed an average car got somewhere around 25 mpg (mine gets around 40, trucks get around 15, seemed safe).
• Time to Bank - $1.70
  Here’s where I assumed more along the lines of me personally dropping off the check on company time. I assumed an average salary of around $10/hour (yeah, now we’re getting depressing). I also assumed a total of about 10 minutes to not only fill out the deposit slip, but also to drive to the bank and back. Had I planned for this during my lunch break, I probably could have wasted the entire hour trying to get to either of the banks nearby.
• Deposit Envelope - $0.05
  I used the same numbers as for the mailing envelope above. These are special envelopes, so they probably actually cost a bit more.
• Total Cost: $3.02
• Total Remaining Value: $1.98

Welp, there you have it. Nice to know it was worth all the effort. I swear, if I hadn’t had this other check from my last contracting job still in my wallet since early March, I wouldn’t waste my time… Thank you Greer City for providing me the funds to feed… no one.

At the end of March, I was going through some of the generic stats for my web server. I run about 30 different sites on this server, several of which are simply hosted for some friends (small forums, eBay images, etc.). In the few months since I moved to this new server, I’d noticed a large number of users in my stats, but since I only had stats configured for the entire server, there was no way of knowing what site they were really hitting.

Earlier this month (somewhere around April 4th I think), I finally sat down and setup different config files so that I could easily monitor all the different sites hosted on my server, and track down which ones were getting the most hits (yeah, I did this while I was at work, as one might imagine). A few days later, I checked back and went through the list of stats to see what I’d turned up. Much to my shock and awe, I found that one of my smaller sites was getting an enormous number of visitors every month, hogging virtually all the unique users the server was getting.

Lyrics at Dacnomm started out as a simple index of various song lyrics that I had looked up on the internet (some of which were harder to find than others), and which I stored in one central database so I could easily refer back to them at a later time. Apparently, without me realizing it, Yahoo! had indexed my site, and ranked it as one of the top results for some of the more popular songs of the day (yeah, who would have guessed I’d be the number one result for one of the most common lines of a Jesse McCartney song?).

As I’ve watched the stats for the past week or so, they’ve steadily grown to a number I’d never expected to see on any of my websites. As of 6:20pm EST on today, April 11th, 2005, the Lyrics at Dacnomm site has reached 600 unique users thus far this month (since we started logging around the 4th). You can see a screenshot of the logs here.

I’m really amazed and shocked at the number of people I’ve got hitting that simple site every day. Now I can see why most of the other lyrics websites lag horribly… They’re handling an enormous number of visitors simultaneously. This has encouraged me to continue adding quotes to the database, as I’d gotten a bit slack lately. I’m about to reach the 200 mark, and currently there are 193 songs in the database.

So, if you’re looking for a song lyric, and you happen to do a Yahoo! search for it (Google doesn’t index my sites for some reason), you may very well end up sucking up part of my bandwidth! :)

Wow, talk about a busy week. Looking at my calendar today, I see 3 things of importance.

Tomorrow there’s a doctor’s appointment, oh joy of joys… Wednesday I have to attend a conference (*cough* sales pitch *cough cough*) about scanners, almost as boring… Then Thursday there’s our regular weekly conference call that will likely accomplish ziltch…

Yeah, ok, compared to some peoples’ schedules, that’s probably lame, but for me, that’s a very busy week. Ordinarily I don’t have ANYTHING scheduled (thank you random fate for helping me keep my job…).