Hot Dorkage

Quick fix eye-candy comic to placate you ….

from xkcd

Ho hummmmmm…… It’s high time I did another post in this sleepy little blog that only eight really cool people read regularly. There are over six billion people in the world, and 1 billion of them have internet. But there aren’t that many really cool people in the world, unfortunately. The other six that aren’t subscribers yet don’t know about me and I don’t know about them. (The number six is a mathematical estimate, based on my statistical analysis of general surfing behaviour courtesy of google.) I have no business writing how to increase your fan base, being how mine is so small. Duh.

That doesn’t stop those other guys. “Increasing your blog readership” is the subject of every other blog for bux article on the internet which is just a rehash or straight plagiarism of other blog for bux articles on the internet and most of those guys are wannabes with only 10 readers and five of them are their drinking buddies and their mom. They’ll talk about this or that, but it’s even simpler. What I’ve found — the unblemished truth: To get a see Angelina Jolie Naked!!!! lot of reads you need to pander to the most base in human nature, pimp it up with tittie pix, and alter your writing style to stuff keywords — which I regard as an insult to freedom. I refuse to do i!t. I will not be bought — hence my small but very awesome fan base. My words are just like they came out of my brain.

And what are the results?

From the looks of things, the “good” posts here only get read by my eight smart and cool fans; yet here and elsewhere, I get oodles and gobs of reads on a post that I threw together in 10 minutes if it has soap opera in it.

Soooooo……. If you’re some slack-jawed drooling twit looking for the tittie pix, tough, I lied. You’ve sorta been dorkrolled, if you will.

And if you’re looking for a tech read, there are a number of good evergreen posts here, and projection analysis show that there is a 99.99% probability that you haven’t read all of them yet; in fact there is a 99.9% probability that you haven’t read any of them yet, and there is a 99% probability that you won’t read any of them now. But just in case……. Might I direct you to the site map, or the search box (Right Sidebar) or the category links. (Left Sidebar, upper) Those things are standard blogvigation controls to help you find what interests you. They are not some weird “unique to this blog” interface that you have to learn before you can find anything here. Yet my actual recorded stats show that 99.99% of visitors ignore them and view only the most recent post, and there is a 84.9% chance that the most recent is not the best one –I guarantee you this one ISN’T!– and that probability increases the more posts the blog accumulates, as long as it stays on track.

Now kick my butt with comments, and maybe I’ll write something good next time. Meanwhile I’m gonna plot visitors to my about page and laugh. Don’t you know that 63.8% of statistics are made up on the spot?

Tech Republic ran this news item giving particulars about who lies most on their resumes and what things they lie about. IT came in third place. Job responsibilities was the most “lied about” item on resumes.

But as a veteran filling out job application forms, I have to wonder what really is considered a lie. For example, these forms that try to fit you into neat little boxes, is it a lie if you fit 90% in the box? what about 80% what if you don’t even know how much you conform to some vague language describing a responsibility.

Here’s an example:

Managing a network in a small company is very different from managing a network in a large one. At one job I had, I figured out and set up all the cabling and KVM switches for our small office LAN and trained my office mate how to use Samba so he could stop recabling the printer every time he wanted to print something. I also showed my boss how to forward a port on his router so we could run a local server on our workstations. That was the extent of my “network management.” That’s all we needed. There were rarely any problems with it. One time a switch failed and after much hair pulling I got them to replace it. Anytime there was a problem they came to me. Would it be a lie if I put this down on my resume? What do you think?

another offering from our friends at xkcd.  Ha!  I wish I could say

“sudo clean your frakkin’ room!” to my offspring! “sudo” is as close to a magic spell as it gets.

This is a prototype expression of thanks in the form of Linky LUV in appreciation of my fans over on Hub Pages It randomly displays one of their widgets right here in an IFRAME. If you don’t like the looks of the one you see, refresh the page and it will give you a different one. Thanks HubPages fans!

It is a very good idea, and often overlooked, to create a table comment when creating a table. Months later when you’ve forgotten what eggs_x_chickens was for, the comment will be extremely useful. It is especially useful if multiple people will be accessing the database, but you should go to the effort to do it even if the table is for your private consumption.

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The dork is featured again in Issue #4 (August 1) of Information Security Short Takes that I was in last month. This blog features a monthly blog carnival potpourri webzine of useful selection of security related articles. I know, I know, nobody wants to hear about security. It’s boring as all get out, and it’ll probably not happen to you. Except that it is happening, to more and more of us each year. Knowledge is power in this game. Know how it works, what to do and what not to do, and diminish your chance of being ripped off.
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Akismet is an awesome spam filter plugin no wordpress blogger should be without. It’s point ‘n’ click installable if you happen to use wordpress, but they claim that hacks exist for 20 other blogging platforms and they do provide an API. Hacks don’t mean evil programs, they just mean ways to enable you to use the software that aren’t quite as slick as for wordpress. Today Akismet flagged 54 spam — all on the Eleven Signs post. (BTW Eleven Signs is my LEAST original post. All the ideas in it had been blogged elsewhere; I just picked my eleven faves and did them up in my own style. ) Previously I had been getting maybe 5-7 spam a day and they were random. I was unperturbed about the jump in spam because Akismet does the right thing.
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Disclosure: this post is being written as an entry in this EntreCard contest.

Entrecard has set up some kind of a partnership with SezWho to encourage organic comments.  According to the post on the Entrecard blog,

When you can take a quality blog that isn’t receiving any comments, and give them 10 or 20 high-quality comments per post… that’s revolutionary in our opinion.

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I wrote these lyrics to the tune of “I wanna hold your hand” by the Beatles, with all due credit to them. The purpose was to teach a class of bright youngsters how Ethernet networking works at the hardware level. I thought that my hot dorkage readers might enjoy them. It’s all as true now as it ever was. And in case you don’t understand some of the terminology, it’s all broken down for you at the end.

And in case you’re too young to remember the Beatles (even though they keep popping up on oldies stations) Below see a recording of it for you to listen to. Notice that you have to click to play it. I would never inflict it on you.

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Lolcatese — is it becoming the new internet pidgin? Perhaps first exclusively written language? Lolcatese is named after the acronym LOL, which is Textese for “laughing out loud.” Textese is a thing distinct from Lolcatese. The purpose of Textese is to transmit the message with the fewest number of keystrokes. Lolcatese and Textese have similar ancestry, but Lolcatese seems to be evolving into a separate language all its own, complete with grammar and spelling conventions, and even pronunciation hints, although Lolcatese is primarily a written language. I’m not sure where the “cat” part comes in.

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