After so little action on the blog, I thought I better save some face and go through tidying up my site. For grins I updated my About Page.

It was quite enlightening to see what I was thinking about a year ago. (What was I thinking!)

Aim of the blog

I was all fired up to write like a satirical loony in order to attract 10000 visitors a month to The Pisstakers. I wanted to host a stable of funny guest writers and develop an all-round mega blog too. Oh well.

The reality is, I am currently the lone contributor, so I haven't exactly created a one-stop funny shop. On the other hand, working alone, I surpassed my aims for traffic - attracting 16000 visitors a month and a useless PR5 rank. 1 out of three ain't bad.

(The one big lesson I learned btw, fellow bloggers, is that little quantity and poor quality researched posts are the way to go!) The Valentines Day Sucks post is a case in point.)

Bio

Then there were the 8 things about Ed. to deal with. On reflection I was pretty happy with the the old list, and seeing as I haven't done much wild stuff in the past 12 months, I just tarted the octo-bio up a bit.

(As I look around the half wrecked boat I am sitting in at the moment, I can't help thinking that if this thing ever floats again, the list of achievements could be worth updating at some stage. Time will tell.)

That was my homework last night. What does your About Me page say? Anything, something, nothing?

I received an email from a friend, telling me to stop buying gas from Exxon and Mobil. I trashed it, not because it is a bad idea, and not because I am a gas junky lacking in community spirit, but mainly because this type of email is spam.

The email contains a fairly credible suggestion to save the world from $4 gas, ie boycott Exxon and Mobil for a year rather than stop buying gas for one day. What's the problem with that idea? Nothing much, but if you scroll to the end of the email, you will see a link to a 3rd party site. This site will benefit from the same numbers of eyeballs alluded to in the anti-gas email (if 10 friends of 10 friends get the email, and before you know it, 300 million will get the message.)

Ironically, in this case, you get taken to a Used car site.



I picked up on this trend when I received a circular begging for help to find Madeleine McCann, the little English girl missing in Portugal last year. Some one managed to get their link included on the end of the email message that went international, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they got a lot of click-throughs on the back of honest folks spreading the word about her sad predicament, bastards.

So, to raise awareness of this sort of subtle spam, what I suggest is that you forward this Pisstakers article to 10 friends, tell them to forward it to 10 friends, and before you know it, 300 million people will know never to forward anything to anyone, ever. That should make people think twice about using the internet to communicate!

I am almost fit to burst with techno excitement, and so should you. I just learnt that the blog software, Rapidweaver for Mac has been updated and is due to enter a whole new era of online slickness in the near future. Break out the winegums, we are having a party.

Version 3.6.7

I have missed a few Rapidweaver updates recently, so I just downloaded the latest - the seventh reiteration of the 6th update of the third version. When put like that, in full, no one should say that a simple numbering system for software is arcane. Anyway, it is a tweaked version of a tried and tested package, so not exactly a mind blowing wow experience, but it is exporting files quicker. Noice.

Version 4

As all Windows users know, Macs are all about form over function, so it came as no surprise to learn from the Rapidweaver review by Ars Technica, that the new layout for version 4 looks pretty cool. If nothing else, even if the quality of my content remains slightly gray and banal, at least I will feel better inside when I blog.

The biggest buzz for me though, is the even speedier new exporting option that is promised. I don't know how it is going to work, but it has to be slick if it is even slicker than what is going on right now.

To be brutally honest when compared with Wordpress, the publishing side of things is a dog. I put up with a lot of wasted time and hanging around when I use this Rapidweaver dealio, waiting for it to go through the whole site looking for new stuff that, to my simplistic mind, is sitting there right at the top of the pile begging to be noticed first.

For the record, I did sort of make a promise to myself way back when I first installed it. Rapidweaver was a new product, a long way from being perfect, but it had potential, so I agreed to stick by the authors as they worked their butts off getting the software right. To be fair, they have doggedly improved every aspect, especially the search engine optimisation side of things, and generally kept the workflow simple, drag and drop easy, but powerful. Kudos to the Brits

With version 4 in the works, hopefully it will be a high performance daddy, but still have the coolest and slickest interface out there for bloggers and web designers. We shall see.

I will now press publish and go make 7 cups of tea and bake a few cakes too, while the current version of Rapidweaver does its thing.

Update: it exported my homepage about 4 times quicker than yesterday, but the Verizon connection crapped out when it was publishing, so this is coming to you 12 hours later than planned!

Hey all, don't forget, it is Administration Professionals Day. In case you didn't know, there are 4.1 million secretaries and assistants churning through forms, making coffee, and asking us if there is anything else they can do for us today! Despite the rumors, they aren't all as kinky as Maggie here in The Secretary, nor as committed as those working in emergency services. In fact for most of the 4 million, it is a regular work life, so these people deserve a special day of hyper inflated cards from Hallmark and a bunch of flowers!

Thinking about the admin professionals I have encountered recently, aka shit head Government employees at City Hall who have snubbed, sneered and prevented me from talking to the right person, all cards should start "Hey, remember it is our money that keeps your lardy ass in a job, not the other way round, so be nice."

Admin professionals who don't ever change their ways should do the right thing and sacrifice their own special 24 hour celebration, making way for Victims of Customer Abuse Day. That way, tens of millions of us could get a card to compensate us for mis-treatment voice by the losers regularly misdirecting phone calls and pushing paper from A to B and back again

Personally, when I saw April 23, Administration Professionals Day , I thought, "Wtf, what about my special day?".

Do you have a special day? I vote for Sons and Daughters Day, to compensate us for being born into this horrible world uninvited.

I was in San Francisco getting the low down on (SSB) single side band radios. A seminar presenter, Captain Marti, told a story about the sea rescue of a sailorman who was suffering from a bad case of emphysema. Without missing a beat, a member of the audience quipped, "Is there such a thing as a good case of emphysema?"

Gold plated Email

You may have absolutely no clue or interest in SSB radios, and to be honest, it was all very radio hammy and full of geeky kilohertz radio wave references that flew straight over my head, (which is what they are designed to do, I suppose). However, my ears pricked up when she got into SSB radio's email capabilities, a subject a bit more down to earth and at my level.

SSB radios offer you the truly madly most expensive email service ever conceived. If you are at sea, it could set you back $1200 for a modem! plus $300 a year for a service, allowing you access for 10 minutes a day!

Sheet. If we ever go sailing, I will have the perfect excuse never to stay in contact with family and friends. Having said that, blogging will become a precious pastime. The Pisstakers could tout itself as one of the most expensive-to-run free blogs on the internet. I guess I better start filling up the blank spaces with adverts.

Want to buy a radio?

After waving good bye to the grim state, aka New Jersey, we drove and drove and finally arrived in Washington state. As expected, Seattle was friendly and cool, but it wasn't the scenery that put the spring back in our step after 52 hours non-stop driving. It was the North West's drink of choice.

Quad breve, pah.

When you can hardly think, let alone stand, the best legal medication is an espresso. Being from out of state, I thought I would mix it up a bit and asked for an octo breve with extra cream and a pound of sugar. I got a funny look until the server worked out the price, and she was all smiles. I hoped the caffeine overload would help me come around, perhaps just before falling into a jerky sugar coma... As expected, it hit the button and I got the spring back in my step. Enough spring to fall into bed.

Trouble is, the espresso effect is fast - and the benefits of caffeine didn't last till the morning.

Toyota comfort, pah

I woke up feeling like a 300lb stripper had tip toed over my lower back. Thank you Toyota! In terms of reliability and economy, Camrys rock, but thanks to the bastard nippons' barebones approach to car seat comfort, my sciatic nerve had broken down. It took 2 trips to the chiro practictioner, lots of moans and groans, and a bottle of placebo pain killers to rearrange my spine, from the bones in my ass to my elbow.

Life is good

Anyway, enough of the complaining. Long story short, we found what we were looking for on the West coast, and traded a spot in a nice rural house in Seattle for a half dismantled sail boat in a boat yard in Californ-ia. Life is good!

It is hard not to have a good time sharing a single bed with Mrs Ed, huddling up against the freezing wind gusting off the bay. And my back is fine, thanks for asking.

And if the Verizon modem thing can sort itself out, I may even be able to blog a bit more now. We shall see.

Hasta luego, as we say around here. And thanks to the commenters and visitors who kept this blog barely alive. (Barely is a relative term, there are still over 1000 visits a week, go figure!