I usually abstain from memes, but this one brought a twinkle to my eye when I realized how much fun this could be given what was closest to me.

Here we go:

Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open to page 92.
3. Find the third sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for a favorite book, pick the CLOSEST.

By Sept. we have to decide whether to negotiate a long term sales agreement with the Soviets.

I’ll reveal the book behind a cut once successfully guessed.

meme nabbed from IfonEarth

I see a lot of traffic from RSS Feed Readers (particularly from Google Reader). Of that traffic, the majority of the feed reading comes from California.

I’d like to know if you’re a real person or a bot, so I’m asking that you come leave me a comment. You don’t have to have a Xanga account; Xanga allows for annomous comments.

If your read my site through an RSS feed, particularly if you’re in California, I’d like to hear from you! Please drop me a line so I know who you are. Bonus points if you can tell me how you found my site.

Thank you Cali Feed Readers!

PT

Alright, I know that I have in recent years tried to keep my ramblings about the kids away from the blog…however, today I just have to share my jarbled thoughts about President Obama’s– doesn’t that look great!– inauguration, and my kids might spill over into this as they spent a great deal of this election actively following it.

Actually, that is the first place I want to start. I have a five year old political junkie on my hands and I love it. It all started with the fact that I listen to NPR in the car as I drive around and as such they too must listen. Wouldn’t you know that my amazingly smart children have both decided that Obama would be the best choice for president? Bless you my children, I couldn’t agree more. While my three year old has been happy to just get giddy at the mention of our now president’s name, it is my older son who could readily tell you how many days until the election, or the swearing in of the new president. He could even tell you that then Senator Obama wanted to ‘make the war go away’ and ‘make people not have their homes go away’ anymore. How wonderful.

Posted by jane_craven

To which I have this to say:

If your kids are so smart and well adjusted, I want to know how the feel about being more susceptible to terrorist attacks now that Club Gitmo is being closed down. I want to know how they think they will feel when they see their mother blown to bits in front of them when a suicide bomber detonates himself in the middle of peaceful business here on American soil.

Do your kids think it’s fair that people can get loans that they can’t afford and then have the government steal money from hard working citizens to pay for those loans? Most importantly, do your kids really think that bringing the troops home somehow magically ends the war, makes America loved the globe over and decimates all enemies both foreign and domestic henceforth?

When they can answer these questions, then we’ll talk about about how smart and well adjusted your kids are.

The Dark Knight was shut out of a Best Diretor nod for Chris Nolan at the Oscars this year as well as Best Picture. The late Heath Ledger is got a Best Supporting Actor nod, which he is favored to win. Other categories The Dark Knight was nominated for are as follows:

The Dark Knight is coming back to the Opry Mills 20 IMAX theater. I’m trying to get a group to go to the Sunday 1540 show; please check the site (The Dark Knight poster is a link to ticket sales for Sunday and Dark Knight is the top show in the list.) for tickets. Also, if you would like to be part of my group, send me an email, Private Message or what-have-you with your email address and I will send you an invite to my Google Calendar invitation.

For those of you in either LA, NYC or Chicago, there is going to be a special showing of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight back to back in the IMAX theaters. Check the IMAX website for details.

Xanga Ideas in its current state is retarded. There is no interaction on the ideas. I suppose this was done either intentionally to avoid conflict or unintentionally due to lack of a Use Case. Regardless, I have beef with the staff comment on this idea.

Idea: Apparently guestbooks have been removed. Please give us back our guestbooks.

Staff Comment: This wasn’t intentional and was caused by a recent change. Your guestbooks should be working again.

I for one want to know where they are. Yes, I have seen traffic to my Guestbook in recent days. Yes, I looked at my Guestbook not too long ago. But there’s no navigational link to it. I don’t remember the URL syntax for it. All we have is a staff comment that says Guestbooks were added back…but we don’t even have the date and time of when that Staff Comment was left! The best we can say is that the comment was left after the submission date of 1/12/2009 2:07:07 PM. This too is unhelpful as we don’t know the timezone being represented. The best we can really say is that after some time designated as 1/12/2009 2:07:07 PM, a Staff Member left the above comment.

My gripe here is that I have no way official way of communicating back to Team Xanga that I think this issue is still unresolved. Sure, I could open a help ticket, which means I might get the answer to my inquiry, but what about the rest of the community? As much as it pains me to say it, not every Xangan reads my blog religiously. So even if I shared with the rest of the classroom, that’s only one classroom in the school building that has the needed information.

Xanga needs to allow for comments on ideas. I’m sure the rationale behind not allowing comments on ideas is that this could lead to constant fighting. So be it! if Team Xanga cares as much as they say they do about Democracy, they’ll endure a little Anarchy. Besides, rampant fighting on Xanga Ideas would increase traffic to Xanga.

The increased traffic would have an immediate positive effect on Xanga morale. Everyone who’s been decrying the lack of traffic on Xanga would have to stuff it. Instead of Plugzing Ideas, Xangas would blog about why their idea needs to be voted to the top. Though it would eventually become monotonous, even more people should be satisfied that so many blog are being written. This would bring Xanga back to its roots.

Once sides and cliques are formed, bloodlust would ensue. This is why Xanga Ideas need to be quickly implemented or closed. Once the gangs were formed and the War begun, the aforementioned anarchy would begin. Now every post would be filled with hate for the opposing clique and all Xanga Ideas would be trashed by Top Bloggers. The front page would be filled with hate-filled post as an accurate cross-section of Xangas.

Of course, the ability to vote NO would be nice too. I fear that should Team Xanga add a second Vote choice, there would be suspicions that Team Xanga was being controlled by Diebold. We’d then have posts about voter disenfranchisement. Posts about dimpled chads, hanging chads and pregnant chads. (The pregnant chad posts wouldn’t be allowed on the front page because the topic and related pictures would be too graphic. Imagine that! A picture could be a graphic. WOWZERS!) Xanga would be accused of being run jointly by Dick Cheney and Obama. john‘s page would be defaced with pictures of Satan. Revelife would form its own “ish” site dedicated to why blogging (on Xanga) is evil.

Under the current Idea workflow, there is no feedback loop. Xangans get to suggest Ideas, they are voted on or pushed off the page with new ideas, someone from Team Xanga may eventually comment on the idea and that’s the end of it. So if further discussion of an idea is necessary it must be communicated on a person-to-person basis. If Team Xanga thinks that viral marketing is best way to have a feedback loop on Ideas, they have another thought coming. Ever play the game Telephone? This is how rumors get started.

For instance, the plane that crash-landed on the Hudson was being discussed at work. Someone quoted a useless bit of trivia: the probability of being in a plane crash is less than that of winning the lottery. However, they way they worded and compressed the two subject matters together, someone else came to the conclusion that one of the passengers on the plane had just won the lottery and perished along with the rest of the plane’s occupants. Viral marketing is how rumors get started…like TheTheologiansCafe is gay.

The Xanga pansy way to solve the issue is have a Top Blogger like antisoccermom or TheTheologiansCafe do the work for free. I guess Dan just volunteered because antisoccermom just said that she ain’t running the fucking help desk until she sees a check with those five pretty boxes on it.

I have the solution to the Guestbook problem. It’s yet another Xanga idea, one I didn’t create.

I have the answer to the feedback loop problem too. It’s a Xanga Idea I should create.

In an effort of illustrating absurdity by being absurd, I’m going to place the solution behind a cut. Why? Because I know that Team Xanga will not implement either of these solutions.

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I was first introduced to Linux in 2000, back in the days of Red Hat 6 at the Bob Jones Computer Science Camp. Linux was a curiosity to me in those days, a toy to be played with. LILO reigned king. You could dual boot a Win98 box with Red Hat, but that didn’t work for too many cycles on my Gateway Gateway E-300. I do know I got very good at installing Windows. To this day, I could probably install ’98 from muscle memory alone. Despite loosing all of my data several times over, I didn’t learn to backup until I finally upgraded that box and put in a CD burner, but that’s another post. The drive was only 5 GB big and MP3s and blogs weren’t thought of at the time, so I had nothing to loose.

I didn’t have Internet growing up. My parents were uber-Christian. They wanted to use an inclusive-only proxy that was put out by a cult who thought shorts were evil. Said cult was alleged to have blocked a website for a missionary trip to Russia that our church went on because the pastor’s son was wearing shorts. Yes, I was deprived as a kid.

Nevertheless, two years later and none more experienced, I bought Osborne’s Complete Reference Red Hat Linux Second Edition along with a copy of Red Hat Linux Survival Guide, the former coming with a copy of Red Hat 7.0. I may have tried to dual boot that OS, I don’t recall. I kept thinking about Linux, but learning it never materialized. It was too complicated to figure out, especially not having Internet access or a second computer. Somehow, through some process of osmosis I picked up the tiniest bit of Linux along the way.

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Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

It was a long race. It was a hard race. There were times when it felt like we were on the back nine in the middle of the Sahara, but perseverance paid off for one blogger: Silver_Alexis.

That’s right. She set her eye on the prize. She paced herself until she got in the home stretch. Then she set her eye on the prize and was unstoppable. Silver_Alexis won by more than three lengths.

Silver_Alexis, I hope you enjoy your new set of Zebra pens.

I would like to thank trunthepaige for suggesting and making this contest possible. Withouth her help and support, I would not have met the people I have who participated in this contest. Paige, thank you for sponsoring this event!