Category Archives: Discourse.net

Usually when I’m complaining about ratings it’s US News or some such. But here’s another bad ratings service:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• torture (10x)
• hell (1x)

My personal homepage, however, is rated

From today's inbox:

Hi Michael,

I will send you $25 in exchange for placing a text ad for a telecom company on this page: [link]

Please let me know if you are interested.

Thanks,
[signed]

I don't know how long the run was to be, so I can't tell if this is a good offer, but in any case, I'm resolutely non-commercial for insurance reasons. So, dear reader, not to worry.

That post, incidentally, is still true, but I can't help but wonder what search led him there.

Someone got to this blog by searching for “is it illegal to own a monkey in miami”. In fact, that phrase has been searched for several times in the last few days…

Weird.

(For a colorful list of what people have been searching for that leads them here, have a look at the discourse.net zeitgeist.)

The blog is acting up in various ways. It's slow, and the some of the stuff in the columns isn't working. I'm going to put off trying to debug it in light of this announcement from No Uptime Hosting Dreamhost:

We are currently experiencing some networking difficulties which is causing parts of our network to be inaccessible. This is affecting everyone in a random manner. We are working hard to fix the problem right now and will have an update for you soon.

Please bear with me until this goes away.

Dreamhost is unveiling a new service with an unusual pricing model. DreamHost Private Servers will provide CPU and RAM a la carte. $1.00/month for each 10 MB RAM and 10 MhZ CPU, protected, on a shared server (there's also a burst mode, but it's not guaranteed). Unfortunately, you buy them together (I need CPU more than RAM).

So, how much is enough to run a blog?

I may have mentioned this before, but I continue to be amazed and bemused by the emergence of one comment thread on this blog, Type 1 Diabetes Cure?, as a sort of clearinghouse for diabetes patients to exchange their stories and seek advice.

I assume this has happened because Google has put that page high on the results list for 'Type1 Diabetes Cure'. I usually close comments threads after a few weeks in order to keep down the robotic advertising attacks, but I intend to keep this one open as long as it has an audience.