The "Flickr meetup" was.. I'm going to call it a success. It was pretty much what I envisioned before tacking the word "flickr" to the beginning of it. Yes, everyone there had a flickr account, some of us even had cameras on us. We ate, had fun - good times. You missed out, I'm sorry. (Thinking of having another one at the Great Dane in Madison, WI next month - If you're interested leave me a comment or email with dates you'd be available, and I'll try to come up with the most convenient date for everyone.)

There will be some pictures going up on flickr, not many, but some. I started playing around with long exposure times on my camera, trying to blend 2 different pictures into one. I had this figured out at one point, but last night I just got a bunch of blurry pictures instead.

And now it's time for your input. What can I do to make this blog more useful/interesting for you? I know.. post about sparkly unicorns - I'm working on it. But what else? Added features? Anything. I'm open to all suggestions.

Oh noes! Iz can xplain.

The boss wunts 2 c u

KHAAAN!

Chokolatez Rain! lol!!!

You may have noticed something really screwy with the post that appeared earlier today. I'm not even going to try to explain what happened.. let's just say that I've had a lot on my mind lately.

This is just a short reminder that tomorrow is the most exciting event to hit Fort Atkinson, WI. EVER. That's right, it's our big flickr meetup thing. Check that link for more information on the time and place. If you're one of those people that wait until the last minute to decide, just send me an email at [address removed to prevent spam harvesting junk]. Make sure to include a cell phone number or something so you can be reached.

That's that. It's gonna be a great time, with some great people.

It seemed like a relatively easy bit of information to track down. I just wanted to know the dimensions of a LEGO block. A 2×2 block to be specific. It was pretty random, and not very important, but I was curious. Try to find it. It's fun.

I ended up asking a reference librarian for help. We eventually found the information that I was looking for, but only after I had given up twice. I even called the LEGO customer support hotline… which forwarded me to the LEGO "shop at home" number, which then forwarded me to "replacement parts", which got me to a real person, who then forwarded me to another real person. By "real person" I mean someone that seemed absolutely stumped by my question.. the size of a block.. I just wanted a number. She put me on hold. I waited. 5-6 minutes later I hung up.

So, after all that effort, here are the dimensions of a 2×2 lego brick. The height is 9.58mm, the length and width are both 16mm.

Exciting, I know. Next week: The Volume of a Water Buffalo.

I've been fighting with myself for the past few days about this, but I finally decided today to switch over to Sprint for my cell phone service. The reason? I was going to get on their SERO employee referral plan. It basically offers unlimited everything-that-I-need for less than I'm currently paying. The only thing stopping me was the early termination fee that I would have to pay to US Cellular.

Everything went fine and the order went through fine. I verified my information, because I've almost sent out some screwed up orders in the past.. it was all good. Until the final "confirmed" page. Somehow my apartment number had vanished from my address. I called up an got some guy in Bangdeklastan and he confirmed that my address was indeed correct in the system, it was just being cut off on the page for some reason. Ok. I can handle that. Crisis averted.

I just got home a half hour ago and I had an email from Sprint. My phone shipped. AWESOME! But I needed to call and verify some things for the account setup. I figured it was just relating to transferring my old number or something. Nope. I'm currently on hold (it's been a half hour call so far) with a guy in Mexico, and being told that I can't have this plan. I'm finishing up this phone call, eating, and then calling it a night. News of my success (or failure) will follow tomorrow.

The 10-minute-later update:

Sometimes I go through periods when I think I can talk my way into anything. This was one of them.

He said he "fixed" my account, which kind of scares me. He "just had to put in a different number" which hopefully wasn't in the "Monthly Fee" field. I did talk my way into free text messages, since it looks like that wasn't included. Not that I'll need them, since I'll have access to my email at all times, but I think Sprint charges for incoming txts so it'll help keep my bill down around $30.

I basically just got their $25 unlimited data plan PLUS 500 minutes, free nights and weekends, unlimited picture messaging, unlimited text messaging, and some other stuff for $30. I really have to eat now.

Blog! The blog! blogblogblog

I've made a few changes and additions to sparxMind. There are some minor things that I won't mention, and that will never be visible on your end.. so I'll just skip to the real stuff.

BlogRush - gone. But I already posted about that. See yesterday's post.

Related Posts - this is new. It's a bit quirky, and a bit.. well, let's just leave it at quirky. Now at the end of each post (only on the individual post page, not on any index or archives pages) there is a list of 5 posts that have been determined (automatically, by word frequency) to be the most similar posts on sparxMind. Hopefully it'll help people find older posts that may have slipped through the cracks but are still relevant and interesting.

Top Commentators - there's a new section in the sidebar that lists the most active commentators. The default setting reset the comment count every month. I've changed it so it's a revolving total, and counts all comments made in the last 30 days. I might tweak this later on, maybe move to 15 days, or have it actually reset the counts and start over. I'm not sure yet. In addition to having your name displayed in a box with spudart, if you are one of the top commentators and include your website address when you post a comment it'll put your link in there. I've heard that search engines like pages with links to them.

Speaking of spudart. He posted an excellent Sticky Note Comic today. Of course I couldn't resist editing it a little and recaptioning it like so. I'm proud, so please check it out.

If you're a regular reader, you may have noticed the BlogRush widget that had appeared on the right hand side of the page. You may also notice that it's now gone. It seemed like it had a decent chance at bringing in traffic, but now that I've played around with it, I've decided that it's ultimately useless.

The Flaw

To participate in BlogRush (I'm just going to refer to at as "BR" for the rest of the post) you just sign up and add their widget to your page. This widget displays links to 5 posts of other BR users, and each time it's displayed, a link to one of your posts gets displayed on someone else's widget. Sound good? Yep, but the conversion rate is going to be horrible for a couple of reasons. First, you have a widget that almost resembles an ad of some sort, and most people have trained themselves to just overlook these. Second, and this is huge, most of the widgets I've seen are placed near the end of the page - a reader isn't even going to see your link in most cases.

Bugs

There's still a lot of stuff that they have to iron out before I would even consider the service usable. The reporting is screwed up, plain and simple. My stats show about 14 people coming to my site through the BR widget, their stats list 1 click-through.

Somehow I've managed to earn a negative credit for having my posts displayed on other widgets - why would I want to display something that's penalizing me for some reason? All my traffic is legitimate, but I think whatever anti-cheating measures they've implemented are docking me credits for some reason.. which means it's probably happening to quite a few other smaller blogs that are just looking for a few more readers.

Readers

You guys. I've seen some links displayed that are to some questionable/offensive content. That reflects on me and my credibility, and it's important to me that I earn and keep your trust. Having my efforts undermined in an attempt to get more traffic just isn't worth it. It should also speed up the load times for you (slightly) which is always good.

Am I wrong?

Are you using BR and have had a better experience and better results with it? I doubt there are many (any?) of you, but I'd like to hear from you if you exist.