No Relation

A blog with a 2008 copyright note offers blog-fixing services. It is not related to this blog. The author is not the GotH of the FixBlog. The services differ. The author has endorsements. Good luck over there!

Encrypted Blogs

So, politics, business and the glamour parade mix with Second Life, FaceBook and everybody gets to go into exposing himself and herself extrovertedly and xenovertedly. The truth is a long way from the published self and fiction.

Blogs encrypting truth for limited circulation may be an oxymoron. Are they still blogs?

The means exist as I find in my research for a client. None of the personal stuff should be exposed to the world but the medium should be accessible to all. The client does not trust mere password access. So, we’ll encrypt the entries. The world can see the entries but only select users receive keys to decrypt and read the material.

The Unmentionables

How to counter bad, slanderous, libelous, defamatory Google search results that kill your carefully built-up reputation, falsely and maliciously? It’s a constant in our work but I didn’t expect the issue on page 1 of the Washington Post.

Usually acting in concert with attorneys, the battle has many levels. Getting a new correction or existing accurate information to jump to a higher rank in a search engine feels pretty good. Making the wrong information sink to double-digit or triple-digit search results generates a high.

Julie Amero and your Blog

What happend to Julie Amero could happen to bloggers. Anybody can catch spyware or a virus that sneakily opens a malicious pop-up window. You don’t have to use an old Windows school PC to run into that problem and face 40 years in jail.

Bloggers are not only at the receiving end, however. They can spread the badness quite easily, albeit unwittingly.

Sign up for a gadget here, a widget there, a map, a clock–and bang! You and your visitors may see more than you bargained for. A client had several such innocent-looking features. Figuring out which one caused the nightmare had him stumped.

Stable Release

FreeBSD is a good base for a blog. Some argue that you should stick with version 4. When 6.2 came out, I thought I would try it. By now, however, I forgot the difference beetween a release branch and a stable branch. I guess I’ll go with release release since it incorporates corrections that appeared since the stable release.

Why would it matter? Sometimes, I ran into unavailability problems when adding packages through sysinstall. Was it the stable version or the release version that could not be found on the FreeBSD ftp servers through sysinstall? If I only knew.

Dad was Right, First Impressions Matter

Dad made us mow the land by hand. Uphill, downhill, sideways.

The resulting upper body strength seems to last for decades. And came in handy with Date 1, formerly Candidate 1.

That frequent 30 minute workout in the heat of the summer translates nicely into mutually joyful initial impressions.

We had decided on a relationship not involving employment. I’ll do my blog thing, she’ll do her graphics and designs. We’ll cooperate symbiotically on a case-by-case basis.

Hardened Kernels

Candidate 1 and I get along too well. That was not the idea.

We talk more about Fiancé C1 and Girl on the Hill — and once that is out of the way, about other 5 to 9 matters — than blogs and the merging of business talents. If this continues, we may not be a good entrepreneurial fit. Nothing would get done. C and C1 might split. And I wouldn’t see GotH again.

In between our meetings, I applied some kernel tweaks to harden client machines and make their blogs both faster more reliable.

Do Not Add Water

Girlfriend calls for a boycott on Chinese foodstuffs. Not only is melamine poison, she reasons. The factories selected it as a filler because it fools inspectors. Red China does not care what they add to our food, she concludes, as long as they can get away with it. Witness the silence from China: No explanation, no apology, no nothing, she points out. That was yesterday.

Today, she almost keeled over when she heard that China handed the death penalty to a food inspector. She is irate. What about the businesses that actually added the poison filler to the food, she wants to know.

I don’t know. I won’t eat garlic from Asia any more and will check food labels from now on. And I’ll add water to soups that threaten, in capital letters: Do Not Add Water.

Fate Dooms Client

One of my clients is in a particularly somber mood. He lost friends in Iraq. To him, they are important not only on Memorial Day. They make him question his own decision to join the National Guard.

His idea was to help neighbors and country after floods, fires and hurricanes. Of course, he would be ready if once again the British were to invade Washington. But Iraq? Fighting and dying on foreign soil?

That had not entered his mind when he signed up. But as another 1300 meet at the White Oak Armory and elsewhere to enter war service, he knows that unexpected fate approaches him as well.

No ESP

I guess there’s no such thing as ESP. Every waking moment, my brain floats thoughts of the Girl on the Hill. I wish it didn’t because it has no effect on her.

Is it true that all is fair in love and war? Should I contact her? I hate bugging people.

The client’s blog and website get a major makeover today because he was short on information, love or ESP. He registered a trademark and didn’t know that the same mark existed under  common-law. Now, the common-lawer and his common lawyer come out of the woodwork and kick his mark out of the trademark register. Out it goes with a wholesale change of his electronic assets. He doesn’t want to argue or fight.

Crisis at BigGroup

BigClient’s buyer ran into a crisis, and he referred me. The project was so urgent and complex that I called in the candidates.

What an opportunity to prove our mettle! We did well and felt good. Candidate 1 had heard from a staffer that it would have taken them a week to fix without us. Instead, we got done before close of business on day 1.

Afterward, we headed to Adams Morgan for a bite and some celebrating.