I’m Over Here Now

Obviously, there’s been a slowdown of posts here over the last few months. Posting here is going to probably going to remain slow for and maybe get even slower.

Lately I’ve been posting over at scottadcox.com for the most part. The posts there are shorter, more snarky, and even less on topic. I’ve had less time to write anything lately. And quite honestly, anything I think has been written by someone smarter and more literate than me, so it’s easier to just link to them!

You can head over there and subscribe, or just follow me on Twitter, which is killing blogging. Or maybe you are enjoying the silence. That would make sense too! 🙂

“Libertarian leaning commentary from Knoxville Tennessee” probably won’t be located in Knoxville for too much longer, so now is as good of a time as any to begin the transition.

I still plan on posting here every now and then, but the post you are currently reading is going to remain at the top of the page. Anything new will be posted beneath. This blog and all of its archives will remain indefinitely for posterity and revenue!!!!

Sometime I Wonder About You

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The current poll asks for your Waffle House hash browns order. So far, seven people have voted, but only three have included “scattered” in their options.

Uh…can you get hash browns at Waffle House that aren’t scattered? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

Carry on.

GeoCities R.I.P.

Am I the only one who is discreetly wiping a tear from my eye to learn that Yahoo! is shutting down GeoCities?  Back in the day, GeoCities RULED! Honestly, GeoCities hasn’t crossed my mind in years, and I was surprised to read it was pulling this kind of traffic recently:

GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.

If you remember the old GeoCities, you can really appreciate how far the web has come in a short period of time with free blogging sites, MySpace, Facebook, etc. It’s kind of sad that the cutting edge concept of allowing everyday people to build an attractive website pioneered by GeoCities has left it so far behind.

What’s next? Yahoo Games?

Things I Wonder About

Why is a tax credit for home purchases only good for first time home buyers? Wouldn’t making it available to everyone lure even more people into the market?

Doctors, lawyers, engineers, car salesmen, politicians, school teachers, reporters…the list goes on and on.  Is there any profession out there that isn’t loathed by anyone? I’d say firefighters and nurses–maybe. But even librarians irritate me. They walk around pretending Google can’t do their job 1,000,000 times more efficiently than they can.

What is the ratio of right-handed to left-handed pitchers in MLB? It seems like there are just about as many lefties as righties, even though there aren’t nearly as many left-handed people in the general population. The logical conclusion is that there are lots of right-handed people out there with good stuff, or at least the potential to have it. Why don’t I know any of these people?

When we played battleball/dodeball in middle school, why were you out if you hit someone in the head. It’s not like you were trying to hit them in the head. In fact, if you could purposefully hit someone in the head with one of those difficult to throw balls at such a young age, you probably should have been rewarded for your ability.

Mayonnaise–why in the world would anyone eat that on purpose?

If you can answer any of these questions, I’d appreciate it.

Gift Ideas for Heads of State

Over on my “short post” blog today I linked a story about the gift President Obama gave to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown–25 of the awesomest DVDs this country has to offer. I mean, how cool is that? I wanted that for Christmas, but I don’t have any friends or relatives that can pull those kinds of strings.

It would have been cool if Mr. Obama could have swung a Wii Fit, but those are tough to find.

Ok, seriously? DVDs? I think, as a general rule, you should stray away from giving heads of state gifts that you can get on Amazon or in the White House Gift Shop, although the James Bond Blu-ray set or a Kindle 2 would be cool. But I’ve received better gifts than DVDs in the past year, and I couldn’t get elected to the board of my HOA.

So, of course, I have some ideas for future gifts that are better than DVDs if the President ever decides to actually give something thoughtful or significant. These are all things I think the President could actually pull off:

  1. An external hard drive with all the music he downloaded back in the Napster days
  2. Offer to help him move, and actually follow through
  3. Tickets to an Oprah taping (transportation to Chicago not included)–bonus if you can swing a lifetime membership to the Oprah Book Club
  4. Let him “ride bitch” on one of the motorcycles in the Presidential motorcade
  5. Offer to let him crash on the couch for the weekend
  6. Autographed photo of the cast of Facts of Life
  7. A couple of four day passes to Disney
  8. Cubs tickets
  9. Hook it up for him to ring the opening bell at the NYSE (on a non-trading day)
  10. Teach him how to work the teleprompter

Boring Work, Varmint Rifles, and Recycling BBs

What a weekend–finished tile demolition project, bought some soy milk, and took care of several administrative tasks.

There was some fun in there too. We went up on the mountain to a birthday party which, as all good birthday parties do, involved a few pops, pulled pork, a discussion on the merits of golf carts as local transportation, and the firing of several rounds from a “varmint rifle”.

It became clear to me that I’m an even worse shot now than I was when I shot often. At one time I was a pretty decent shot. Never great, but decent. Of course, I’m turning this into justification for an air rifle purchase in this month’s budget. I figure the cost of that along with the price of a few thousand BBs is much cheaper than the amount of ammunition it would take for me to ever be able to hit the broad side of a barn again.

By the way…did anyone else run their own BB recycling program as a kid? If I remember, a piece of plywood behind your aluminum can targets did a pretty good job of knocking them down, after they’d been slowed by the can of course. I don’t think we were smart enough to put some sort of catch tray at the bottom of the plywood. We probably spent more time picking up BBs off the ground and shaking them out of cans than we did shooting. Once we moved on to shooting bumblebees under the pear tree it became too treacherous to try and collect “reloads”.

Sorry for the autobiographical pause…just thinking that marksmanship skills are something that should be maintained throughout one’s lifetime. You never know when you will have to take down a squirrel or rabbit for dinner.

Retail Wasteland

Driving back from Nashville yesterday we stopped in Cookville to get gas and let Pea run wild through their mall. What we found was Zombie Mall. It was like something out of a Cormac McCarthy book. All the stores were empty with the gates pulled down, no one else inside but a couple of mall walkers. It smelled like an old country church, but you expected to be attacked at any moment by an undead congregation.

The only safe haven in the mall was a GNC at the far end of the mall. Why it was still open I don’t know…probably just to spite the owners into keeping every door at the mall unlocked. The only “big” store, JC Penny’s, wouldn’t even let you enter from the “mall”. You had to go outside and back in.

It would be cool if someone took these old retail spaces and put them to use with stuff like indoor skate parks, soccer fields, indoor playgrounds, etc. I mean, I’m not doing that with my money, but it would be cool if someone else did.

Time to Move This Island

Twitter has definitely changed a lot of things for lots of bloggers. To compound matters, Twitter changes things with Facebook too. I’ve been thinking about the best way to handle all three of these things for a while. There are few issues that come up which make it almost impossible to not annoy someone. Usually I wouldn’t care about that, but how to deal with these things has been bothering me as well:

  • I like Twitter updates fed into Facebook, but I’m finding that most people on Facebook don’t realize that I’m not actually on Facebook when they show up. So I end up getting replies on my status, an email about those replies (yes, I know I can suppress those), along with the replies I’m actually expecting on Twitter itself. Worlds collide! I don’t want to disable the emails because I still want to be notified when people are replying to my actual status updates.
  • I like Twitter to be updated when I write a new post here. I realize that’s annoying for a lot of people as a general concept, but my tweet/post ratio is probably close to 30/1, so it can’t be that annoying. And the stuff I write here matches up pretty well with the stuff I tweet.
  • I like hitting the “Post to Twitter”  button to tweet what I find interesting in my browser, but that seems like it may be annoying for my regular Twitter followers, and it may not match up with what I tweet.
  • I’d like to be able to make short blog posts out of these tweets from the browser, Instapundit style, but that format doesn’t really fit in here either. Most of what shows up here is what I’m thinking, usually a little longer than 140 characters, and is coming from me instead of just a one line comment on someone else’s post.
  • Online reputation management is becoming a bigger deal. Since I own www.scottadcox.com, I figured I should go ahead and use it.

Here’s what I’ve come up with…

  • Removed my ‘sadcox’ Twitter feed from my Facebook status updates. I figure I can still use Facebook’s built in status update, possibly for more personal type stuff. So…don’t expect too many updates there…heh. That move is more for me than for other people.
  • Set up a new ‘scottadcox’ Twitter account, mainly to handle tweets coming off the browser. So there shouldn’t be any more “Reading:” tweets on my sadcox account unless I make a mistake. I’ll be using the ‘sadcox’ account more for conversation, replies, etc. I still consider that my “real” Twitter account. No need to follow the new one unless you just want to see what I’m reading. In other words, no interaction on that account.
  • Set up a new blog, www.scottadcox.com. This will mostly be made up of the tweets from the browser, which will let me post Insty-style.  I even found a theme that works well for that type of posting. It will be very frequent with limited commentary, like Twitter for people who don’t use Twitter.

I don’t really have any plans for monetizing the new blog–it’s mostly just for linking out. There may be some VERY unobtrusive ads later, but that’s not really on the table at this point. The basic idea is to make something easy to read and pop lots of interesting stuff. I’ve felt pretty limited here in not being able to do that just because of the layout, and I’m not really interested in completely shifting gears here and changing what I’ve been doing.

Maybe I’ll change my mind later…dunno.  For now I’m going to put the feed from the new blog in the sidebar here. Hopefully these two will end up working together somehow, and I’ll figure out exactly how that will happen according to the bumps in the road I’m sure to encounter.