So I’m in court today (don’t ask), waiting to take the elevator down so I can head out and buy more brownies, when this black lady walks up to wait with me, and starts ranting away about something, presumably on the cell phone. We got into the elevator, and she continues to keep on ranting as we went down. Loud too. The only thing I could catch was something about “Brown” and “white people” in “Massachusetts.”

When I caught that, I had to stifle a grin. But then I realized something else. She wasn’t on the phone. I thought she had been railing away on the cell via a bluetooth headset, but she was actually just ranting out loud to no one in particular.

When I realized that, it was all I could do not to burst out laughing. I moved to the corner of the elevator, desperately trying to hold my face together with my hand. Finally the doors opened up and she walked out, still railing away. “….&*#$ white people!!”

I just broke out laughing from there, then headed out the doors, taking in the cool air and the warm sunshine. My brownie will be extra tasty today.

Tags: angry, black women, brownies, cell phone, election, funny, Massachusetts, Scott Brown
Categories: Politics and Poker
 
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So now that the sky is falling and the world is soon coming to an end, it seems my plan to pay off all my debts couldn’t have come at a better time.  Just a few more months and I will be back in black, so to speak. 

And I figured, what better way to celebrate the coming of Armageddon and my soon debt free existence than to give myself a much needed and overdue makeover?  After all, if I’m gonna go out, I might as well go out in style. 

This is where you, my beloved readers come in.  I’m going to need some advice and suggestions to complete my makeover here, and your much valued advice will most certainly be welcome.

So where do we begin?  Well it begins of course, with…
 

The Leather Jacket

 
Yep, there’s not a brother in creation who can lay claim to being the baddest of the badasses if he’s not donning a slab of weather beaten leather.  And I don’t mean the kind of leather sported by a 500 pound biker either:

Oh, HELL NO.

No, not quite.  I’m looking for a blazer type jacket that swings in the breeze as I walk in slow motion towards whatever epic battle I’m about to engage in with a gritty but determined look on my face.  Something like the following might be more appropos:

I'm kind of a big deal.

JCPenny’s never seem to have what I’m looking for though, and something like this I can’t chance ordering online because it’ll likely either be too short, too long, too tight, or too loose.  Something like this has to be perfect.  Oh, and something like this also has to have a big enough pouch to store all those women’s hearts I’ll be grabbing up when they see me looking all fine and whatnot.  So, suggestions?  Maybe an online store that will tailor make a jacket based on the measurements I give them?  Ponder over this some while I move on the the next item on my list:
 

The Watch

 
It’s kinda sad, but I haven’t been wearing a watch for years.  The last watch I wore was a titanium hunk of metal that was given to me as a graduation present from my folks after I finished college, my mother’s reasoning then being that I should have a gift that not even I could break.  She was wrong of course.  The thing gave up the ghost a few short years later, and my wrist still has that pasty white line around it where my watch used to be.  Here’s a tip by the way: just because a watch is made of titanium doesn’t mean it won’t break if you end up dropping it on the street the same day a dumpster truck passes through.

Anyway, the thing that held me back here from getting another watch was that I kind of liked my watches to be a bit.. well,  gadgetry.  You know, one that could tell me the weather, latest sports scores and what was currently showing in theaters.  So I ordered a watch from MSN Direct that looked like it had been lifted off of Dick Tracy’s dead body and thought I was once again the epitome of cool.  The watch would update with all kinds of nifty info and graphics via a radio signal.

The only problem was, I happened to be living in a dead zone 50 odd miles wide between the two areas where the watch could actually get a strong signal.  Needless to say I don’t think holding my watch out the car window as I desperately tried to balance between driving and using myself as a human antenna was quite what the designers had in mind.  Another downside was that the antenna was built into the wristband, and it was about as bendable as a block of steel.  While a lot of thought admittedly went into its design, comfort obviously wasn’t one of them.

So, what to do?  I still wanted a watch that was a bit gadgetry.  And man do they have gadgets watches aplenty.  They even have watches where you can upload videos or watch TV on as well!

Nothing says COOL like a watch that can get Rick-Rolled.

I might be going overboard with this though, especially since I have an online buddy who is convinced beyond measure that if I even think of wearing a monstrosity such as the video watch above, I will never get a girl, never, ever, ever, ever, amen and amen, for the love of all that is good and holy, please, do not sully the human race by wearing such a ridiculous contraption.

Well alrighty then. 

That still leaves the question of what brand and type I should get though.  Obviously I want a good, quality watch that will last, maybe solar powered, small and not bulky, black leather wrap, (to match my black leather jacket of course) built in compass, (I’m constantly getting lost so this is a must), and since I can’t get weather reports, I figure one that can read barometer levels would be a nice alternative instead.  Oh, and it has to light up.  I don’t mean the fuzzy wuzzy neon glow in the dark silliness either, I mean light up nice and bright so that a plane flying overhead could see it.  Seriously, I’m fed up with not being able read my watch because I’m running from the police and the dumpster I’m hiding in makes it too dark for me to tell the time.  It’s just uncivilized.

So, suggestions?    Moving on along in the meantime:
 

The Sunglasses

 
There arew few things in life I’m more finicky about choosing than sunglasses. They’re always too round, too ugly, too rickety, too bulky or too much or too little of some damned thing that I just end up hating it after a while.

With sunglasses this awesome, how could you not want me?

Bottom line though, the glasses have to be polarized.  When you can see clouds the way God probably sees them, then dude, those are the kind of glasses I want.  Only problem is, polarizing sunglasses are rarely mirrored or opaque enough so you can’t see the eyes.  And that just won’t do, especially when I’m checking out a super hot awesome babelicious babe’s umm… shoes.   It’s none of people’s business what I’m looking at anyway. 

I did see one brand that had polarized but completely opaque (none of that ugly brownish tint) at a Mall once, but I never got the name.  Once again, suggestions on brands I could check out are welcome. 
 

The Cellphone

 
I’m with Verizon, which as some of you Verizon users know likes to nickel and dime every bloody damned thing you do on your phone including using the built-in calculator.   Seriously, this is the one network where if you utilized every possible feature they offered you’d probably pay oh, about a grand a month or so for the pleasure.  And just to milk it further, let’s not pay a one time fee to download, say a ringtone.  Let’s offer a SUBSCRIPTION FEE instead where you have to subscribe to a ringtone you like on a $%^&ing monthly basis.  Dude, seriously.  Not cool.

And since I’m using a basic LG phone, it takes me about 10 minutes to dial in complete sentence when texting someone (including Twitter).  I could go Blackberry I guess, but let’s face it, we all know there’s only one solution here:

My hands are manlier.

I’ll have to jump ship and go with AT&T though, and from what I understand of their monthly plans, the costs can get steep ($80 or so for the whole works including unlimited text).   But a coworker let me try out the iPhone just for a minute and it was enough for me to fall in love.    Yep, I definitely wantie, especially when all the favorite apps I use have also been ported for the iPhone.  Heck even my webstats service ported an app for the iPhone.  Mobile blogging and twittering would get a whole lot more fun with an iPhone too, especially if I get caught in a Cat 5 hurricane and want to live blog the experience while sharp debris fly around me.

So for those of you who jumped from your former network to AT&T, was it a real pain?  I was told I can still keep my phone number from Verizon, but I’ll have to find out for sure.  One thing’s certain, I just can’t be a true badass now if I’m not carrying an iPhone. 
 

The MacBook

 
Villains use Windows.  The good guys use Macs.  There’s a reason for this, so who am I to break with tradition?  Besides, I need a machine that removes as many roadblocks as humanly possible between creating multimedia content and uploading it to my blog.  Do I wanna make a video?  Click click, done.  Do I want to create a podcast so y’all can swoon at the sound of my stud sounding voice?  Click click, done.  Photos, Music Composition?  No problem.  They really do make it that simple, at least from what I could tell when I played around with a MacBook for about two hours at Best Buy until they threw me out.  Microsoft?  I don’t know what these people are smoking, but Vista acts more like a virus sent by the Russians than an operating system.  Seriously, how hard can it be to make something as user intuitive and fun to play with like GarageBand?  I’d like to compose some bit of music and videos one of these days, but Microsoft, they like to leave that sort of thing up to third party developers who charge you $500 for the pleasure of installing their bloated craptastic software onto your system, which then proceeds to chew up your memory into bits, cause your hard drive to forget how to spin again and your video card to go blind from insanity.

When I say I want a pimped out notebook, this is not what I mean.

So, it’s settled that a MacBook is a must, especially if I’m going to be traveling a lot and living in dinky (but yet homely) apartments.  I’d love to get one secondhand, but from a cursory look on eBay they’re so high priced even secondhand that I’m probably better off getting it new.  Sad thing, this will probably be my biggest investment, and it’s not one I’m ready to make unless my blog earnings justify it.  So how can you guys help?  Well if you got one lying around, feel free to donate it to the brutha here.  It’s for a good cause.  Or, you could  link to my blog.  No, really.  Adding a link from your site can really do a lot to boost my standings in the search engines, and in return I’ll be happy to link you back.  Lincoln needs some link love, sugar.  

And finally:
 

The Motorbike

 
Yeah, you knew this was coming.  A badass without a bike?  It’s like Mozart without a piano.  Although, I might make an exception here only because I simply don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to go trudging around the country with both a SUV and a bike.  I could get a trailer I guess, but that tends to overly complicate things more than it should.  I already got a sweet ride, so is a bike really necessary?

Well yes.

It’s kinda like skydiving or bungee jumping, one of those things you do once in your lifetime, just to see what it’s like, at which point if you’ve managed to survive the experience you can then go around boasting about what a reckless badass you’ve been (though this is probably something I wouldn’t want my mother to know about.)

Plus, the chicks dig it, which is pretty much the only reason I’d think of getting one (and yet another reason why Mom is better off not knowing.)

Yes, I really am THIS awesome.

There’s crazy though, and then there’s suicidal.  While I’m down with crazy, I definitely wouldn’t get a bike with enough CCs that I could outrace an F-16 fighter jet.  A simple beginner’s bike with 250CCs will suit me just fine, thank you.  Bike enthusiasts will laugh at me, but most people won’t know the difference.  And besides, the chicks dig it.  Though truth be told, I really dug the Harley Fatboy that was used in the movie Terminator 2.  How cool would it be to have a bike you can effortlessly latch an oversized shotgun onto?

Get off my bike, Arnie.

Ok, on second thought, that might be just a bit too much (especially since the bike model Arnie rode on still retails for like $15,000 today.)

No, I think something a bit more sensible might be in order, such as the Kawasaki Ninja 250, which is touted as a great beginner’s bike and only retails for $3,000 or so.  Best thing about it of course is that it seats two. 

In case you haven't noticed by now, black is my thing.

On the off chance that anyone reading this is a bike enthusiast, happy to hear if you have any thoughts to add. 
 

Conclusion

 
That about wraps up all the ingredients needed to realize my lifelong dream of becoming a Super Righteous World Saving Badass.  Ahhh, I could see it now too: waltzing into a Dairy Queen somewhere in Smalltown, USA, taking my helmet off to reveal my studly, tousled, raven black hair, and ordering up the kind of drink only badasses would dare to order:

“Give me a milk…  CHOCOLATE.“

Dudes, who wouldn’t want me? 

Tags: Bike, black, black leather jacket, cell phone, debt, debts, fun, garageband, God, laptop, living, MacBook, makeover, mobile, motorbike, music, notebook, phone, Photos, podcast, stud, sunglasses, travel, verizon, Videos, watch, wishlist
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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I called up the Director’s office, but apparently the Director is such an important guy that I have to write a letter formally requesting a meeting with him first, then outline the reasons why. Good grief.

So I wrote a nice long letter explaining everything: naming names, describing Devil Woman’s long and sordid history, and my request to be immediately transferred either to another division altogether, or somewhere outside of headquarters.

Then I drove down to HQ and parked next to the building entrance. I grabbed my MP3 player in case the Director decided to see me then so I could record the conversation, and braced myself. In 7 years I had never done anything like this, and now my job and future was on the line. Once I turned in that letter there would be no going back. All of hell was about to be unleashed. I let out a long breath, and opened the door…

*RING*

My cell phone lit up, but I let it go to voicemail. I hesitated long enough to check my message just to see who it was, and it turned out to be my union rep, letting me know she had good news and to call her back as soon as possible.

Hmmmmmm… I looked at the entrance again for a moment, then decided to call her back.

“Hello?”

“Hi Del, it’s Linc. You had news for me?”

“Yep, she’s gone.”

“…………..what??“

“She’s gone, back to her old section.”

“What happened??”

“Apparently she wasn’t authorized to be in that section to begin with, so she’s been ordered back to her division.”

“……….well I’ll be a son of a b….”

I spoke for a few more minutes, and from what I could garner, my union rep had finally talked to one of the chiefs, who upon learning that Devil Woman had been moved, immediately called to have her put back. The move had been unauthorized and never should have occurred.

It was a victory, but I was peeved. My union rep had given me the runaround for days, telling me she couldn’t couldn’t be transferred, there was nothing she could do, I had no case, blah blah blah, and one conversation with the chief finally took care of that stupidity. Really, how about you actually find out for sure first what can’t be done before you start making broad assumptions and making me out to be the bad guy here? Damned stupid woman.

But… a victory is a victory, and I do need to thank God for it. If I hadn’t stood my ground, who knows how long she would have remained there. The powers that be in my section were trying to pull a fast one, but now they’re on notice. Next time they push me, I WILL bring the noise.

Tags: battle, cell phone, chiefs, corruption, devil woman, fight, good grief, hq, job, mp3 player, runaround, union, union rep, victory
Categories: In The Coal Mine
 
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I’ve been as busy as a beaver lately, but now that I’ve set aside a few minutes to blog here, I can’t remember what I did five minutes ago, let alone what I’ve been doing for the past week. My head’s in a fog, I’m chronically tired, and the whole world seems hell bent on working my very last nerve.

So, what to write about? Well, I’m here at my desk at work, munching on some chicken fingers and using toilet paper as makeshift napkins. The Eagles are playing off my laptop, and I’m just sitting here, wondering about my life, and what it’s become.

*cruuuunch* Mmmmm, good chicken…

Fridays at work always seems to be a bittersweet day for me. On one hand I have the office to myself, I can relax and surf the Internet or watch TV. Sometimes I’ll order in some pizza and garlic rolls, then chow down while I check my email and blogging stats.

But it’s also a day when the reality of how lonely my existence has become really sets in. While everyone else is making plans for a fun night out with their loved ones and friends, I just sit here at work, with only a lukewarm pizza slice and a dead cell phone to keep me company.

I can’t help but wonder if I’ve finally managed to dig a hole deep enough that escaping it has now become utterly impossible. This seems to be my lot in life, as it has been for the past seven or more years. Nothing has changed, and nothing will ever change. It seems the only thing left for me to do is resign myself to my fate, and hope something like cancer will finish me off early.

What a waste of human flesh I’ve become.

Tags: beaver, blogging, cell phone, chicken fingers, chow, death, depression, eagles, fate, five minutes, fog, friday nights, Fridays, garlic, job, last nerve, life, loneliness, napkins, regrets, toilet paper
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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Is it me, or does the mass of social networking (or Web 2.0) sites out there seem to be such an overwhelming chaos of convoluted information that even Einstein would have trouble making sense of it all?

Unfortunately though, not content to see 3 or 4 daily readers perusing my blog (despite my anti-social tendencies), I decided to make a journey through the social networking universe and see what was out there, and whether I wanted any of it to come back to my little corner on the web. I also needed a vehicle that would help me find relevant content that could truly inspire me (while also setting me apart from other bloggers). I started by going down the list of social networking sites found at Wiki, and from there I proceeded to spend the rest of the day clicking from place to place, sometimes bored, sometimes impressed, but mostly confused and perplexed.

Some sites seemed simple enough in its concept, but others begged the question: “What in the blue @#$% is the point of all this?” First there were the MySpace clones, some of which appear to improve on MySpace’s shortcomings. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, such sites were online slums exhibiting the worst that humanity had to offer, so I quickly moved on whenever it became obvious that a site I was visiting had been designed using a model similar to MySpace. To be fair, Facebook wasn’t nearly as bad or coarse as some of the MySpace pages I’ve surfed, but it’s really designed for those attending college (and for employees of popular companies).

Then it was on to sites that offered… well I wasn’t exactly sure what it was they offered. The worst offender I think had to be BlinkBits. I just stared at this thing for what had to be 30 minutes and I still couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. It did appear to be overwhelmed with spam though, and whenever I made a test submission, the content just seemed to get lost in all the advertising for Viagra. Hooo-kay…. Blinklist on the other hand seemed to be more polished, but it was still hard to understand the actual purpose of it. The list of “blinks” I sifted through didn’t seem appealing enough for me to check out (and again a lot of the blinks appeared to be spam).

My headaches from surfing finally started to wane when I began checking out the social bookmarking sites. Del.icio.us as some people by now probably know is the most popular one there is, but to me it seemed a little… bland. REALLY bland. So bland in fact that I thought for sure I was missing something, a key feature I was supposed to enable to access its full features. But nope, Del.icio.us was just a simple bookmarking service that utilizes tags to help you organize your bookmarks. Its interface though was just plain UGLY to me, and once I realized it couldn’t be changed, I began to understand why other social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia existed. I’ve already uploaded my bookmarks to Del.icio.us, but I think after I organize them I’ll export tham to Ma.gnolia, which has a much more polished and appealing interface to me. Del.icio.us seemed like the barebones equivalent of a Linux box, while Ma.gnolia gave me that happy-dappy, flower-filled MacOS feel, complete with sunshine and rainbows. There were a few other bookmarking services as well with some truly novel concepts, like Backflip’s method of organzing your bookmarks in a Yahoo style directory, but the rest more or less seemed redundant to me.

I then moved on to blogging oriented communities, like Xanga, Blogger and LiveJournal. But the most polished one I’ve found thus far was Vox.com, created by the makers of the MovableType blogging script. I’ve already been able to duplicate most, if not all of the features offered by these communities on my own blog, so I didn’t feel the need to join for the time being. One community that stood out a little though was MyBlogLog, which was designed with the idea of having people connect with other readers of their favorite blogs. I played around with it for a while, but didn’t see much use for it, partly because my favorite blogs weren’t listed, and partly because the listing of readers for a particular blog didn’t tell me much, if anything. All you see is a small thumbnail of the reader and their usually cryptic usernames underneath. It was still an interesting concept though, so I may decide to stick around and see if I can make it worth my while. There was another site called Squidoo that looked intriguing as well, giving users the ability to create “lenses” that were in essence start pages piecing together a variety of content reflecting the user’s personal interests. At least I think that’s what it is. It basically just offered a different way to organize content, but unfortunately the design seems to make it susceptible to spam as well. Some of the lenses read more like bland advertisements rather than a user’s actual personal take on places on the web that interested him.

For the most part I ignored some of the popular social networks based on specific themes since I was, ironically enough, already a member of them. Namely, I’m thinking of YouTube, Last.FM and Flickr. These three sites have definitely proved their weight in gold, and I’ve been consistently using all of them to complement my own blog. It’s funny, while I generally despise mainstream social networks like MySpace, these theme based networks on the other hand are like manna from heaven. There’s even a site called Doostang that’s designed to help people find jobs through social networking. Muy coolio.

I also came across a few nifty sites that offered a variety of ways for people to organize get-togethers and meetings in real life. Dodgeball (which uses mobile phones to send you alerts when friends and crushes are nearby) and Meetup (which allows you to find groups and meetings of interest in your area) were two of the best I’ve seen. If I had any friends I’m sure these services would certainly come in handy.

Finally, I soon I began descending on news oriented sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Tailrank, NewsVine (and many, many more). Newsvine by the way actually looked in some ways like NetVibes (a service that allows you to design your own personal start page through aggregation). It looked interesting, but WAY overloaded with content. It was one of those things that required your full attention in order to understand how it worked, but I suspect I’ll be investing a lot of time learning how to use all the features it offered only to end up wondering why I bothered in the first place. Tailrank was more blogging oriented, providing feeds for the user that can help you glean what
topics were currently drawing the most interest in the blogosphere. Reddit offered a Slashdot-like way to submit and discuss news items in a vanilla but very addictive format. Then there was Meshly, a service that offered a way for users to submit articles and content via instant messaging. Digg was far more polished in its look and voting system and remains one of the top sites in this particular category of social networks, but in the end I began to realize why these particular sites weren’t that appealing to me. In truth, I wasn’t really a news oriented person. I’m as interested in what’s happening in the world as anyone else of course, but sites like Digg and Reddit completely overwhelm you not just with news related items, but LONG discussion threads such news articles regularly spawn. They seem to go on forever, and ever, and ever, and…

I also noticed that these news oriented networks tend to draw a particularly monolothic demographic, so much that the vast majority of users that peruse these sites could probably be described as angry white male geekazoids who generally spend their pastime decrying in rabid fashion the latest evils of the current White House administration. Ironically enough, this probably would have still been the case had a site like Digg been launched in say, 1998, which back then would have undoubtedly provided an outlet for angry white male geekazoids to vent their frustrations over, uhhhh… the latest evils of the White House administration. In a way this is what I believe is the downside of time based content. It’s repetitive, cyclical, and ultimately boring. Wars come, wars go. Scandals come, scandals go. There really is nothing new under the sun. And I was getting tired of reading through news items that continuously sparked the same old rehashed arguments and flame wars ad infinitum. Good grief, tell me something NEW.

And yet the blogosphere is mostly awash in news, and discussions (or flame wars) over said news, so much that they start to become almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was the diversity? Where was the focus on timeless content, on things that might really matter? The void here was remarkably palpable to me, abandoned instead for themes that would guarantee the heaviest traffic: news and politics. Quality is forsaken in the never ending quest for quantity. And why not? Quantity after all is what brings in the mula.

Tired and weary from my online journey around the world, and from sifting through the endless content at places like Reddit and Digg, it occurred to me that I already had something wonderful and good all along, patiently waiting for me to come home. I had a means to explore timeless content the way it used to be done, back when the web was just getting started. Back when it wasn’t all about news, but about people, about true individuality and innovation. About things that mattered. That something was a small little toolbar currently residing at the top of my browser, provided to me by the good folks at StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon was really what I had been looking for all along. A way to surf the web aimlessly and randomly, and yet still find wonderful places that I could bookmark or blog about in a heartbeat. I was finding content that mattered to me, content I never would have found in a million years perusing sites like Reddit or Digg, or even via a search on Google. The kind of community StumbleUpon offered also proved to be far more diverse, and a more accurate reflection of the general population of mankind. StumbleUpon was the kind of social network that attracted people from all walks of life, rather than just a particular demographic of smarmy geeks who coined phrases like “Web 2.0″ and “folksonomies,” and then expecting the rest of us mere mortals to know what the hell they’re talking about.

So finally, after two bleary eyed days of clicking and surfing, after seeing what’s out there and beyond, the prodigal blogger has finally stumbled his way home. And who knows, if even StumbleUpon should lose its appeal after time, I could always create my own social network.

Tags: 30 minutes, advertisements, aggregation, articles, backflip, blinkbits, blinklist, blinks, blog, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogging community, blogosphere, blogs, bookmarking, bookmarks, cell phone, chaos, clones, convoluted, cyclical, del.icio.us, demographic, digg, discussion threads, diversity, dodgeball, doostang, downside, einstein, evils, facebook, fashion, favorites, flame wars, flickr, friends, geeks, get togethers, gold, good grief, hooo, individuality, information, innovation, inspiration, instant messaging, interests, items, journey, kay, last.fm, lenses, list of social networking sites, livejournal, ma.gnolia, manna from heaven, meetings, meetup, Meshly, mobile networking, money, movabletype, mybloglog, myspace, nerds, netvibes, news, newsvine, nothing new under the sun, pastime, people, politics, prodigal, quality, quantity, rating, readers, reddit, scandals, shortcomings, sites, slashdot, slums, social bookmarking, social networking, social networking sites, social networks, spam, squidoo, start page, stumbleupon, submission, surfing, tags, tailrank, tendencies, themes, thumbnail, timeless content, toolbar, traffic, universe, usernames, viagra, voting, Vox, web, web 2.0, white house, wiki, xanga, YouTube
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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I’ve been troubleshooting my blog to see what’s been causing the added load time, and then ended up spending a couple of bucks so I could correctly send pics to my blog from my cell phone, which previously kept resulting in broken links and improper syntax. I think finally got it right though….

By the way, blogging by cell has been made possible using a 2 year old plugin script…. written in German. Good grief, half the time I wonder what in the blue balls I’m doing here. It seems I spend more time doing blog maintenance than actually blogging. Still, I did manage to build this thing from scratch after months of work and scouring all four corners of the Internet for nifty plugins, so I’m not about to abandon this little project of mine and flee to Xanga just yet.

Anyhoo, after getting sidetracked by the moblogging issue, I went back to analyze why my index page seemed to lag at times when I tred to load it. Apparently, my tags plugin (the Ultimate Tag Warrior) seems to be the culprit. I noticed the load time sometimes jumped to 30 seconds or longer when my browser tried to access the ultimate-tag-warrior-ajax.php file. I have no idea why this is the case, but naturally I thought upgrading it might fix the issue.

Nope. Upgrading only proceeded to break the Tags Cloud shown in my sidebar. One step forward, two steps back. Love it…

I think the simpler solution was to just remove the code for the tags altogether from my index page. It clutters things up anyway, and it’s probably more appropriate to just display them on my individual pages instead. I think I finally licked this problem, but I’ll have to check it from home to make sure.

Ugh, I need a life.

Tags: ajax, apartments, blog, blogging, blue balls, broken, cell phone, culprit, four corners, ghettos, good grief, internet, load time, maintenance, moblogging, plugins, scratch, script, snapshot, tags, tags cloud, troubleshooting, two steps, ultimate tag warrior, upgrading
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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