In preparation of using the root website for something, I’ve moved a bunch of my personal items from there to this blog. The Poetry, Parodies and Writing tabs contain the bulk of it. Feel free to check them out, or don’t.

Soon as I get myself organized, I’ll do up a post of the future of probablynot.com.

As you might have noticed, there is a new theme to the blog. Normally when I change the site around I just say “Please excuse the mess” and make changes. I never talk much about what exactly I’m doing to the site (except that one time I went in to detail about switching to Wordpress from Coranto).

However, I really want to throw some credit out this time because this new theme is just all kinds of cool.

The base theme for Wordpress is called The Sandbox. Its a theme built specifically to support templates. You might be thinking “But isn’t that just what Wordpress does?” and in a way you are sort of correct. However, while Wordpress just provides functions that you can plug in to your themes, the Sandbox theme is a skeleton design for all those functions that can then be inherited and manipulated by the “skins” of the Sandbox. This is really where the Sandbox shines. Now I’ve got one theme that handles the nitty gritty page code, and then I have about a dozen different skins that supply new images and a CSS file, along with any other enhancements. If your webspace has size or file limits, file reusability is important.

So, now to the usual… things may change around a bit now and then here, so bear with me… Please excuse the mess.

Its not often I post in the Site News section, but hey, I’ve got site news… I’ve been looking at new themes for a while now, but I’ve been holding off redoing them because I also wanted to upgrade to the latest Wordpress, which required a newer version of MySQL than I had available.

Well, after much wrangling, my database was finally migrated to a new server, and as I type this the latest Wordpress is uploading. So a new theme is coming…

I was born by a river in a little tent,
And just like this river,
I’ve been running ever since.
It’s been a too long, too long-time a-coming,
But I know a change gonna come,
Oh, yes, it is.

And then I went to see my brother, oh yeah.
I said, “Brother, help me, please.”
He turned me down.
And then I went, I went to see my sweet mother.
I said, “Mama, Mama I’m down on my knees.”
It’s been a too hard living,
And I’m afraid to die.
I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.
It’s been a long, long time a-coming,
But I know, but I know a change gonna come.
Oh, long.

-Sam Cooke

Avast! Yarrr! Yes, it is once again Talk Like A Pirate Day. And yes, I have installed the annoying Pirate Speech plugin for Wordpress, so suffer!

I’ve already managed to make it through one meeting this morning saying things like “Aye” and using as much pirate speech as I can, but luckily there aren’t many meetings scheduled today.

So, enjoy the day, talk like a pirate, and have fun.

Not much going on here… still fixing up the house so I can move in. With the lack of interesting stuff, I decided to go ahead and do one of those posts where I talk about my site stats.

Let’s begin with the fact that my website is about 4500 times more pornographic than I thought it was. 4599 people found my website in July while searching the internet for “free porno”. 30 people got here looking for “sexualintercourse”. Overwhelmingly, more people found my blog while looking for porn than anything else.

16 people did get here looking for information on Puzzle Pirates. Poker, PoE, Doubloons, how to cheat, how to uninstall it. I hope they enjoyed my writing.

12 people came here looking for Scooby Doo, all of which were lead to The Duality of Doo, my review of the two Scooby Doo movies. One of those people was specifically looking for “pictures of Scrappy peeing on Daphne”. I’m sorry I couldn’t help.

10 people came here seeing answers to why the alliance sucks at pvp in World of Warcraft. Only one person came here asking why the horde was better. Next week I will publish a paper using my extensive research that will conclusively prove that people who play WoW are very “glass half empty” sorts of folks.

6 people came here looking for solutions to problems with their Jeep Cherokee. Hopefully they got the answer… take it to the shop, don’t drive it when its overheating. I do these things to educate you at my own expense.

4 people came here looking for my City of Mist raid guide. I guess the new EQ progression servers drummed up some interest, its just a shame I don’t have the guides anymore. But check the Google cache…

1 guy came here seeking the meaning to the Seven Mary Three song “Oven”. As much as I love the song, I don’t get it either.

There were tons of other searches, mostly just getting here once, and far too many of them I expected. I didn’t seem to get any of the crazy search phrases other sites post about. Well, except the porn stuff.

On the other hand, how do people actually get here? By looking at the referrers I can see that, obviously, most people got here from Google or Yahoo while looking for porn. Beyond that I appearantly appear on the Portal Network MMO bloglist. Neat. I also got 4 people who got here from Nerfbat. Most of the other referrers, however, indicate that I am my own best promoter… Many people come here as a result of my posting on message boards (link in signature) and making comments on other people’s blogs (link on name).

So, to all you people who manage to find my site somehow… welcome. Enjoy your stay. Come back often and feel free to comment.

You may have noticed the Currently Reading section over to the right has been empty. Let me tell you, it definately is not from lack of material. I have got a stack of books just waiting. No, I am currently not reading anything because what is usually my reading time, riding the bus to and from work, I have been using as work time.

See, I spend roughly two and a half hours on the bus each day. About an hour going to work, and an hour and a half coming back. Since my work has been so kind as to provide me with a laptop, I have been doing program code while I travel, which in turn allows me to only need to stay in the office about six hours each day.

It is a sweet deal. I mean, if I was driving myself to work, that same amount of time (a little less, the bus takes a longer way, and the transfer from bus to rail can be a time killer) would be just lost. I would be spending is dodging idiots on the highway and trying my best to adhere to an “Arrive Alive” policy.

So anyway… I do have a dozen or so books waiting for me, and there are like another ten or so coming out in the next couple months I plan to pick up, and I’ll get back to reading and reviewing them just as soon as I buy my house. Ha! Yeah, like I’ll have more time once I have a house to work on! I crack me up sometimes.

Other blog sites will occasionally do a post about their traffic stats… what google phrases turn up their site, where readers are coming from, etc… Not me, I don’t have those stats. But what I do have is Akismet comment spam blocker. So instead of talking about who is coming here for the content, I’m going to talk about the people that come here to spam…

Quite possibly the most abundant spam is for phentermine. But only if you are interested. (So the spam claims.) Of course, they post that comment probably 300 times a day. And I’m not interested in phentermine, especially since I don’t know what it is.

Second is Xanax. Almost as often as phentermine. Then comes Xenical, ambien, tramadol, and a horde of other drugs. Does this spam actually generate them sales?

Then comes the online casinos.

Most of the spam is very polite. They apologize for what they are about to do, or say its only if I’m interested. Some tell me I have a great time. Some thank me for the bookmark. Some even exclaim that my site is very cognitive.

The irony is… before I installed a spam blocking plug-in for WordPress, I got about 10, maybe 15, spams a day that I manually deleted. Since installing Akismet 3 weeks ago it has blocked 3,500 spams. Its almost as if blocking spam actually attracts more spam. But I’m not about to remove the plug-in. I’m not that crazy.

You probably won’t notice much at all, but I decided today to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. While from the outside it all looks pretty much exactly the same, under the hood the upgrades are many and sweet. Writing posts has become alot easier and quicker, and with the addition of Widgets, maintaining the sidebar no longer requires me to actually modify the base code files.

Awesome.

Well, I’m off to continue doing other things, one of which might just be making a new logo image. Enjoy.

I decided to start keeping a list of what I’ve got jammed in my MP3 player. So, over on the right you should see a link entitled “My Playlist”. Basically, I’ve got a ridiculous amount of CDs, many many hundreds, possibly over a thousand, which isn’t much for someone who works in the music industry or at a music store, but its quite a bit for someone who has never worked in either.

Anyway, there you have it.

Enjoy!

Basically, it’s for my brother, but I’ve added a simple “How To” guide on Programming to the site here. It’s over on the right listed as “So you want to be a programmer?”

It isn’t anything fancy, just the basic rules that I personally follow when it comes to programming, which is what I do for a living. The main idea behind it is that you don’t need to spend large amounts of time trying to memorize all the nuances of a language, just learn the basics and fake the rest.