• Its 10 to 2 atlanta in the 6th. The braves may just win this one!! #

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• Eating baskin robbins out of business!! #

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Apparently, in Loganville, GA, there’s a Home Owners Association that wants to tell me where I can and cannot let my dog go potty. I’ve lived in a community like this before, it was a town house Amy owned when we first got married. The dogs couldn’t go on the grass as it was community property they had to go in the natural (woods) area. Since the HOA was responsible for the landscaping and for cutting the grass, I really didn’t have a problem with that. They could pee there, they just couldn’t poo.

Well, the Liberty Community Management Group and the Little Suwanee Pointe Subdivision want to tell their homeowners where there dogs can and cannot relieve themselves. I think that this goes way past the ideals of an HOA. I grew up in a neighborhood with out an HOA and while I loved that for many reasons (no stiffling rules about the number of cars in your driveway or the pattern in which your lawn had to be cut) there were also some bad things. An HOA which does not over step its boundaries (you know, one where they lean on people who don’t mow their lawn for a month at a time) is a good thing. It helps keep the neighborhood looking nice and clean.

One, such as the LSPS and LCM is just a petty little group of people who have nothing better to do with their time then worry about the brown spots on my lawn caused by dog pee. If I were the recipient of the violation notice, i would make it a point to walk my dog on the HOA President’s yard daily…

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In a hazy sound that’s reminiscent of Dylan (bob) The Walkmen have prereleased their new album on Amie Street for an amazing price of $5 (for 14 songs, can’t beat that) with all the proceeds going to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as part of the site’s “Download To Make a Difference” campaign.

Its a pretty admirable thing to do and for a $5 donation these days, you can’t beat getting free music (thats less then two gallons of gas!!). Not to mention the fact that the sound is pretty good. Like the cut from Canadian Girl (Canadian Girls are HOT!) or the also good New Contry, most of the tunes on this disc are worth a listen.

The Walkmen are a five-piece indie rock band from New York City, and along with Interpol and The Strokes are often mentioned when describing the modern “New York sound,” a second wave of NYC-based rock bands following in the footsteps of icons like Joy Division, the Velvet Underground, and Television.

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Well, the results are in and after an amazing 15 years on the list of top party schools in the country, Florida has managed to make it to the top. Of course, officials are linking it to the schools recent sports endeavors saying:

The fact that we have three national championships in two years is probably a major contributing factor,” spokesman Steve Orlando said. “We know our students like to have a good time.

Personally, I think its the fact that the students are in COLLEGE. I know that at the college I attended (which as it was a 2yr school, we were a “dry” campus) there was at least one party a night. Sometimes more. Which, come to think of it, might be why it took me so long to get a degree….

Anyway, back to the point. The gators apparently know how to party. So do West Virginia University, University of Mississippi and Penn State University. What do all of these places have in common?? They’re places I would have to be drunk to attend as well! So maybe there is a common factor in this after all.

The number one, stone cold soberest school? BYU in Utah. Go figure right??

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Add this one to the list of “Things not to do to family pets”! This is lumiere (guess where that name comes from), our Sheltie. He’s the third canine member of the family and usually he’s much fuzzier.

Shelties (think smaller collies) are nothing but fur. So much so, that five minutes after we vacuum the rug in the living room, we have to vacuum it again due to dog fuzz. The beagles aren’t too bad about shedding, but you run your hand along Lumi’s back and its covered. True, we should brush him daily (or at least weekly) and we don’t. So part of it is our fault, but Amy took matters in to her own hands and had a mobile groomer come out (which was cool in itself) and shave him down. Now, he looks like a rather tall chihuahua (chi-who-a-who-a).

In a way its a little sad, but at least I don’t have to vacuum every 10 minutes now….

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Talk about a major WTF?!?!?! We went by the mall this past weekend, something we rarely seem to do these days but we had a coupon or something IDK, anyway we stopped in to the GameStop there and perused the growing display of wii games and came across two games we thought looked interesting.

I’ll get in to the second game another day, as we actually play it and the little one is fairly good at being a penguin… its the first game I want to talk about today.

Octomania cannot possibly be described with words. We purchased this game because it resembled Super Puzzle Fighter II on the playstation. Or at least the little images on the back of the box did. Boy were we wrong.

Part of it is like SPII in that you can battle against another player (either via the network or the second controller) and they do fight based on the number of Octipi you remove from the screen but thats pretty much where it ends. The screen is full of boxes with numbers and the point is to get a certain number of same colored octipi in the square based on the number. You can then “kill” more octipi by linking them to the “cloud” of dead ones.

All of this is accomplished by rotating the octipi in a square pattern to get them where you want, needless to say, its a little frustrating. Add to it, the odd japanimation back story and this game makes for a splended waste of $15.

If you’re looking for an interesting game that will cause you no end of pain, look no further!!

Popularity: 63% [?]

If you’re like me you’re always finding ways to improve click-thru-rates on your websites. Whether its to advertisers, friends or other pages on your site, your ultimate goal as a webmaster is to get people to click right? After all, what good would a page be if people didn’t click on it? They might visit once. See the static, never changing, non-interactive content on your site and say “forgitaboutit!” The exact opposite of what you want them to do.

And tricks, tips and scams abound that claim to be able to help improve click thru and retention rates right? Well, I think I found one of the ultimate tools in a webmasters arsenal. The SiteSpect Difference aims to teach you how to use behavior tracking and “multivariate testing” to increase the “loyality” of your visitors. I’ve read through most of this white paper so far, and while some of it goes way, way over my head, most of it is simple stuff that as webmasters we should be doing anyways.

Chances are you know where your visitors are clicking already, and chances are even better that its not really where you think they should be clicking. This paper helps you make changes to your site that will change that. Check it out, its free and who knows, it might help improve your clicks!

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I had previously (ok, a while ago) blogged about the evolution of a blog and how it went through many stages similar to relationships and it appears that many of you (ok, well, 10 of you) agreed with me on that one. Then, funny thing, I stopped blogging regularly.

Part of it was a lack of desire, part work got to be a lot, plus I was working on redesigning Linuxtracker. Its not that I didn’t have anything to blog about or say, we went to Las Vegas, we’re doing the Dave Ramsey program, the world is messed up right now, its that I would think of something good to write about and then promptly forget it. I wasn’t writing down my ideas.

That my friends is the key. Ideas are only as good as the people who remember them. If you write it down when you have it, even if its just a note like “woman who sued fiancee for breaking up with her is a bitch” you’ll have more to go on when trying to come up with a good topic of conversation. If you need help coming up with good topics, see whats happening around the blogsphere. Watch/read the news. Visit your favorite sites. Listen to talk radio or just observe life.

There’s stuff out there happening every day that is ripe for the picking…. you just have to pick it.

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So, I’ve been a member of Entrecard since they opened their doors. And to be fair, its been a good, if sometimes onesided, relationship so far. The traffic has been decent, the friends and new blogs I’ve visited have sometimes proved valuable and other times not so much. I was intrigued, to say the least, when I heard about the newest endeavor by EC to help boost readers and participation on blogs. I mean, afterall, we’ve all seen how well blogrush helped right?

July 15th saw Entrecard announce a partnership with sezwho. Its simple. You join sezwho and add their dealie to your site and you have the ability to earn more EC credits via posting comments on other blogs. Now, I know you’re thinking “AWESOME!! Finally some payback for being first on problogger all the time” but thats where you’re wrong.

Your comments have to have substance and are subject to the ratings of the masses. If people like your comments, good for you, if not…..

Its an interesting idea, and one that is kind of patterned after digg, blogging zoom and other sites like that, however, this is strictly for comments. The more you leave. The better they are, the more likely you are to benefit from this conglomeration of stuff.

Yes, I’ve added it here, so comment away, you willing commentors, maybe you’ll get a good ranking! Oh and let me know if you’ve added it as well….

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Some of you (ok, the one person other than my mother) who visits the site regularly, may have noticed that it had been rather slow and sluggish to respond. The load times were dismal, the lightbox script for looking at photos didn’t work correctly, and things were just, well, bad.

I’m happy to say thats been corrected (for the most part).

The site is now running wp 2.6 (w00t!), the plugins have been upgraded to the latest and greatest (which fixed the wpg2 problems with lightbox) and I disabled Firestats, which I think were causing most of the problems anyways.

If you notice anything wrong, let me know….. I’d like to fix it.

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• How many parents does it take to get a 2 year old to go to sleep?? #

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• Do you really want to know what I’m doing?? #

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In case you were living under a rock, or in a cave, or on the third moon of Adapose 3 and you some how missed the chaos last week, the 3g version of the “greatest thing since Jesus walked on water” was released last Friday. That’s right, the 3g iPhone. Personally, I’m not a mac fan at all. Yes, they build a pretty box. And yes, they know how to make the gui look amazing. But their OS is just BSD. Their phone, is, in all practicality, an iPod that can make calls.

The “nice” thing about this version is that is does sync flawlessly with the Exchange server we use for email and whatnot… so no more tricks with yahoo or other methods to get your business email on the damned thing.

We have a couple of sales reps where I work that are Mac fans and as predicted, two of them already ordered their phones and a third is still trying to find one in a store…

I had the chance to set one up yesterday and I have to say I was not impressed at all. Aside from the thing being all shiny and black, it gets smudges on it like nothing else, the screen was covered in finger prints with in seconds and typing on the damned thing is next to impossible (note: I have a Blackberry curve 8310 and you’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hands). The fact that the letters are rather close together and you can’t really tell where one ends and the other begins is a pain in the ass.

Plus, when trying to type in a 40 character wep key for a wireless network, you have to keep switching back and forth between the letters and the numbers. From the limited experience I had setting up the email account, typing on the thing is going to take a while to get used to.

Ultimately, I think that if I was just out to buy the latest and greatest fad and I didn’t care about being too productive on my phone I’d probably rush right out and get one. In fact, with the built in wifi, you *might* be able to get away without having a data plan, but then you’d just have an ipod that could make calls. And that’d be a waste.

I love my BB Curve. Is there a phone in your life you can’t live with out??

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• Holy crap its hot. #
• Mark will be at cheeseburger in paradise by perimeter mall around 9pm tonight #

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• Holy mario kart! Mk on the wii is phun!! #
• @ longhorns for lunch!! #
• @ banjo lessons! #

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• @gruntled you are an open mic…. #
• So this is what it feels like to turn 30… Kind of a let down… #

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So I was going to write some pithy commentary on the strange band Sigur Ros but nothing really came to mind as I struggled to listen to one of their songs for more than 5 seconds. A writeup I saw in this months paste magazine had pretty much the same reaction as the author’s pet rabbits hated the music as well.

Thats why you’re being treated to the amazing stylings of Julia Marcell. Her album It Might Like You is a fun acoustic sounding piece of work thats pleasent to listen to. The vocals are good and strong and the melody of the music is at times light and airy and other times down right good.

If you don’t own her album yet, I bet you soon will. Dancer is one of my favorites on this disc!

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• I hate lightining strikes!! #
• Why is it that four year olds don’t like to eat dinnar?? #

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• So much for a three day weekend! #

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• Happy 4th!! If you’re at Turner Field tonight come on over to the big cow and say hi!! #
• Who the fsck decided to put independence day in one of the hottest months of the year?!?!? #

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• Trying to find ways to avoid work…. Got any suggestions? #
• Wtf is all this traffic?? #
• Maybe no fireworks tonite… Looks like rain!! #

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