Coyote Blog

You can submit for this weeks COTC here.

The new Carnival of the Capitalists is up at the Red Prawn.

The host next week is....me!  Submissions should be sent via the Gongol submission page here.

In this post, I was surprised at the high share that Firefox has with Coyote Blog readers.  Looking into this further, I have found the high (30+%) Firefox share to be pretty stable over time.  However, I have a second Sitemeter account that tracks the cumulative stats for all my camping and recreation related sites of my business.  These visitors are much less likely to be computer-savvy, and the browser shares demonstrate this:

Coyote Blog Readers:

Recreation Site Visitors:

Not sure I really had a point here, but it is an interesting difference.

When I first installed Google desktop search, I thought it was awesome.  It did an amazing job indexing everything from my Outlook email to the files on my hard drive to my Internet history files. 

A couple of months later, though, I am not so thrilled.  In particular, Google desktop search seems to be missing all kinds of hits in my email.  I will get no email returns from Google but then use the "find" function in Outlook and get 20 hits for the same search term.

This is very disappointing, because I was so fired up about the product initially.  It seems like Google software may be subject to the same senescence issues that seem to be a fact of life in Windows.  Since it is both free and a beta, I am perfectly willing to cut them slack, but I do hope they get the kinks worked out.

The Carnival of the Capitalists is up this week at Weekend Pundit.  The Carnival is coming here to Coyote Blog in 2 weeks.

The Carnival of the Capitalists is up this week at Weekend Pundit.  The Carnival is coming here to Coyote Blog in 2 weeks.

Had a record day today hosting the Carnival of the Vanities.  Guess what time in the traffic chart below that Glenn Reynolds linked to me?

Welcome to the 125th edition of the Carnival of the Vanities.  Many thanks to Silflay Hraka for starting the Carnival to showcase smaller blogs to a wider readership.  Look for future Carnivals at these sites:

February 16th - Soccer Dad
February 23rd - Pundit Guy
March 2nd - Belief Seeking Understanding
March 9th - Solomonia
March 16th - Bird's Eye View
March 23rd - CodeBlueBlog
March 30th - Eric Berlin
April 6th - Incite
April 13th - Yea, Whatever

Future dates are open to anyone interested in hosting.  While you're here, feel free to look around -- this post will tell you more about what I do here.

OK, enough of the introduction, on with the show.  As is traditional, we have taken all comers regardless of their point of view.  I have exercised my editorial license only in selecting the first post:

Continue reading ‘125th Carnival of the Vanities’ »

If you are coming from the "Best Business Blog" poll, welcome  (if you are a regular reader, you can vote for Coyote Blog here).  Here are some examples of our business blogging:

Real-life small business experiences:  Buying a company; Outsourcing to Your Customers;  Working with the Department of Labor;  A Primer on Workers Comp;  Dealing with Sales Taxes;  Services and Brands

Economics:  Taxes and Class Warfare; The Harvard MBA indicator;  Messed-up Pensions

Capitalist Philosophy: 60 Second Refutation of Socialism, While Sitting at the Beach;   Respecting Individual Decision-Making

Libertarian political commentary:  Post election wrap-up; Thoughts on Kyoto;  Fisking the NEA

Frustration with runaway torts:  Jackpot Litigation; Coyote vs. ACME;  Plenty More Here

Camping (my business):  New American nomads; This RV is just wrong

Attempts at humor:  Replacements for Dan Rather; My Manhood vs. the Pocket Door

Extending Occam's Razor: Meyer's Law

ACME Products:  Instant Girl; Ultimatum Gun; Earthquake Pills

February 9 will be my first attempt to host Carnival of the Vanities.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Carnival, it was started by Silflay Hraka and is meant to give smaller blogs a chance to reach a wider audience.

Submission guidelines

Send an e-mail sent to coyote@coyoteblog.com.  Put "COTV" in the subject line. Add a one word category to help me sort them (i.e., sports, religion, politics, etc.). It should look like this: cotv -- rambaldi devices.  I am not insisting on any theme, and all political points of view are gratefully accepted (if you want a theme, wait for our Carnival of the Capitalists issue at the end of the month).

In the text of the e-mail include the following information:

• Name of your blog:
• URL of the blog:
• Title of your post:
• Permalink to that post:
• Trackback of the post:
• Describe the post in a sentence or two:

I need to receive your e-mail by 3 p. m. (EST) Tuesday, Feb. 8 for it to make the 125th edition.  Deadline extended to 6PM EST.

I pulled out my old Commodore 64 the other day and played a bunch of fine old games including Raid on Bungling Bay, Choplifter, and M.U.L.E.  All were fun, even if their graphics do not stand up to the test of time.  In particular, M.U.L.E. is a fabulous game and it amazes me nothing like it has ever been produced since.

This is my browser mix here at Coyote BLog this week:

UPDATE:  I just checked, and Firefox is at 25% today. IE under 60%. I seem to be
single-handedly bringing down Microsoft. Maybe thats how I will make
money with this site - Bill Gates will pay to shut it down [cue Dr.
Evil with pinky at corner of mouth saying "one Miiillliiiioonnnn
dollars"].

Check out the link a ways down on the left.  I am thinking we need to have a get-together for all those featured on the home page.  Looks like I am the only "dog" on the page.

I sent this email to NZ Bear today:

From reading the FAQ's, I guess I am not the only one, but in moving my blog from my Typepad address https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog to a dedicated address www.coyoteblog.com I have managed to grossly inflate my ranking, since my link score has been credited with cross-links between these two sites.  I am not actually a "Large Mammal" "“ I am actually small and weak and survive by hiding among the rocks from the larger beasts.  When you work up your "merge" code, please add these sites to your list of targets.

Warren Meyer "Coyote"

My apologies to folks who have emailed me over the last few weeks.  Every day I check the box and each day it is empty.  I figured I must not be provocative enough in my writing - no hate mail or anything. 

The long and the short of it is that it turns out that the account was forwarding to a moderately random email address.  I will work to recover the lost emails, but things are working now (just in time for my hosting the Carnival of the Vanities next week).  Sorry to anyone who thought I was ignoring their mail.

I try to keep on the lookout for odd, niche blogs out there.  Previously I linked to the remote (as in TV remote) blog and the NFL Cheerleader Blog. 

The niche blog today is the Payphone Project, which is both a photo blog as well as a news site about payphones.  Make sure to look at the pictures, but here is my favorite-- The Antarctic Payphone at Scott Base, Antarctica  (uhhh, anyone here have 426 quarters they can lend me?)

Though I must admit that this one on Lake Victoria is cool:

I actually first ran into this site when I was working in the online directory world at Whitepages.com. 

Update: While I called this a niche, it must be a big niche, because the Payphone Project has competitors (and here, and jeez, here too)

Coming soon: Carnival of the Payphones?

Most computers today do not have a true hard power switch, meaning that you flip it and the computer loses power.  Most of them have some kind of electronics and software in the middle.  The reason for this, ostensibly, is that Windows used to do really bad things if you just flipped the power off without letting the OS shut down first.  So when all is well, pushing the power switch causes windows to shut down, and then the computer powers off.

The problem is that if the computer crashes bad enough, the power switch won't work, because the software or electronics behind it have crashed or locked up with everything else.  Every few days I find myself in a situation where I am crawling on the floor having to pull the plug out of the wall to reboot, or, on a laptop, having to pull the plug and remove the battery.

Give me my hard power switch back!

The beta for Microsoft anti-Spyware is a free download here.  They created most of the vulnerabilities, so presumably they may be best able to plug them.

I installed and ran the beta and it looks good.  I ran the program after running several other programs like adAware and spybot S&D and it found a bunch of things that the others missed (though how you know for sure, I don't know.  This message about found problems could be like the little dial that xerox machine repairmen set to determine when they get to come back).  The program even claims to have found and cleaned out TV media, which tops my all-time frustration list.  After the run, the program lists the threats found, and actually has good information about each threat so you know what you are eliminating. 

Update:  PCMag review

The Carnival of the Vanities is up here.

The Carnival of the Capitalists is up this week at Management Craft.  I haven't had time to read through everything, so I have no recommendations this week.  The site does note that future article submissions need to go to this site, as the old email system will no longer be used.  My hosting date in February is coming up soon, and I am definitely looking forward to it.

Its now up here at the Radical Centrist.

I have been looking for a good feed reader for a while.  I don't like the online solutions, for the same reasons I don't like web-based email clients  - they are slow and awkward to navigate.  I tried one or two that were supposed to integrated into IE, but they crashed my system, and I am trying to move to Firefox anyway.  I have not yet tried the new Mozilla email client called Thunderbird, but I am told it has a feed reader in it.

FeedDemon is a third party standalone app that is a combination of feed reader with tabbed browsing to pursue links in feeds.  The embedded browser can be switched between IE and Firefox, but even with the IE code, it has tabbed browsing!  I have been very happy with it.

The only complaint I had was that it was difficult to synchronize my already-read feeds between home and work.  For a week or so, I carried a usb memory key back and forth with the cache, but this was a Kluge.  Fortunately, the FeedDemon 1.5 beta has (almost) fixed this.  By integrating with bloglines, I do not get repeats at work of feeds I read at home.  There are only 2 downsides to this:

• You have to go online to bloglines to add a new feed to your reading list, though this is pretty fast
• Feeds downloaded at the office do not show up at all at home.  This is not what I ultimately want.  What I really want is to be able to download and have on my computer all feeds in both locations, but with the read/un-read status synchronized.  This may already be possible, but I can't figure out how.  Since this is a beta, I am sure more improvements are to come.

30 day free trial.  Recommended.

Tim Blair rounds up great quotes from 2004.  He may have spent more time on this one post than I have on my blog for the whole year.

The Carnival of the Vanities is up at Ravenwood.  Don't miss my post on the 60th anniversary of the great Phoenix-area German POW escape.

This week's Canival of the Capitalists is up at XtremeBlog.  Don't miss my post on the difficulty of managing corporate public relations in the web age here.