Aaron Adams’s Lame-ass Blog

Because I didn’t have a particular box checked in my site options, I missed some comments to this site that got held for moderation. I’ve now approved those comments. And as always, I appreciate everyone’s feedback here.

You may have noticed that the site reacts a little quicker today, and that it was down for a while last night. That’s because it is now hosted by an Xserve!

It’s not exactly a new XServe, but it’s one hell of an improvement from what was there before. And there’s a new firewall at the head of the subnet, so I’m sure that helps too.

Thanks to Mike Peschka for his contributions.

As some of you may realize, I’ve been both a fill-in co-host and guest on a show called Your Mac Life where my friends Shawn, J, and Lesa let me talk about the latest Mac-related news until we get tired of it all (approximately 2.5 hours). I enjoy being on the show very much, and if it weren’t for the fact that I live in Dayton, Ohio, and the show originates in Nashville, Tennessee, I’d probably be there a whole hell of a lot more.

For quite a while now I’ve been toying with the idea of doing my own podcast, not as a competitor to something like YML, but more of a “me too” kind of thing. If I can’t join ‘em there, I’ll supplement ‘em here. The reason I haven’t created a podcast yet is because I don’t know if anyone would really be interested. I have a rough idea of approximately how many people read this page regularly, and it ain’t that many, often times because I’m not motivated to write in the depth that some other bloggers are. Every now and again I have something original here, and it seems to get its share of attention. But generally, I hate to use this page to repeat points that are better articulated by others, and turning it into link-o-rama would be equally pointless. Talking, however, is a different matter. I can say more than I can write, and I can say it with other people presenting different viewpoints or counterpoints. I can do more humorous things in a podcast than I can in writing. The format just lends itself to greater spontaneity and more information conveyed for less work.

But… the world of podcasting seems to be chock full of everyone with a microphone and an opinion chatting about many of the same things. I don’t want to be someone here spinning my wheels and creating more noise when nobody may care. So I have some questions for the readers of this site, and I’d like to get your responses in the comments section. To control spammers, I moderate comments to weed out the nastiness that isn’t caught by the filter, but rest assured that I want your honest opinion and censoring negative comments to this post isn’t the kind of petty stupidity I care enough to engage in.

Would you listen? Do you have the time and interest to add one more podcast to your list? Is the technology news and opinion podcast genre pretty much full? What would you want to hear? What would you not want to hear? Am I over-thinking this? Is there something I haven’t considered? Submit a comment and let’s see where this goes.

Someone at Macworld last week greeted me as “the guy who’s made a career out of syslogd -u”, a reference to this posting to my blog that also appeared in an issue of MacTech and on AFP548. I was a bit surprised to hear that comment for a couple of reasons (one of which was that someone may think I make a career out of writing), but I want to clarify something for the readers of this page.

I’m not stupid enough to believe that editing a plist file to add the -u switch to syslogd is some kind of earth-shattering tip that the Mac community can’t live without. When I submitted that article to MacTech initially, there was no guarantee and no indication that it would ever be printed. The same goes for AFP548. The only place I know for sure that it will appear is my own page, so I posted it.

I realize the person who said that to me was doing so with a wink and a nod, and I take no offense from it. I write some of these small-time tips because they don’t seem to currently exist in the Google database. My first reaction when I need to know something is to query Google, and when that search fails to turn up an answer, I look elsewhere. When I know the answer, I write it up in the hope that it will make someone’s day a little easier down the line and, judging by my web stats, I’ve accomplished that in a couple of different ways.

At 1:05 this afternoon I turned off required registration for comments. At 7:30 this evening, the spammers found me. By 9:30, I had to turn required registration back on. That’s really frustrating because I want to make interaction with this site as painless as possible, but even more so, I refuse to let my personal property be a dumping ground for the criminal filth these people (Can they really be considered people?) spew onto the Intarweb. It is my sincerest wish that all spammers burn in hell.