Pac-man meets Qix game. For those who remember and enjoyed playing Qix and Pac-Man, you will probably enjoy this time waster. I have. The first few rounds are really easy but it gets much, much harder around level 7.

This is odd, the Linked In VP actually thinks their service can do a better job than the Yellow Pages. Certain sections of the Yellow Pages, anyway. Funny thing is last time I checked the Yellow Pages I didn’t have to register for something first before searching through it.

Web-based social networking takes advantage of the power of relationships among friends, and friend of friends, in social settings. Similarly, LinkedIn relies on connections with business colleagues and, in turn, their colleagues.

The words “takes advantage” ring eerily in the text above. Yes, it’s the Reuters reporter’s words, but it’s the perspective I have with services like these that want to know all about our friends of friends of friends and try to draw some cosmic connection with the data.

I register for almost everything, but one missed to date has been Linked In. It appears from the comments by Coding Horror that I’m glad I haven’t yet:

I’ve been a member of Linked In for almost two years now. I dutifully entered my credentials and kept them up to date. The only other interaction I’ve had with the service since then has been a continual stream of link requests. I’m selective about who I approve, limiting it to people I’ve only met in real life. And the net benefit of this selectivity? As far as I can tell, zilch. Nada. Nothing. I did get a cold call from a headhunter once based on my Linked In profile, but I don’t consider that a benefit.

Coding Horror also indicates there is no automated way to cancel. Any service which doesn’t let me leave as easily as join is a non-starter. It’s doubful, although definitely ambitious, that they will ever become comprehensive enough to replace the Yellow Pages. If they ever should and they allow people to search for people they don’t know by service without registering, then I’ll get listed. In the meantime, I’m sticking with the reference from Coding Horror who actually has been using the Linked In service for two years.

Any readers have experience — pro, con or neutral — with Linked In?

Been a little while since we’ve checked out the standings in the 2006 Hmm Virtual Stock Exchange. There are a mere 77 days remaining to see who will be crowned the 2006 Hmm Virtual Stock Exchange champion. Looking over the top 10 there are several new names and we are now up to 95 players in the game.

superdav42 has the top spot as trading opens this morning with $156,157.26, an overall return of +56.16% with 1 transaction in the last 40 days followed closely by iiq374 with $152,385.86 (+52.39%). Slickrick is pulling up the #3 spot. Will one of these three be #1 77 days from now?

It’s looking like we’re going to get over 100 players which means more prizes. There’s still plenty of time if you want to play just click here, register and pick your virtual stocks.

We’ll check in on this again in November. Good luck to all players.

Last week we received a ‘free’ exercise bike with the points that we’d accumulated at one of the indian casinos and my wife surprised me by saying she wanted an iPod to listen to while working out. We visited Costco this morning and picked her up the 80GB iPod ($339 USD). She wanted the black one instead of the traditional white. The last one at Costco.

The tiny package contains only white earbuds, a dock connector, a USB connector for charging and syncing, a soft black pouch to hold the iPod and of course the black iPod itself.

One thing I really like about the iPod is how easy it is to sync up your music collection. You just plug the thing in and it talks to iTunes and voila, the tunes move across to the iPod. At the bottom of the iTunes screen it tells how many songs you have and how much space it’s using: 1,184 songs is a long way from the 20,000 the device holds. I can’t imagine having 20,000 songs loaded in the device. That’s probably a lifetime worth of music for our whole family. More likely will be adding TV shows or movies. I’m itching to check out the show Jericho after talking to Rob and Dana at Webtalk Guys on Saturday.

Watched a couple minutes of the free Blade episode and the video looks alright. I notice that some shows like Prison Break are selling season passes ($39.95 for Prison Break) which enable those who buy to receive all current episodes and future episodes as they are released. Good idea.

The movie selection is weak, but will have to give it time there to ramp up like the TV section which now has TV shows from A&E, ABC, Adult Swim, Animal Planet, Biography Channel, Bravo, Cartoon Network, CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, Disney, E!, ESPN, FOX, Fuel TV, FX, History Channel, Jetix, Logo, MTV, NBC, NFL, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, PBS, Sci Fi, Showtime, Sleuth, SOAPnet, SPEED, Spike, The N, TLC, Travel Channel, TV Land, USA and Warner Brothers. There is bound to be something appealing in this TV lineup both past and present with prices at $1.99 per episode. I was looking forward to checking out Heroes from NBC, but the pilot episode is somewhat mysteriously missing.

My wife doesn’t like the iPod earbuds and has her eye on one of the kitchen dock kits. I was checking out the selection of nine games and don’t see the package any more for buying all of them. Is that deal gone? Not sure it’s worth paying $4.99 each, but would like to try at least Pac-Man on the iPod.

Weighing in: how to calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI)
The other day I looked down at the scale and jumped off when I saw the number 189.5. That’s the heaviest I’ve ever weighed, so I, too, plan to ride at least 10 miles on the bike every day. We’ll see how long I can last and how many miles I can get up to (here’s to hoping that this doesn’t go like last year’s YMCA experiment). Our oldest teenager is also going to be riding the bike. I was playing Doom on Xbox Live earlier today while riding. There is definitely something strange about trying to play video games while riding an exercise bike.

According to the Body Mass Index generator today I’m at 184 and it still shows me a little overweight. My goal is to get under 170, which would put me back in the “normal” weight category at my height.

Any readers willing to share how you are doing with your BMI?

Learned about this one awhile back and meant to blog about it, but searching through the archives it appears I never did. I was reminded about the Techmeme bot being blocked by the Wordpress plugin Bad Behavior by default when I read thatedeguy’s recent complaint:

I am on the Techmeme Blacklist. Yes, it does exist. I’m quite certain that Gabe, the owner of Techmeme will deny that I am on the list and perhaps he’ll even show the list to prove that I’m not on it.

I believe Gabe that there’s no blacklist, thatedeguy. Yes, this blog gets listed on Techmeme so there’s my disclaimer, but there was a time when this blog stopped showing up and I noticed it and contacted Gabe. The only thing we’d changed was adding the Bad Behavior plugin so my immediate concern was if somehow that plugin was blocking his techmeme bot.

If thatedeguy isn’t using the Bad Behavior plugin maybe he’s using some other plugin or program that is blocking the Techmeme bot? This isssue isn’t unique to the Bad Behavior plugin or Wordpress, it could occur with any filtering program that is using a similar methodology as the Bad Behavior plugin.

Maybe it’s because I’m a developer but I tend to look at problems internally before looking externally on issues like this. I don’t think it would be very logical for a site like Techmeme which exists to push current news that sites are talking about to have any kind of blacklist, as Gabe indicates in his comment on Thatedeguys’s blog.

Tom Raftery had the same problem as I and wrote about it in August 2006 prompting a somewhat heated discussion in the comments between the Techmeme and the Bad Behavior plugin developers. I don’t know if this is the exact issue for Thatedeguy but it was for Tom and I. Chris Messina also had the same problem.

As for the possibility of whitelisting Techmeme in Bad Behavior, I visited Michael Hampton’s site to see if his plugin has any specific information related to the Techmeme bot conflict and couldn’t find any with a quick perusal.

Next I sent Mr. Hampton an email asking about the situation and letting him know I was going to write a blog post about this situation. I was curious what he suggested for those who want to use his plugin and also want to be listed at Techmeme. His response, which he gave me permission to quote verbatim:

When Gabe first e-mailed me about his bot’s problem, about a year ago, I
told him exactly why it was blocked, and gave him two alternative
methods he could use to fix his bot. At first he did neither. Instead,
he chose to attack me, saying I was being unfair to him by not giving
his bot a free pass to violate protocol, (I don’t give Googlebot a free
pass, why would I give him one?) and calling Bad Behavior a stupid way
to go about screening out spambots.

A few months ago, he chose to take his attacks public.

He did eventually take one of the two approaches I outlined for him so
long ago, at about the same time he took his attacks public. Later I
learned that his bot was still being blocked, but for some other reason.
I don’t yet know what that reason is, except that the error returned is
400, indicating he’s likely violating the HTTP protocol (as Bad Behavior
uses 400 for protocol violations). But the reporter didn’t send any
bad_behavior log entries, so I don’t know exactly what error still lies
in Gabe’s bot.

It’s too bad. I like Memeorandum and Techmeme. I’d even like to be
listed in them. But that’s not going to happen until Gabe fixes his bot.

I also contacted Gabe by email this evening to ask about this situation and his side of the story. Remember, this is the weekend and both Michael and Gabe responded rather quickly. Gabe responded to the situation by saying that he was working on a solution and might have it posted by “midnight tonight.” He indicated that he had discovered some sort of workaround for the issue. As I publish this it’s a few minutes before midnight, so maybe I’ll be updating this shortly.

Update 10/30/2006 7:30pm PST: Gabe responded below in the comments and also privately to me since that he strongly refutes the notion that he ever attacked Michael Hampton. I asked Hampton to stop by here and address specifically when and where Gabe attacked him and he hasn’t shown up yet. Hampton did send me an email notifying me that he now saw one of his sites on Techmeme so the changes Gabe made seemed to have worked. Also, Thatedeguy responded with additional information. As always, readers are encouraged to visit the comments section for details and response. I try to in cases like this to update when it’s important to the parties the post body or write a follow-up post, but the comments usually come from the horse’s mouth (so to speak, no offense).

Resolution on the way
When I see Gabe’s resolution I’ll post a link to it or maybe Gabe or somebody else can do so in the comments below if you see it first. The reason for this post is to further help make aware those who are using the Wordpress Bad Behavior plugin — or another plugin or program that uses similar methodology to block bots — and want to be listed in Techmeme that there is a confirmed conflict. The solution of not using Bad Behavior isn’t a good solution and it seems by trying to whitelist the IP of the Techmeme bot wasn’t working as planned because the IP addresses change.

Gabe has said several times there is no blacklist that keeps sites out of Techmeme, but if his bot is denied access by the plugin, that means there is zero opportunity for your blog to show up on Techmeme. No matter who links to you.

If you see Wordpress bloggers complaining about not being listed on Techmeme ask them in the comments or privately if they are using Bad Behavior plugin and point them to this post or to Gabe’s once he has published the resolution (my guess is nothing different will be required on the our end with Gabe’s solution, but we’ll have to wait and see). Hopefully Mr. Hampton will point to the resolution for Bad Behavior users, or point to this post if he feels more comfortable.

Sometimes emotions can get in the way of solutions and as someone who likes both the Bad Behavior plugin and Techmeme, I’d like to see a resolution published for a not very well known problem that clearly has created some developer to developer friction. This post will be updated when a resolution is made available.

Regular readers through the website might have noticed a few changes recently at the site. Recently, I added a couple additional Wordpress plugins to the site with some minor custom configuration and also integrated an AJAX-style Google search option on the search results page. None of these changes took much time, but they added some nice functionality to the site which I’ll share in detail below.

Dynamic digg plugin
The first was the Digg vote button which will dynamically appear on posts that have been dugg by readers (see example live post above). You can see an example of this pictured above and at the bottom of each post near the comment box. If you have a Digg account and somebody has already dug the post, then it will show the vote button and you can click it and send some love if you think the post is useful, interesting or entertaining. If somebody has not already dugg the post then it will show the “digg this” link. I have submitted a few posts in the past to digg myself, but it feels wrong submitting your own stuff, so I haven’t done it for a long while. I feel better asking readers to submit or vote on the posts they like. It helps the site, it helps me and in the end it will help you in the form of more posts of that type quality being produced in the future and made freely available.

If you’d like to have your own dynamic digg vote system and you are using Wordpress, it’s pretty easy to setup. Here’s what I did:

STEP 1. Downloaded the digg this plugin by Aviran Mordo.
STEP 2. opened the digg-this.php file at line 55, which is two lines above the function that reads:

function notify_moderator_on_digg($post_id, $digg_ref ) {

And add an else clause with the following code:

Replace PERMALINK_URL with the permalink to your post. You can probably use something like: the_permalink();

STEP 3. FTP the modified digg-this.php file to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate.
STEP 4. Find a spot in either single.php or comments.php Wordpress template to add the digg_this_button code. It needs to be after the_loop part of the code so that you can get the correct permalink. You could hack it further of course if you wanted to use in another template or page but that is beyond the scope of what I wanted to do here.
STEP 5. Visit a post that has already been submitted to digg. If you don’t have any posts than get someone to submit one of your posts or digg one of your best ones yourself. As soon as the post is live on digg, which is right after you submit it to digg, visit the post page on digg.com and click thru to your post permalink page. You should now see the button instead of the link to “digg this.” Voila, you now have a dynamic digg this / digg vote setup just like we have here at Hmm. I would make sure if you submit the post yourself that’s it

Related posts based on word count
Download related posts plugin by Mr. Wasabi.

The next plugin I wanted to add was for showing related posts based on the number of words in a post. I chose a cutoff of 250 words, but if you didn’t want to have a cutoff based on word count than you can just download and activate the related post plugin out of the box. If you want to only show the related posts based on the number of words, then follow my instructions in this post: How to add sphere it function based on number of words.

The concept is the same in that I only want to show related posts for posts with a certain number of words. I chose to put the related posts at the very end of posts over 250 words right aligned. Some of the related post results aren’t as good as I’d choose myself, but in many cases it is helpful. Hopefully this helps interested readers explore other similar posts from the growing archives.

Google AJAX search
For awhile I’ve been wanting to add a way to conveniently search Google from within the Hmm search page. Those who have used the Hmm search before will note that there was a noticeable empty space on the right side. Once upon a time I tried putting Yahoo search results there but I wasn’t happy with the overall relevancy.

I added a checkbox to the search page with Google? next to it and when checked will run the same search through Google video, local, web and news. The results are returned almost instantaneously. You can run additional searches in the Google box and through AJAX you’ll get the results returned on the same page.

Try it out with this vanity search pictured above. The URL window will share any dual search result parameters, so you can share these searches with others.

You can add Google AJAX search to your site by using the Google AJAX search API. The first thing is to get an API key from Google and then go into your search results template and add the code that is generated. In our search.php template I added some code to transfer whatever is in the search box if the ga=g query string is set. The code to modify from Google is as follows:

searchControl.execute(”<?php echo($s);?>”);

The $s variable contains the search results. I didn’t make the code two way as far as what is entered into Google AJAX search input will prefill the Hmm results. That might be an interesting mod for another day.

Also, a reminder while on the Hmm search that any keyword can be subscribed to via RSS. This way if you only want to read posts on a specific keyword(s) you can do that here. Just click on the orange XML button for the RSS feed URL to use on the Hmm search results page.

From RSS to web
With these three changes I’ve added the ability for readers to digg or vote on already dugg stories, display related posts based on the number of words in a post and integrated an AJAX-style Google search. Pretty cool stuff with minimal time involved thanks to code generously donated to the internet community at large. If you operate a Wordpress blog you might look at adding these or other features and functionality for your readers.

Those who read the site in RSS only — which we’ve always provided full text RSS, BTW — will not experience most of this new functionality. This kind of stuff can help drive folks out of their feedreaders and back to the web version of your blog, although that is something I only thought of while writing this post. My main reason for adding everything here was to enhance the site experience for both readers and myself.

Now, it’s my turn to ask which of these features/functions do you find useful, if any? Is there some other feature you’d like to see added to this blog?

Navigate through a picture forward and back with your mouse in Flash.

It’s done. The bizarre thing to me is that it is being piggybacked on legislation targeting anti-terrorism.

President George W. Bush signed a law designed to bolster security at US ports and prevent terrorists from smuggling in nuclear weapons. The law also included an unrelated provision inserted by lawmakers in Congress to severely restrict Internet gambling, prompting gaming companies abroad to close down their US operations.

2006 has become the year of the fight against online gambling. Whether you oppose or approve of online gambling, it’s clear the government sees this as a campaign issue and it disturbs me to find this being lumped in with anti-terrorism laws. If it’s so strong on its own, why not keep it separate? I was telling a friend of mine the other day that online gambling is a felony here in Washington state and he was shocked. Next time I talk to him, I get to say there’s a federal ban too.

Another friend of mine who lives and works in Sweden for an online poker company told me this morning that his job is still up in the air.

The one thing the terrorists wanted to target — our freedoms — continue to be under siege. The terrorists win when we let the government continue to expand their power under the guise of protection.

Photo by Jeremy Wright, used with permission

The blogs were abuzz last week over blog network B5 Media receiving $2 million in venture capital funding. On our live Friday radio show October 6th we caught up with Jeremy Wright, CEO of B5 Media and asked him to spell out the $2 million dollar question: what are they gonna do with the money?

Some other things the interview reveals:

- B5 Media bloggers are only expected to make six posts per week and if the posts are long and of high quality article-size they are fine with 3-4 posts per week.
- several Editor positions will be announced in the future with an emphasis on promotion from within
- about half the $2 million is being set aside to pay bloggers for the coming 2+ years, some of the writers will make five times what they are making now and some will make 2-3 times what they are making now
- where the B5 Media blog network fits in with the competition
- what type of writers are B5 media looking for to join their network
- Does Jeremy read all the B5 blogs?
- will B5 be doing anything different or new with the design of the blogs on the network?
- hear for the first time ever the choir that follows Jeremy around during interviews

Several times during the interview a past post here at Hmm is referenced entitled: Another sweatshop blog network emerges which you might want to read first before listening to this interview. That post was written September 21, 2005.

Duration: 46:52

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Just a quick note to fill readers in on what’s been happening lately. We are in the process of setting up a new office/desk/closet for our online company KMR Enterprises. I’ll be taking pictures and maybe even a short video of the transformation of “the space” over the next couple weeks. We’re moving some of this business out of the office in our house and into an actual place of business in town.

Why?

The main reason is it’s time for a little bit of a change. The status quo gets boring and I like to experiment, demo and try new things as I’m sure many readers already know. This will present some new challenges.

I like being closer to the public and the public doesn’t visit our home. Also, I’m going to be doing some (local mostly) computer and web work for the town where we live. I would like to try building a good business portal website for the businesses in our town and help some of the other local business gain more web-related exposure as well as our established offline business. I’ve been doing this over 10 years and want to see if I can lend other businesses in town some of this experience.

Also going to move the Hmmcast to a bi-monthly instead of weekly schedule for awhile so Hmmcast #26 will be next Friday and cover two weeks worth of posts here. This is more a time-saving thing, because I want to use some of this time for other activities. My apologies for the last Hmmcast audio (thanks again for the head’s up, Will) that had some static problems. We’ve replaced the sound card and tested and all is working well again. I have a good interview with B5 Media CEO Jeremy Wright which I’ll be posting later today. Also have a couple more interviews lined up for coming weeks, so the Hmm Interview area will be delivering some new audio to fill in for the Hmmcast being every other week.

We’re also having to deal with some time consuming stuff with our offline business. Some good, some not so good. Since that is actually our primary business, the online stuff has been taking a bit of a backseat lately. I’ve been trying to keep up with my RSS reading however and the following are some quick thoughts on what’s happened over the last few days.

- Xbox Live Pipeline is a snazzy web interface for the Xbox Live Marketplace, but man, kill the sounds already. Worse than a game of hyper Pong.
- Google Spreadsheets and the artist formely known as Writely have now been combined into Google Docs & Spreadsheets [thanks read/write web]
- PC World PC Retail Mag thinks that the #1 selling gift this holiday season will be the Nintendo Wii. This prediction sounds pretty solid because there aren’t going to be enough PS3 to go around and unless Microsoft slashes the Xbox 360 price and adds HD-DVD the Wii could be the cabbage patch doll of 2006.
- John Chow shares his list of the 10 best Wordpress plugins. Browsing through it, we’ve tried and use only two of the plugins, but some of the others look very interesting, including the dynamic digg this plugin. I think the optimal title plugin would be handy for those who use Google Analytics because it pushes the title of the blog to the back of the post title and would make it easier to track in the stats. I’m going to try that one and the related posts plugins out and maybe the digg one too. Thanks John.
- Text-Link-Ads have released a blog juice badge. Hmm scores 6.7 out of 10 (I think). We’ve started testing them out here at Hmm so interested advertisers can buy a text link in the RSS feed (also pictured to the right). Seems pretty affordable for advertisres at $80/month. We didn’t set that rate, text-link-ads did and they take 50% of the money for the backend (too much in my opinion, especially considering I could write my own rotator to do this, but then they also provide an advertiser matchmaking service of sorts which I don’t have). I like that you can rotate in your own ads, which we are already doing. Thatedeguy swears by these ads. Let me know what you think of them in the comments. I think if they are rotated enough they’ll be alright and I don’t find them intrusive as a single text ad link. I’m curious what you think. At this point it’s a limited time experiment and it’s only in the RSS feeds.
- Verballs are furry creatures that light up and move when Skype calls come in. Think Gremlins and Skype. Windows only via Popgadget.