Thanks to Southern Gal who was the very first webmaster to jump in and pledge to the Blogathon cause for ASACP and my efforts here at makeyougohmm. Go check out her weblog, post a comment, and share the love. Please take some time and donate to this cause as the donation doesn’t have to be large — it can be as small as a buck or two, so break out those piggy banks for this good cause. Tomorrow’s Script School radio show at 2pm PT / 5pm ET will focus on this cause and what will be happening during the Blogathon.

While on vacation I did some training for staying up into the wee hours and made it until 4:30 am one night, so I’m going to continue the training over the next week and will be reporting on how it’s going as well as give some more insight into what I plan to be doing during this 24 hour Blogathon. I should mention that I stopped drinking coffee a few years ago, so I’m not likely to be using caffeine to get me through it as I imagine others will be. My favorite beverage is chilled water. Will I be one of the few drug-free Blogathon contestants?

Related entry: here

We got up at 8am. Apparently Joel, our night owl was having trouble sleeping (he was wanting to be playing the online game: Diablo). Neal went and found us ice for the trip. I unloaded some pix and from Day 1: see the one from the arcade where Neal and I were playing the Simpsons pinball machine. 

I made this journal entry.

As we were coming into Reno, Nevada, a fire had just started on the side of the road and we speculated that it had been from somebody throwing a cigarette out their window. All along on the trip we saw signs saying that the fire warning was: HIGH. Somebody must not have read the signs we saw.

We arrived in Reno, Nevada and stayed at the Peppermill. The kids enjoyed the pool as there were animatronics (a bear, lion, etc) that came out every hour or two and made sounds and moved. We were pretty tired from all our travelling. The kids enjoyed the jacuzzi in our suite, floating underneath the bubbles. We ordered room service for dinner.

Oh, and yes, we lost more $$ while the kids played for a little bit in the arcade.

We ordered the pay-per-view movie: Anger Management which I didn’t think was as bad as many of the reviews I read. It wasn’t Adam Sandler’s best work, the ending was a bit awkward, but I laughed a few times so I’d give it a B-

(source: kvbc) The Paris casino in Las Vegas has started flying the French flag again. Apparently those flags were irritating some customers during the Iraq war and they were taken down. Imagine that?

While on the casino thing, I’m into collecting stuff mrchipper.com - this guy is a casino chip collector and I’ve added his blog to my blogroll. If I see an interesting blog, new, established, whatever, I will share it here. Sometimes for webmasters trying to figure out what they might blog about this can be helpful as I know seeing what other people are blogging about was helpful for me.

(source: Yahoo): Is it just me or if I’m driving along the road and strike a pedestrian and the person comes up through my windshield the first thing I’m going to do is STOP. This guy apparently drove on for a mile with this guy in his windshield. What’s wrong with these people? If you have a human stuck in your windshield, you don’t drive around town. Of course this isn’t as bad as Chante Mallard who drove home and had sex while a homeless man died stuck in her windshield. So let me just say this loud and clear for all passing motorists: STOP if you get a body stuck in your windshield. Hit that large thing at your feet called a brakepad, seek assistance immediately, and by all means don’t have sex on your mind with some person you met at a party earlier!

July 26-27, 2003 6am Seattle time — Wake up early and stay up late with the third annual Blogathon! Founded in 2001 by Portland, Oregon resident Cat Connor, Blogathon is a revolutionary internet charity drive where sponsors pledge money based on how long they think the participants can last in an all-day, all-night, website updating marathon.

More details as the date draws nearer will be available here at: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/ or by contacting TDavid directly at http://www.tdscripts.com/contact.html

(source: Miami Herald). I went into business nearly 10 years ago and just the technology I’ve seen change is stunning. The company was married to IBM technology and using the old system 36 and then switch to AS400 and now they are moving everything to the web. I have in my hands a letter from company reps telling me to stop collecting emails from clients because it was not a secure method of communicating company business and today they are actively encouraging us to get email addresses from clients. So yes, I’ve seen the changes firsthand that technology has made to the way business is getting done. It’s funny but the website for our offline business is crap, I have to update that. How has technology changed your business?

Popular open source database maker: mySQL is teaming up with Pogo of Redmond (source: eweek) to launch it’s database server in a box. If you’d like to learn more about mySQL, Script School is starting a free online mySQL course on July 25, so enroll today and learn how to use mySQL on your websites.

Radio talk show host, Michael Savage, had his TV show cancelled by MSNBC (source: reuters) for saying to a gay caller: “Oh, you’re one of the sodomites! You should only get AIDS and die, you pig!” I checked out the Savage Nation website which has text in like really BIG font. He does look a little bit like Jack Nicholson though … in The Shining. What a stupid, silly, hateful thing to say about gay people. I support free speech, but hate speech like this goes way too far. Savage goes on to say: “I don’t care about these bums, they mean nothing to me. They’re all sausages.” You might be able to get a glimpse of this insulting video footage at glaad.org (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) website, but traffic is hitting heavy at the time of this writing. Keep trying. I have no idea what Savage is talking about: all SAUSAGES? Maybe somebody else can make sense out of his diatribe.

Update 7/8/03:  Savage claims <a href=”http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/SavageTVShow.html”>the real story</a> is he thought the conversation was off-air and personal between he and a “setup caller”. Hmm

Leslie Kelly, a photographer sued Arriba Soft Corporations for making thumbnail copies of his images and putting them in a search engine (source: slashdot). Today the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s ruling that making these thumbnails was ‘fair use’. This is just a preliminary ruling and subject to the DMCA ruling, but it is an interesting decision that could be a premonition of what’s to come. Should thumbnails be copyrighted? Will be interesting to see how this one comes out …