Daily Webdork

May 2006 - Posts

• Daily Webdork for 5/19/06

  A FAIR-WEATHER FAN SPEAKS OUT How easy it is for us Browns die-hards to forget that neglected sub-species of zealot: the fair weather fan. Scorned and tormented, the fair weather fan ducks for cover when found out, and then makes radical claims of fandom which, while not proveably false, sound weak and pathetic. I will not hide or attempt to hide in the crowd of fans, trying to mingle among the true believers. I cannot, in good faith, pretend to be what I am not. I am… gulp… a fair-weather Cleveland Cavaliers fan. There, I said it. I love playing basketball, but have never played in organized basketball at a high enough level for me to have learned much about it. I didn’t play organized basketball after about the ninth grade, which is a good thing, I guess. I’ve been told my best move is something called a “premeditated hack”, whatever that is. I do have a nice 1.5” vertical leap, though. Frankly, I find NBA basketball to be pretty boring, although the game I’ve been watching this past week seems to be much improved over the product from just a few years ago. I’m seeing more defense than in years past, and the top athletes in the game seem to be much more complete players than I remember. Lebron James actually passes the ball and plays what appears to be some decent defense. Imagine that. A major reason that I find it boring, I guess, is that I have no real appreciation for the strategies and different types of defenses employed today. There is a lot about the sport I simply don’t “get”, which limits my appreciation for it. I couldn’t tell you where the passing lanes are at a given moment. A pick-and-roll sounds like something Eric Clapton would be involved with. To me, it’s still just a bunch of freakishly tall guys running around and randomly getting called for fouls, which they never seem to admit to committing. Generally, it seems they run back and forth for a while, and then things become kind of important in the last two minutes. Another reason I’ve never been a basketball fan is that I had a hard time dealing with the Michael Jordan as God era. I couldn’t freaking stand Michael Jordan. Yeah, the bald-headed knob was an all-time great, whatever. To me, he was just another twit who chose my hometown team to be the one against whom he would make a freakishly fortunate shot that would be remembered forever. He belongs with John Elway, Terry Bradshaw, and whatever mercenaries were on the Florida Marlins back in 1997. Pfffft. I didn’t deal well with that era, and the years which followed weren’t particularly good ones for Cleveland-area basketball fans. What we’ve seen here this last week in Cleveland has been pretty amazing, however. It’s always been the other town that has the superstar player in my lifetime, not Cleveland. It might take some getting used to. At the same time, it might make an NBA fan of me yet. I guess I better pick up that “Hoops for Dumbasses” book down at the Barnes and Noble. MAMMA MIA, MAMMA MIA For Mothers Day, my kids gave* my wife a gift certificate to the above-mentioned bookstore, which has a nice big place of business in my area. She enjoys heading down there and browsing the book aisles and getting some peace and quiet away from the kids, dog, and bufoonish husband. Last week, she came back with a Queen Greatest Hits CD. We played it going back and forth to the restaurant where we had her Mother’s Day dinner, and my kids instantly glommed onto it, even though none of them had heard of Freddie Mercury and crew before that. I’ve been hearing “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Fat Bottomed Girls”, and the rest of their greatest hits collection over and over for the past few days. I hadn’t listened to the band, by choice, anyway, in twenty years or more. Upon listening to them again, I was amazed at how cheesy a lot of the songs are. “Bicycle”, for example, with the break where little ringing bicycle bells are played solo for a bit, is hard to listen to without a little snobbish snickering. A lot of it is silly, but undeniably fun. But, holy crap, that stuff gets into your brain and you can’t get it out. The late singer’s voice is still banging around my head. Mamma mia, mamma mia, let me go. * This “giving of gifts”, technically, is more of a process involving extracting cash from Dad and then demanding chauffer service to shopping malls, where I’m asked what Mom wants. Don’t let her know. WEBDORKIAN DESPERATION METRICS Queue of Emails Needing Attention: 219 Unread RSS Feeds: 8,006 Tasks on To-Do List: 35 Caffeine Saturation: Abysmal Windowblinds shell: Vista rip Mood: “Out of my frigging head! Out!” Listening to: Nine Inch Nails, to sandblast Queen out of my skull   Posted May 19 2006, 11:31 PM by barrymcbride with 1 comment(s)

• Daily Webdork for 5/18/06

  MICROSOFT FIRES BACK I know several people who work for Microsoft, or have worked for Microsoft. They’re solid people, by and large, good managers, good technical folks trying to build decent products. I guess I’ve never been sold on the notion that Bill Gates and Co are purely evil or retarding technology significantly by reducing competition. As a developer, I actually liked Microsoft dominating certain areas of the IT world. Even if their operating system or browser had its weaknesses (and they had many), at least Redmond’s domination limited the number of targets that a developer had to try to hit. Diversity isn’t always a good thing if you’re trying to get a new application into people’s hands. Right now, though, Microsoft is getting attacked on all fronts. OpenOffice.org challenges their long-time revenue driver, Microsoft Office. They face challenges to the lynchpin of their business, Windows, with Linux and web-oriented operating systems popping up. Google rolls out application after application and prepares to mount an assault on the desktop. Microsoft is fighting a global technology war on two dozen fronts and is fighting back again a swarm of attackers, from little Web 2.0 start-ups to massively over-hyped and well-funded competitors like Google. Bill Gates & Co are preparing to unleash a massive counterattack on all fronts. A new operating system will show up early next year, accompanied by a radical new version of Office. Some new Windows applications are rolling out right now, and I like what I see. Microsoft has learned a lot from the success of Apple’s iTunes, and the new applications focus on simplicity in their user interface and hiding of rarely used features. The new Windows Media Player (went into public Beta yesterday) is a major step forward, and gives iTunes a real competitor. I have used iTunes over the last year, but check out the album-art oriented interface in the new Windows Media Player. Very slick and very easy to use. I especially like the stacks of album art used to represent a artist for which you have a bunch of albums. There are two reasons I’m not switching to Windows Media Player at this point, however: There’s not smooth compatability with iTunes. I’ve got this nifty iPod and I’m not going to out to buy some other Windows-compatible device, so whatever I use has to sync with the iPod as easily as iTunes does. The import function into the Media Library misses a ton of information. WMP’s library management functions are weak at this point, with “folder monitors” that don’t pick up everything, including album art that is picked up by iTunes with no problem. Default library import routines pick up crap in folders you don’t want them to use, such as that copy of “Corpse Bride” which I had in a shared folder for my kids. (I hear it now…”yeah, suuuuuuuure”). It’s still in Beta, so a lot of this may get fixed. There’s a lot of potential in the new Windows Media Player, though. Nice comeback by Microsoft. Another nice comeback is found in the new Internet Explorer. I like a lot of the design choices they made here. Gone is the reliance on a dizzying array of menus and submenus that you see with IE knock-offs like Maxathon, or in Microsoft’s Office. It’s replaced by a simple interface similar to Apple’s Safari browser. It takes some getting used to, but once I got used to it, IE7 became my default browser over Firefox. It loads faster and is simply easier to use. Here’s a screen snap of the IE7 interface. Check out this feature – similar to some you can add on Firefox, but very quick and well-integrated by clicking the little tab near the left with the four squares on it (to the right of the star and plus sign in the above screensnap) As with Windows Media player, there’s again a focus on visual cues. It can be a lot easier to pick things quickly from pictures rather than labelled tabs. I have to admit I mostly jump between tabs, but having this sort of feature available (and responsive, unlike some FireFox extensions) makes it that much easier to jump back to Internet Explorer, a browser I used to dread having to use. On the web, Microsoft is rolling out an array of web services, which now appear to be set to baffle the heck out of the surfing public. I’ll ramble on about that in a future blog. THERE’S NO STOPPING IT! A relentless thirst for Lebensraum has caused the entity to expand, annexing all territory that surrounds it. Nothing can stand in its way. With no limits on growth and no natural enemies to speak of, it has run amok, expanding beyond all reasonable purpose and defying natural laws thought to be insurmountable. The ecosystem has been disrupted and the food chain quivers in fear. While massive corporations profit from the horrendous shift in consumption that generates it, ultimately the system will collapse upon itself. Yes, I’m getting really freaking fat. My waistline is the anatomical equivalent of the zebra mussel: ungainly, hideous to the eye, and constantly increasing its range. When I started this gig back in August 2001, I was at the peak of adult health. A healthy and vigorously exercising 5’10”, 170 pound male, I strode with great purpose upon the Earth, master of my domain. Now, I sort of waddle. Being overweight sucks. Your energy declines, you feel horrible about yourself constantly, and you lose desire to go anywhere or do anything. How did this happen? Slowing metabolism is part of it, but a larger part of it is simply being at a computer from dawn until unconsciousness hits. I’ve put on 10–15 pounds each year I’ve been at this since 2001, and the trend has been steady and inexorable. Another part of it is simply that when working from home, you don’t really have to dress up to impress anyone, so you lose a bit of the need to keep yourself looking good that comes with corporate life. So, I’m trying to reverse the trend. Increasing the care with which I select foods, switching to… shudder… light beer… when needed. Ugh. I’m no good to anyone if my circulatory system explodes. I’d be as useful as, well, Butch Davis offering draft advice. Wish me luck.   Posted May 18 2006, 11:40 PM by barrymcbride with no comments

• Daily Webdork for 5/16/06

  It’s 1AM. Pretty damn late. My brain isn’t capable of coherent thought, but I’m still too agitated to sleep. Here are some things I’m fairly sure about: 8.2% is a big number, even to Rupert I work for Rupert Murdoch. He’s my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. I don’t want to be too forward here, because I like my job, but this chart might be something for him to ponder. If you think about how much Google is worth, and how valuable their acreage on the ‘net has become, knowing that MySpace.com is responsible for over 8% of their traffic. Well, um, wow. That’s all I’ll say. Wow. I need to get some help on the OBR. One of the great things about this site when it started was that it was a team of people working together. Lots of guys made real contributions on a daily basis. We’ve got a great group of moderators on the forums… folks who try to keep things running just because they like hanging with their fellow fans and creating a cool place to be. Outside the forums, though, everything you see started getting routed through one solitary webdork back in 2001. I think I need to reverse that, not only to do the things that need to be done around here, but to start doing some things that we’ve never really done well. Promoting the site and magazine, for example. Reaching out to Browns Backers groups. Producing the radio show. With my work at Fox and with the way we’ve expanded by adding the magazine and the radio show, it’s obvious I’m spread too thin. We may add other things to this mix soon. I need to find some folks who, like Mike Desmond has done with the magazine, can take things that need to be done, organize them, and make them happen. If I don’t, the quality of what we do will slip because too much will be threaded through me and I won’t have time to do any of it right. If anyone reading this has worked a company through similar challenges, I’d love to hear from you. I could use some sage advice. I want one of these things. I’ve got a Treo 600 I got three years ago, and it might be time to upgrade when enough cash has accumulated to do so. The new one has higher screen resolution but the same form factor I like and there wouldn’t be a learning curve. My Treo is so beat-on now that all the finish has been worn off a lot of the keys. I got my money’s worth out of the thing. Broadband on one of these deals would rock. I’ve done site updates via my Treo and being able to hit the forums or do a training camp update at broadband speeds would be a lot more effective. It might be time to get a Windows Media version rather than a Palm OS version. Frankly, Solitaire is the most useful Palm OS app that I have, so it wouldn’t be that painful to switch. Comedy takes time YBD said on the forums not too long ago, dogging me, “remember when Barry used to be funny?”. Ouch. I flipped him off in response, but he’s got a point. There’s a real time investment required to do something funny well. Brian Tarcy works pretty hard on his “What’s Gonna Happen” articles, for example. At least that’s what he tells me. I think I used to be able to write funnier stuff back when I was doing the Ravens Suckzone not only because the Ravens were such a great target, but also because I had more time. I could take an idea, work it around in my brain over and over, and just take it to sillier and sillier extremes. Right now, I can’t do that. I have to go from concept to finish too quickly. Writing once every two weeks like I did back in 1997 doesn’t fly in the days of around-the-clock updates. You can’t rush humor. I tried something different on the radio show tonight and it failed miserably. When you’re trying to be funny and it fails, there’s no worse feeling… I remember once in High School I tried to improvise a humorous monologue in speech class once and it just died. That memory is still painful when it bubbles to the surface. No wonder comedians are such a mal-adjusted lot. There’s a lot of work and challenge in refining a stand-up routine and no harder audience to please. I don’t think I have time to do humor effectively right now. Some people can be funny instinctively (and I hate them for it). Regular people like myself have to work at it. Moohead tried to tell me this, gently, a few months back. I think he was right. Until you have the time to do it right, perhaps it’s best to focus on communicating directly.   WEBDORKIAN DESPERATION METRICS Queue of Emails Needing Attention: 319  (down 38 from Saturday. Ra!) Unread RSS Feeds: 8,092 Tasks on To-Do List: 36 (down 11) Caffeine Saturation: Negligible Windowblinds shell: Some Vista rip  Mood: “Stupid accents do not a character make” Listening to: The gentle sound of light rain through a window in the middle of the night. Music and lyrics by God, I guess.         Posted May 17 2006, 01:38 AM by barrymcbride with no comments

• Daily Webdork for 5/13/06

  WELCOME TO HELL. POPULATION: DORK So, I’m in Hell. If you’re wondering what Hell looks like, it looks pretty much like the reality in which you’re currently grounded, except for the following: You suddenly contract some sort of illness that swells all the glands in your neck, makes you tired, troubles your breathing, and make you feel like you’re burning up. At the same time, an application upon which you depend to help manage your incoming email, ClearContext, fouls up and stops working. While you are fiddling around with it to fix it, you bork the registry and basically screw up your entire computer system, upon which your livelihood depends. You spend all day trying to get that working again. After you fix it, you realize than an entire day has gone by, and the stuff you were panicking about before merits even more panic. Then you realize that the first bullet point means all you want to do is take a freaking nap. Ugh. I ACTUALLY LIKE INTERNET EXPLORER Not the current version, 6.0, which is a UI nightmare as well as a welcome mat for hackers, but Version 7.0, which fails to suck very much at all. It took me a while to get used to the different way they do tabs than Firefox/Opera, but once I adjusted, I liked it a great deal. Unfortunately, the registry borking referred to in bullet point #2 above is stopping me from re-installing it. So, now I’m dependent on Firefox again, which means that I’d be an idiot to try out the new Firefox 2.0 Alpha. Opera 9.0 Beta is better than either released version of IE or Firefox, but there’s no Omea Pro connectors for it, so that’s out. A browser that’s pretty interesting is called the Orca Browser. It’s built by the same folks who developed MyIE / Maxathon, but uses the Gecko web browser engine. Naturally, it doesn’t have the extensions available that you find for IE or Firefox, but the sucker is just fast. It bears watching. I’ve got too much to do to babble any longer. I’m really behind after the events of the last 24 hours. Later this week, I want to talk a bit about what my bosses at Fox are doing – some very interesting stuff developing at FIM, including an IM client built around their acquisition of MySpace. WEBDORKIAN DESPERATION METRICS We’re at Defcon 4. Queue of Emails Needing Attention: 357 Unread RSS Feeds: 7,702 Tasks on To-Do List: 47 Caffeine Saturation: Absolute Zero Windowblinds shell: No time to play with that stuff  Mood: “Why me, Lord?” Listening to: Whatever iTunes randomizes to   Posted May 13 2006, 05:42 PM by barrymcbride with no comments

• Daily Webdork for 5/12/06

  The Intersection of the Misleading Our ex-namesake and good friend, Bernie Kosar, is managing to stay in the newspapers as reports about divorce action filed by his wife, Babette, gradually shows up in newspapers here in Northeast Ohio. The ironic thing about the story is that it manages to find an unlikely intersection between two professions which are not exactly at the top of the public admiration scale: divorce lawyers and sports journalists.  Only one of those professions pays well, but both have tendency to warp reality for public consumption, either intentionally or unintentionally. That we’ve linked the stories about Bernie’s marital challenges on our newswire doesn’t mean that I like them or approve of them. Relaying, reporting and analyzing the news of interest to Browns fans (whether good news or bad) is our gig here, and we don’t censor or selectively filter the news we link for our personal or business ends. If you’re looking for a Browns site that does that, I can point you to several. I met and talked with Bernie probably a couple of times a year over the past few years, and have met Babette as well. As for the speculation which has taken place on our forums and others about either, all I can say is that none of it ties to what I’ve seen, and I saw Bernie several times a year while he was involved with the site. Being in the newspapers sucks. There have been a couple of times that I’ve seen the site or magazine written about as an entity (not as the source for a Browns story), and it’s never positive. For example, one news story about this situation said that Bernie “withdrew his support for Bernie’s Insiders” last year. This makes it sound like we did something offensive or were somehow hurting him, which is misleading and false. We changed names because Bernie sold his piece of Scout and had no reason to be involved with the business, especially as he was being welcomed in Berea, and secondly because we wanted to step of his shadow. If we did something to piss Bernie off so that he “withdrew his support”, it’s news to me. The journalist (who I hold in high regard) who wrote that story probably never thought of that interpretation, and likely didn’t mean anything negative by it. It’s just another reason why it’s rarely fun to be in the papers. Unfortunately, if you find information about the OBR from anyone other than the few people who actually are involved in it, you’ll find that it’s generally wrong or, at best, uninformed. This is why the internet and blogging can be so valuable, or so dangerous. It’s not that blogs are always right, and journalists always wrong, or vice-versa, but hopefully having more sources of information available, with more perspectives, will help readers of the news get more “data points” from which to draw conclusions. At the same time, anybody with access to a web browser can seek to damage or hurt others. I actually had to threaten to sue someone last year because of falsehoods spread about myself and the site, and I despise the lawsuit-happy nature of our society. I decided not to go through with it, not because it wasn’t justified, but because the guy, who was trying to compete with us, agreed to take down the things he had written. The days of anyone being able to control the news are ending, and not soon enough, but the replacement is a chaotic, uncontrolled mess of information and disinformation. As always, we have to trust in people (Browns fans, voters, consumers) to sort through it all and see the truth behind the words, because no one can control it. Death to Papyrus Oddly enough, this bit of today’s blog is actually tied to the one above. If Bernie Kosar is guilty of lavish spending and giving away too much money, it is again news to me. What I saw with both Scout and “Bernie’s Insiders” was smart, careful spending and investing. For not very much money and the temporary use of his name, Bernie established a strong NFL outlet on the Scout network, which has helped to draw tens of thousands of people to the network and helped bring other NFL sites into Scout. The Kosars sold their investment in Scout to Fox and did very well with it. Truth be told, and that’s what blogs are for, I spent a lot more developing Bernie’s Insiders, in both cash and lost income potential, than the Kosars did. Part of this was because I felt it could be a nice business, but mostly it was simply because running this site and magazine is really what I wanted to do with the vocational part of my life. I was willing to do whatever I had to do in order to make it happen. Like a lot of small-scale entrepeneurs, this meant scrambling for money whereever I could get it. The Kosars helped a bit, and family members loaned me a little money as well. I also maxed out home equity loans, took business loans, reduced household expenses to the bone, maxed out credit cards, took a second job, took on for-pay web design projects, and was fortunate enough to be married to a woman who was willing to go back to work to help support the family. All of this has kept me scrambling over the last five years, but has a less-considered side effect as well: lots and lots of paper. Overwhelming amounts of paper, email, and other information coming from creditors, partners, customers, employees, friends, neighbors, countrymen, Romans, and spammers. And that’s only on the business side of things… the OBR acts as news outlet and a portal for Browns news, so that adds an even more massive amount of paper, email, RSS, etc on top of that. I don’t have a love-hate relationship with paper. I just hate it. I don’t like seeing it, and I don’t like it piling up in my office. I despise not knowing where things are and go into sort of an endless spiral of non-productivity when I can’t locate something. It’s hurt a lot during the last five years. While I still struggle with the large amounts of electronic information that pours in, I think I’m winning the war against paper. What I’ve done is put together three tools – Excel, Scansoft’s Paperport, and a relatively unknown application called Omea Pro and developed a system to get rid of paper as it comes in. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Between July and April, paper simply piles up because I don’t have the time to deal with it, even if my system for eradicating it has been refined over and over. The last couple of months has been especially bad because I’ve been working on simplifying and paying off the loans and other items I mentioned above, and have increased my workload at Fox. This allowed more and more paper to pile up until there were stacks and stacks of the stuff around, hiding things I needed and generally slowing me down. As soon as my schedule cleared up this year, I decided I had to go through a mass purge and recording of paper. That’s what I’ve been doing the last two days, which is why you haven’t seen me on my blog or in the forum as much. Here’s how it works: All paper that comes in to the office is scanned (using Paperport) and then fixed up, if needed. All scans are just numbered sequentially with a code like 06–05–019, where 06 is the year, 05 is the month, and 019 is just a number which goes from 1 to 999. The scan (a PDF file) gets this number, and I also write the number on the piece of paper. Then, I enter the number and info about the document in Excel. Who it came from, what it is, when it was sent, etc. This is my database, for now. The paper is then simply filed in big folders for the year and month, so I have a big 06/05 folder in my file cabinet, on my disk drive, and so forth. The nice thing about this system is that it avoids hierarchical foldering of paper and computer files. So I don’t have to ask “did I put that in the loans folder, or the insurance folder, or the State Farm folder, or the overdue folder?”, etc. So, if I need a document, I can look it up on the Excel spreadsheet and that tells me where it is on my file system and where the paper is in my files. It’s pretty damn anal, but it’s borrowed from the much larger systems I used to design as an IT consultant back in the day. The coolest thing about it, really, is the way that Omea Pro sits on top of all this. What Omea does is provide a desktop where you can see email, files, RSS feeds, web pages, notes and so forth. Combined with this is the ability to categorize each of these types of objects… it’s sort of like applying tags to a blog. So, a file of paper may be tagged both “insurance” and “loan” and might also have a “priority” flag. Same with an email. At the end of the day, what we have is an ability to, for example, review everything that comes from,say, National City Bank about my business loan. I can click to a single category and have everything there… paper in scanned form, emails, web pages, notes, to-dos, contacts, etc. Omea pulls it all together. It really is amazing. I haven’t seen anything like it. The scene snap below shows, as an example, all the different types of information I had on hand inside Omea when doing some research for DE Victor Adeyanju before the draft this year. This doesn’t even include any RSS feed items on Victor, which I didn’t classify for him. You can do similar things for any kind of tag or topic. The downside about Omea is that it’s a side-project of developers at a company called “JetBrains” which focuses on development tools. It is an amazing app and would be very popular if marketed correctly, I think. I believe inside of a decade that this sort of technology (tagging, smart searches, mixing of email, RSS, files, web) will be built into the operating system and office apps. For now, though Omea is the only product I’ve found that can pull off an information desktop where you can track in a single location all the different types of information you can receive. It’s amazing, and I hope that development continues. Webdorkian Desperation Metrics Because of my focus on eliminating paper and dealing with the financial side of my business, as well as my work for Fox, my OBR-related email and news items have fallen behind in the last two days. The war against information and task overload continues. Queue of Emails Needing Attention: 304 Unread RSS Feeds: 7,509 Overdue To-Do Items in Outlook: 11 Caffeine Saturation: Absurdly Inadequate Windowblinds shell: Muku 1.0 Mood: “Wha happen?” Listening to: New Order, Waiting for the Siren’s Call     Posted May 12 2006, 11:35 AM by barrymcbride with 6 comment(s)

• Daily Webdork for 05/09/2006

  The battle against my to-do lists and email goes on. I will call today a “draw”. I have absolutely no idea where today went. When I looked up, the day was gone. Here are some things I do know: That Miles dude on 24 was trouble from square one. You could tell that he was going to side with Logan because it’s a bit of an unctious twit, has dark hair, follows the orders of his superiors, and interferes with Chloe. I’m surprised he pwned Chloe so easily at the end of the show. I’m guessing he had a powerful magnet in his hand. I’d say that he’s going to die soon, but he has some gray in his hair and that makes him a wild card. Aaron’s red hair protected him from death, but apparently it allowed him to get beat up. That stuff about changing your oil every 3–5,000 miles isn’t a joke. I just wound up spending a mint on car repairs because I didn’t change the oil often enough. I was always “too busy” to take 20 minutes to change the oil and it cost me big-time. Not many people are reading this blog because it really reveals the complete and utter banality of my existence. Plus, I’m kind of dull and boring. My true purpose on planet Earth, and the only writing I’m any good at, involves making fun of the Baltimore Ravens. I would return to that calling, but these days poking fun at the Rats is pretty much the comedic equivalent of kicking the homeless. A lot of visitors to the website don’t seem to like Rich Passan’s takes. I always figured they would be fun to debate on the forums. One theory, that he’s controversial so we can make money from “page views” is totally wrong. We’re compensated by the number of subscribers we have and our share of advertising revenue is based on subscription numbers, not page views. What’s most important to me is that people come here to have fun and get informed. Faux controversy is not, and will never be, something we engage in. Launchy seems to be a cool little app which speeds up your access to programs and key data files. I doubt it will ever have the power of an Active Words, but I’m going to try using it for a couple of days. I’d better get ready for that radio show. I have to leave in 90 minutes. If I don’t prepare, I’ll suck even more than usual. Webdorkian Desperation Metrics Queue of Emails Needing Attention: 213 Unread RSS Feeds: 7,121 Overdue To-Do Items in Outlook: 11 Caffeine Saturation: Adequate Pre-Radio Show levels Windowblinds shell: Metal Vista Mood: “Man, tomorrow I’m gonna be an email answering MACHINE” Listening to: Orbital, “Halcyon + On + On (live)”   Posted May 09 2006, 06:49 PM by barrymcbride with no comments

• Daily Webdork for 5/8/2006

  Mock Draft Results I just posted the results of the OBR Mock Draft Contest. Cranking out the results took a lot longer than I thought it would because I had to revive some dead code to do the scoring of the results. Unfortunately, I had to write a program to score the entries because it’s impossible to do it well via a spreadsheet. Then I fed it some bad data and had to go back and re-do all the results after desk-checking a few entries and finding a mistake or two. I figure I would have this pretty much down to a science by now, but no. Webdorkian Desperation Scoreboard Queue of Emails Needing Attention: 210 Unread RSS Feeds: 7,051 Overdue To-Do Items in Outlook: 12 Caffeine Saturation: Dangerously low Windowblinds shell: Ecliz 1.1 Mood: “90 minutes until Jack Bauer kicks Presidential ass” Listening to: Orbital, “Planet of the Shapes” I had the email pile down to 170 by noon, but focusing on getting out the results of the Mock Draft Contest allowed it to sneak up again. Someone at Microsoft has Good Taste Admittedly, the only movie I’m really looking forward to seeing this summer is Richard Linklater’s pseudo-animated version of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Robert Downey Jr looks like he owns this movie playing druggie Barris. In the trailer for the film, Downey’s character says “I tip my hat to any entity which can bring so much integrity to evil”. I love that line. It crossed my mind when I learned last week that Microsoft is going to be using guitarist Robert Fripp to record sounds for their new “Vista” operating system. For an entity which is considered the bane of existence by many techno-nerds, Microsoft sure does some of the little things right. They had innovative sound crafter Brian Eno record sounds for Windows 95 and now Fripp for Vista. Eno and Fripp are two of my personal Music Gods, with Eno’s 1970s solo work and Fripp’s 1980s version of King Crimson both being among the most-played music in my life. The early 80s King Crimson was just an amazing band, with Fripp at the top of his game, and Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, and Bill Bruford comprising the rest of the foursome. All of these musicians were innovative in their own way and the result when they came together for three albums was nothing short of amazing. That Microsoft chose to use these musicians to create sounds which will be a part of all of our daily lives is an incredible choice, especially when there are so many bad, but more popular, choices they could have made. Mega-props to Redmond on this one. A Must Read Phil C. sent me a link to a terrific article by Dan Pompeii on the specifics of the Browns war room during the first round of April’s draft. He includes details of why the Browns chose Kamerion Wimbley (thank or curse Romeo) and the mechanics of nabbing a sixth-round draft pick from the Ratbirds. Don’t pretend that the Browns didn’t want Ngata – they wanted him. Crennel basically said he wanted a pass rusher more than a run stopper, and the Browns chose Wimbley. Savage wheedled a sixth-round pick from the Ravens and did so without losing a friend in Ozzie Newsome. Must reading for any Browns fan. Thanks Phil… this would have flown right past my radar if you hadn’t emailed me about it. Coming Up: Roster Moves, Jack Bauer, and another article from Rookie Camp… We have another report from rookie camp coming up tomorrow morning. Fred got a lot of interviews when he was in Berea last weekend, and we’re running them every few days or so because there won’t be much other Browns news. The Browns had made a series of minor transactions today as they added a couple of rookie free agents and dumped a few after the rookie camp. This is identical to what they did a couple of days after rookie camp last year. I’ll be adding that info into the roster and hot news tonight, along with trying to answer some more email. None of that is going to get in the way of “24”, the only program that I actually plan around. I watch Family Guy, Simpsons, and South Park as well, but those are Tivo-ed and watched if I have time. 24 has to be seen live because my family won’t tolerate waiting a day or two to talk about it with me. I’m still convinced that anyone with blonde hair is immortal in 24. Jack, Kim, Chloe, and Audrey: All blonde, all alive. Everyone else: Dark-haired and dead. Who knew that hair color would be the key to survival in the 21st Century? I’m going to get me a bottle of peroxide and settle down to watch Bauer dodge missiles. Later!     Posted May 08 2006, 08:07 PM by barrymcbride with 1 comment(s)

• Daily Webdork for 5/7/2006

  Here We Go Again This is my latest attempt to set up a blog that I can update regularly. This time out, I’ve tried to learn from past failures, so I can create a new, different, and more interesting failure. Everything on the Daily Webdork is built specifically to make it easy for me to update. This weblog can be updated off-line via the hyper-simple Blogjet, can deal with uploaded images easily so I don’t have to manually upload them, it doesn’t have many restrictions on what to write about, and is of only minor interest to law enforcement organizations. So, I should be able to slam stuff out everyday. Right? The trickiest bit, of course, is that when things get crazy and available time dries up, the blogs are the first thing to go. Not this time. No, this time is different. For sure. My latest attempt, the “Free Agency News IV”, worked really well for a while, but I couldn’t find anyone to help with it, and it was tricky trying to figure out what should go into that vs. a front page story, hot news, newswire, etc. I may revive it soon if I can figure out how to fine tune it. Then again, I may not. JT is returning from his self-enforced New Dad Exile and his “OBR Daily News and World Distort” is better than the News IV as a wrap-up of what’s really going on anyhow. So, in setting up the “Daily Webdork”, I’ve decided to make it as easy as possible and just write about anything that happens to be on my mind at the time. I’ll try to focus on the things I actually know something about: the Cleveland Browns, running a small news organization, juggling multiple jobs and family, cool software, hacking application code, etc. Hopefully something useful will emerge at some point. Webdorkian Desperation Scoreboard Queue of Emails Needing Attention: 205 Unread RSS Feeds: 6,970 Overdue To-Do Items in Outlook: 14 Caffeine Saturation: Ebbing Windowblinds shell: Ecliz 1.1 Mood: “I’ll set up a new blog so I can avoid productive behavior” Miscellaneous Cleveland Browns Notes The Browns rookie pool, the amount of money they can spend on draft picks and rookie free agents has been set at $4,876,144. This is the ninth highest in the NFL. Somone in the league offices feeds ESPN this info. They should feed it to us instead, because our writers are way cooler than Lenny Pasquarelli. It looks like Tim Couch is going to get a shot at making the Colts. The Deuce has been trying to get back into the NFL despite having a bum shoulder. The added advantage he has with the Colts is that he played for ex-Colts coach Bruce Arians for a couple of years here in Cleveland so it wouldn’t take long for him to learn the Colts’ system. No word on whether or not there will be any photographs of him riding a tricycle like there were when he went to Green Bay. Tony Grossi wrote in a column this morning that Braylon Edwards won’t be ready until October or so. I remember writing about this and talking about it on the radio after Edwards first got hurt last year. The reason we brought it up was that the Browns were saying that Edwards would be ready by the start of the next season and that sounded like hyper-positive spin to us, frankly. It just takes longer to recover from ACL injuries. I’m still not believing the Bengals when they say Palmer will be ready, either. I hope I’m wrong on Edwards and right on Palmer. Today’s Weird-Ass ezBoard Behavior I got an email from Fevah today telling me that when he goes to Page 4 of the Watercooler threads, he gets a pop-up box that looks like this: There’s actually a reason for this. What it means is that someone used a “personal icon” which is actually kept on a server that requires authentication to view. Whoever is using it probably doesn’t realize that no one else has access to it. Just like viewing a web page on a restricted server requires a login and password, an image on that server requires one as well. So, when you link an image from a secure server, everyone else sees this. There are two possible fixes: (1) track down whoever is linking that graphic and ask him/her to stop or, (2) just turn off personal icons by names in the thread listings. I’m going to go with solution #2. Those icons are too small to even be meaningful. I should have turned them off a while back. Some New Stuff This morning, I put a new graphic by Foose on the Muni Lot. I had to shrink it down a bit to fit it, so it doesn’t look as good as Foose’s original version. I like it anyway… it captures the mood of the Muni Lot for me. Also, I decided that the big-ass super-fancy rotating gizmo up at the top of the page a few weeks ago was really cool, but took too long to load for some people and pushed threads down. So, I replaced it with a couple of small javascripts linked to posts on our front page, blogs, and newswire. The result should load fast and won’t appear anywhere except the lobby and thread listings. I’ve been searching for years for the right way to integrate all the info on the site to the boards, and this is attempt #297. It always bugs me when folks link other sites when we have the info right here. That’s the sort of thing that bugs webmasters, I guess. So, I’m trying to help people find the info here. Reality Bites These last two weeks have been nuts. During draft weekend, we were creating player profiles on picks just minutes after they were drafted so that rosters stayed up-to-date. That weekend was a frenzy of updates on the OBR and around Scout. Since then, I’ve been trying to catch up with rookie free agents – even more new players than draft picks – so that our NFL rosters are current. In my job at Fox, I’m starting to help manage more and more of the NFL and MLB portions of Scout, so I spent this week talking to publishers and starting to work with them. Plus, I had to close a new mortgage on my house and my daughter had her first communion this weekend – with all the visitors and party preparation that entails. We held her first communion bash yesterday afternoon and have finished up cleaning up after that and saying goodbye to friends and relatives who came to town. So, things have been busy. Today is the first day I’ve been able to catch my breath in a couple of weeks. Woot! It feels good just to be able to sit down and catch up on some things I’ve been meaning to do around the site. The coming weeks will be light for Browns news so this is the time of year I spend doing things that I don’t have time to do after training camp starts or during the draft/free agency periods. Setting up this blog is one of ‘em. Later!   Posted May 07 2006, 04:21 PM by barrymcbride with no comments