maintenance
drorzel | December 12, 2008A big storm has coated everything in the vicinity of Chateau Steelypips with a quarter-inch of ice. Trees are coming down all over the place (a big limb smashed the gate to our back yard), and the power is out for God knows how long.
We've temporarily relocated to Kate's office, which has heat and power, but I'm going to be basically incommunicado until further notice. I won't be reading or replying to comments, so behave yourselves while I'm gone.
drorzel | November 21, 2008Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, and the impending holiday and associated travel has thrown our schedules all out of whack. I'm making myself crazy trying to maintain the usual posting schedule while still meeting work and family responsibilities. Thus, for at least the next week, and possibly longer, I'm not even going to try.
If something really big comes up that needs to be mentioned, I'll probably post about it. Other than that, you can expect links dumps, and not much more.
If you need something to entertain you right now, here are a couple of party games:
The Elevator Pitch Contest at…
drorzel | May 4, 2008As a sign of what an enormous geek I am, here's what I did to pass the time while Kate was getting ready for the wedding we went to yesterday:
Yes, I amuse myself by making graphs. If I knew Python, I'd be an xkcd character.
Anyway, that's the monthly traffic for this blog from January 2006 (when I moved to ScienceBlogs) to the present. As you can see, April 2008 was the third best month since the move, thanks to Reddit picking up my post on What Everyone Should Know About Science, and in influx of crazy people. Thank you, Reddit, thank you crazy people.
The really interesting thing about…
drorzel | January 26, 2008
I got hit on the wrist with an elbow in Wednesday's lunchtime hoops game, which was painful enough to overcome my deep antipathy toward the medical profession, and send me to the doctor. After a referral to an orthopedist Friday morning, the verdict was a contusion of one of the umpteen little bones in my wrist. Nothing is broken, but I'm going to be spending the next few weeks wearing the brace in the picture, and icing it regularly.
The brace in question makes typing rather inconvenient, and I'm not a good typist to begin with. This means I'm going to restrict my typing-related program…
drorzel | January 1, 2008Because it's not science without graphs:
That's the traffic for this blog for 2007. If you integrate the area under the curve, you get a total of 833,275 page views for the year, which is, frankly, kind of astonishing. That's up from last year's total of 574,676, so I guess the goal for 2008 is to break a million.
The top ten posts for the year, in terms of traffic:
Many Worlds, Many Treats: 52,667 (of course)
Bunnies Made of Cheese: 14,068
Stealth Creationists and Illinois Nazis: 9,048
It's Turtles All the Way Down: 5,539
New "Meme": Manly or Self-Sufficient?: 5,213
Why Do Polarized…
drorzel | October 20, 2007As noted a little while ago, ScienceBlogs has recently redesigned the channel pages on the front page, and they now include images supplied by the bloggers. For example, the doomsday weapon photo that currently graces the Physical Science page is a picture of my lab.
Now, any idiot can take pictures of cute fuzzy animals, but physics pictures are a little harder to come by. So, the corporate masters are soliciting pictures from you, the readers of this blog:
It's not too hard: the image needs to be at least 465 pixels wide. Readers should send their photos to photos@scienceblogs.com. They…
drorzel | October 16, 2007ScienceBlogs has just redesigned the main site. Sort of. The change is subtle enough that you might not notice it-- the only real difference on the front page is that the "channel" list has been reorganized-- it's now slightly shorter, and some old channels have been combined into new ones.
There are two practical advantages to this: on the back end of things, this allows the individual bloggers to put a post in two channels at the same time, which is great for things that straddle the boundary between two areas. Also, the new channel pages feature pictures, with the Physical Science page…
drorzel | October 3, 2007You may notice, a couple of posts down, a post with the title "Links for 2007-10-03," with a bunch of, well, links in it. This was auto-generated by del.icio.us, and is the main reason why I started using that service this week-- the idea is to give me a way to collect together the sort of almost-bloggable links that I run across every day and end up leaving as open blog tabs for a week before deciding that they don't really have enough meat to be a full post, and it's too much work to cut and paste a lot of them together for a Links Dump. This will tend to include a bunch of EurekAlert press…
drorzel | September 29, 2007I haven't even had a book contract for a month, and already I'm engaging in Authorial Avoidance Behavior...
I spent a while this morning messing around with setting up a del.icio.us account. This does actually have a worthwhile goal, namely to be an improvement over my current system of keeping a hundred tabs open in Opera containing articles I might want to mention on the blog. This way, I can file them in a central place, and not have the browser open tempting me to web-surf when I ought to be writing.
But, of course, it's also a wonderful excuse to putz around on the web, doing nothing…
drorzel | August 16, 2007As mentioned several times hereabouts, Kate and I are headed to Japan on Saturday, where we'll be spending three weeks touring around and attending the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama. We will have at least some Internet access, and I may post the occasional travel update from Japan, but I'm not going to try to schedule three full weeks worth of posts to keep the blog going during my absence.
If, for some strange reason, you find that you are wholly dependent on Uncertain Principles for your computer-based entertainment needs, have no fear-- I'm not going to leave you totally…
drorzel | July 27, 2007I'm off for a much-needed vacation, and will be Internet-less for the next week. Woo-hoo!
The plan of the moment is to set up a handful of physics "news" items to appear next week (the scare quotes are because some of these items are weeks old), but otherwise there won't be any updates. If you're wholly dependent on this blog for your daily entertainment needs, use this opportunity to get a frickin' life, will you?
If you find yourself desperate for something to do, somebody has set up a stub ScienceBlogs page at Wikipedia, which could stand to be upgraded with more information about the…
drorzel | April 27, 2007Over at Cognitive Daily, Dave asks about splitting articles in RSS feeds. The ScienceBlogs feeds do not provide the full text of our posts, just the "above the fold" portion, and this practice rubs some people the wrong way.
The reason for this is that our Corporate Masters are trying to support the site by selling ads, and ad revenues are based on page views. The get those page views, we need people to click through to ScienceBlogs, so we try to use the "above the fold" content to draw people in, and get them to look at the ads.
My question to you is, how do youn feel about this?…
drorzel | April 2, 2007As mentioned in passing in the previous post, we've been having some DSL issues that prevent me from posting anything from home at the moment. Hopefully, Verizon will get this fixed (Kate spent a long time on the phone with them Sunday morning, and they think it's a software problem on their end).
More importantly, I've got a wretched cold, and an 8am class. I can more or less handle lecturing at that hour, but that combined with the cold leaves me glassy-eyed and drooling for most of the rest of the morning, which isn't exactly conducive to interesting blogging.
As a result, traffic here…
drorzel | March 19, 2007You may notice that there are some new ads on the site. They're short videos done by DuPont, with an excessively perky anchor talking about science topics and the wonders of chemistry, and that sort of thing.
We were promised that the ads would not auto-play or break people's browsers, and as far as I can tell, that seems to be the case. If you encounter any problems with them, though, please leave a comment here, and your concerns will be relayed to the Powers That Be.
And while we're at it, we may as well make this a Site Design Open Thread-- if you have comments or complaints about…
drorzel | January 8, 2007Movable Type tells me that this is the 1,000th post to this blog since the move. This comes just short of the one-year anniversary of the move (the first posts are dated earlier, but the official launch was on January 11th, so that's when I'll do a full year-in-review.
For comparison, the total number of posts in the three-ish years of Uncertain Principles prior to ScienceBlogs was 1,087 (according to Blogger). So, my posting rate has increased just a little bit-- an average of 2.75 posts per day for the past year or so. Why the big spike, given that I promised to only blog once a day in my…
drorzel | December 14, 2006We've been having intermittent DSL problems here at Chateau Steelypips, which has led to much cursing of Verizon. The fact that their tech support department screwed up the first two service appointments, and repeatedly dropped calls after half an hour spent navigating their miserable phone tree and hold system didn't help any.
The repair guy finally showed up this morning, though, and found the source of the problem: Mice had built a nest in the terminal box on the pole, and squirrels had chewed on the wire going into the house.
And now, Her Majesty is being all smug. "You said I was…
drorzel | December 11, 2006Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean is pondering comment policies:
So the question is: how can the comment sections be better? To decode this for our more innocent readers: how can we increase the signal-to-noise ratio? Increasing the signal is one obvious way, but that's hard. The real question that I've been wondering about (haven't consulted my co-bloggers on this) is: should we take more dramatic steps to decrease the noise? In particular, should we have a much heavier hand in discouraging, deleting, or even banning people who are rude, disruptive, off-topic, or just plain crackpotty? And in…
drorzel | October 19, 2006I have discovered a marvelous proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, which is too long to fit in the Excerpt box.
Which means that people reading this blog via RSS have no chance of seeing it, as the combined feed is currently showing only the excerpts. It's not clear whether this is a glitch or a poorly-thought-out deliberate action, but either way, several of us are trying to get that fixed.
This would be a good place to put comments about any other technical problems you're experienceing with the site, though. I'll see that they get passed on to the appropriate people.
drorzel | October 3, 2006I've got a silly pop-culture post planned, but we'll put that off for a moment, because this is the 666th post to this blog, according to the counter on Movable Type. That would appear to demand something evil, so here you go:
Behold the Evil! Evil!
drorzel | September 20, 2006If you've had trouble accessing the site in the last couple of days, sorry about that. Scienceblogs.com has been under a cross-site script attack for a while, and we only recently figured out what was going on. Efforts are underway to deal with the problem. We're re-targeting the orbital mind control lasers even as I type...
Unfortunately, an attempt at a quick-and-dirty fix for the problem last night rather comprehensively broke the server. It seems to be better now-- knock on wood-finish particle-board desk top.
The server difficulties destroyed a couple of posts that I was working on this…