Blogshares

I’ve been play­ing about with blogshares again. It really is good fun. Seyed Razavi is doing a great job, and seems to be con­stantly updat­ing the whole thing. As prob­lems are found or as they are repor­ted, they are addressed and fixed, new fea­tures are being added all the time too. There is a great buzz about the whole thing.
Go have a play.

Mothering Sunday

We’ve had a good day today. Jamie and I got up early (not­with­stand­ing the Day­light Sav­ing Time change!) and made Jan break­fast in bed. Jamie gave her her card and presents. Then we went out early to see my Mum, who is recov­er­ing from yet another cold.
Later lots of us went to the Shaandaar res­taur­ant in Rusholme’s Curry Mile. There were 13 of us alto­gether, and it was pretty busy. We had to wait a while to get seated, but once seated and served, the food was good and every­body had a good time.

Oops! Some things can be a little too popular

It looks like blo­gchalk­ing should have con­sidered send­ing out staggered emails regard­ing their change of server rather than modi­fy­ing the images pulled from their old server to say “update your image”.

“Band­width Limit Exceeded
The server is tem­por­ar­ily unable to ser­vice your request due to the site owner reach­ing his/her band­width limit. Please try again later.”

I also read this story on wired today:

“An author hop­ing to spur sales of his book is facing a gigantic bill after an online pub­lish­ing exper­i­ment went hor­ribly awry.
Last week, writer Glenn Fleish­man offered his book, Real World Adobe GoLive 6, as a free down­load.
But instead of the few hun­dred down­loads Fleish­man expec­ted, the book was down­loaded about 10,000 times in just 36 hours. And because he’s charged incre­ment­ally for band­width, Fleish­man estim­ates he could be billed $15,000 at the end of the month — pos­sibly a lot more.”

Blogshares Goes Beta

Blogshares the fantasy stock mar­ket for web­logs has gone into beta. This means that mem­bers can pub­li­cise it (see the link in the left hand column) and that you can join and start trading.

“BlogShares is a fantasy stock mar­ket for web­logs. Play­ers get to invest a fic­tional $500, and blogs are val­ued by inbound links.”

It looks like it should be a bit of fun, I’ve joined and star­ted buy­ing stocks.

Linkin Park Meteora Tracks

Wow, Linkin Park must be really pop­u­lar at the moment. In the last 24 hours or so, I’ve had more than 70 vis­its from people search­ing for Linkin Park. Almost all of those search­ing for phrases like “linkin park met­eora tracks” (the most pop­u­lar), pre­sum­ably look­ing for MP3s of the album! Rather too many were search­ing for “link­ing park” :-)
But hope­fully no one has been search­ing for “lin­coln park” :-) If they had I guess they won’t find too many pages!
As to the Linkin Park — Met­eora album itself, it just gets bet­ter! I’ve prob­ably listened to it more than 40 times already! I just can’t stop. It’s already a can­did­ate for my album of the year. It really was worth the wait.
Recommended

Best of 2001 and The Skies Of Pern

I’ve been neg­lect­ing my blog a bit lately, so I haven’t updated the ‘cur­rently read­ing’ sec­tion for a few days. It’s been say­ing none, when in fact I’ve read sev­eral stor­ies from Sci­ence Fic­tion: the Best of 2001 edited by Robert Sil­ver­berg. I say “some stor­ies” because I struggled to get through some of the ones I did read. So much so that I put it to one side and moved on to The Skies of Pern by Anne McCaf­frey which I am very much enjoy­ing.
I nearly put this one to one side after I had star­ted it too. But this time because it is the latest in the series and I still have to read at least the pre­vi­ous two books and I found myself read­ing about things that had happened in the pre­vi­ous books. In the end I decided it was too good to stop, and so I con­tin­ued. I’m about two thirds of the way through the book now. I’ll say more when I’ve fin­ished it.