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FreeRepublic ^ | Saturday, March 6, 2004 A.D. | SunkenCiv

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I'd been here a couple of months, and had begun to worry about handling all the threads. Sooooo, today I grabbed all of the pages by source, grabbed the tables of links to posts to and from me, and sorted them (the easy way, well, as easy as it gets) alpha instead of chrono.

Please, don't tell me that there's a way to do that automatically, or my brain will hurt.

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	Thursday August 10 2006	Changed the Google archaeology search to "sort by newest first".

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	Saturday September 2 2006	Added cgk's latest Ping lists link.

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	Monday October 30 2006	cgk updated it, so I slid that one in (#6).

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	Monday November 13 2006	Removed the nice clock, because Time.org has had to "deny all external image requests" due to bandwidth stress.

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	Thursday November 16 2006	Gods, Graves, Glyphs topics, along with astronomy and other such topics, belong in Chat. News is for political topics and such. Do not bother to ask me the template question, "did you post this to General/Chat or did it get moved?" I posted it in Chat. People who are bothered by this are a waste of my time. Likewise, complaints about the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. or C.E. instead of A.D. are wastes of bandwidth and my time, and I've previously addressed it here. Science is a method, not a body of knowledge. It's a good method for finding out some things. It is not the only path to knowledge, or the only path to worthwhile knowledge, or the only path to real knowledge. Hume asked whether it was more likely that nature sometimes ran out of its course, or that human testimony is fallible. If he'd had anything on the ball, he'd have known that one thing is the other -- that what we regard as the course of nature is human testimony.

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	Thursday November 16 2006	Gods, Graves, Glyphs topics, along with astronomy and other such topics, belong in Chat. News is for political topics and such. Do not bother to ask me the template question, "did you post this to General/Chat or did it get moved?" I posted it in Chat. People who are bothered by this are a waste of my time. Likewise, complaints about the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. or C.E. instead of A.D. are wastes of bandwidth and my time, and I've previously addressed it here. Science is a method, not a body of knowledge. It's a good method for finding out some things. It is not the only path to knowledge, or the only path to worthwhile knowledge, or the only path to real knowledge. Hume asked whether it was more likely that nature sometimes ran out of its course, or that human testimony is fallible. If he'd had anything on the ball, he'd have known that one thing is the other -- that what we regard as the course of nature is human testimony.

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	Saturday December 23 2006	Added the footers for three other ping lists. Thinking about retiring the book links down below, and will probably do that early next year. Also considering expanding the links to various resources that I use for the ping lists, and adding a sort of hall of fame, a la SeaMole's. My main reason for doing that would be to make it handy for me to look at recent posts by people known to generate pingworthy topics.

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	Wednesday January 31 2007	Profile, or mini-blog? I had an outside chance of getting my income tax returns done in January, probably for the first time ever. I will get them done in February, no, really, I mean it. Quit whispering to each other. FreeRepublic has been getting better lately. The repetitive (sometimes regurgitative) verbal shootouts over mystifyingly and illusively divisive issues on the level of "tastes great" or "less filling" have toned down. Some of that is due I think to the denouement of the 2006 election. The DUmmie trolls and sleepers who came by to stir up trouble, claiming to be "real" conservatives and preaching about splinter parties and single-issue focus groups did their work well, I believe. I certainly do hope everyone has learned an important lesson going into the next presidential campaign cycle. If not, anticipate living in a single party state, and furthermore, anticipate living in it for the rest of your life. There will not be any return from it next time. I've reorganized my Links page here on FR, in large part to correct some overlooked inconsistencies, but also to push all the election related stuff to the top of the sort. I still plan to move a good number of them off the page for good, installing pointers to the new storage place as a replacement. With this profile update I've removed the last few graphical links to Amazon reviews. I still would appreciate any favorable votes you might send my way (HolyOlio), but it appears that the various in-progress reviews may take a while to appear. I've been making a point of reading on the weekends and getting away from the beguiling virtual world. Or rather, getting away from the modern version of the virtual world -- books are after all the original worldwide web. ;') The other change I've made to this page is to move the various ping list footers and other old message footers, with all those handy links, to the bottom of this page. Anyway, thanks for visiting my profile, and for your kind FReepmails and public replies.

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	Saturday February 3 2007	Updated the footers for the four ping lists, and added a link to cgk's #7. Also fooled with the formatting. Added the income tax topic link to the 1-31-07 entry.

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	Wednesday February 14 2007	Added the Happy Valentine's Day marquee graphic -- now just a link to minimize loading time for this page, as well as annoyances (entry edited Thursday, February 15, 2007).

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	Thursday February 15 2007	This has been a great few weeks for GGG topics, and everyone involved has my thanks, and by proxy, the thanks of everyone who has been thanking me in public postings and in FReepmail. Also, thanks to all who have been pinging me lately. All the lists (including informal ones -- see cgk's lists for the formal ones) have seemed more active and more relevant lately. Must be the new year takes a few weeks to get started. Edited the entry for Wednesday, February 14, 2007. :') Altered the page layout just a bit, narrowing the #ccccdd left margin and adding the #8888cc right margin. Added some FReepmail links and a few links to the GGG topic list, here and below.

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	Monday February 19 2007 1202 33445	As of right now (12:29 PM here in Michigan) "You've posted a total of 1,202 threads and 33,445 replies." I decided to check because I was saving the latest "in forum" screen (250 replies) and found it had taken a mere five days, i.e., 50 messages a day, other than a few overlapping messages. I have the day off, and I don't feel sick as a dog for a change. I read about a "norovirus" that is in outbreak around here. I'd post something, but it was in one of those unusable sources. And that particular garbage wrapper is a partisan shill sheet anyway. My only plan for today is to assemble a desk I bought last year, pull over the PM 7600, and install the 1 GHz accelerator I got in November. I'm also expecting another little gizmo, but it won't be delivered today, obviously. So I'll probably also go shopping for toasters. Have a great day, a great week, a great month, a great winter, and a great year. And how about updating your own profile page, eh? I just added the #8888cc left margin and narrowed the right margin.

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	Sunday March 11 2007	It has been an odd few weeks. A couple weeks ago it seemed we were to have Spring, Fall, and Winter in the space of a few days. Last week began bitter cold, then warmed up. It was 56 degrees here in Michigan, today. The gas price spike was bad, but didn't last long enough for me to notice it on the station signs. Also, I got gas late Monday or Tuesday, at a discounted price of $2.409 a gallon. If 84 million drivers cut their driving by 20 miles a week, at 20 mpg that would save 2 million barrels a week, or 104 million barrels a year. Hey, it beats having Al "Robot" Gore in the White House and setting energy policy. Of course, Gore wouldn't get a second term, after turning into the biggest disaster since Carter. Speaking of elections, I have a couple of blogger topics, used for keeping track of the 2008 campaign -- (Stop) Hillary Clinton for President in 2008 and Election 2006, Election 2008. Visit early and often.

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	Saturday March 24 2007	Welcome to KlueLass, longtime fellow Delphinian! Welcome to Texas Red, another longtime fellow Delphinian and Lost Globester!

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	Saturday March 31 2007 1246 35074	Val, the Lost Globester responsible for dragging me into FR in the first place, had a terrible disaster with her computer, and so, sans password, had to sign up with a new screen name here. Welcome back, BabeUSA. ;') I added three Amazon reviews, and my reviewer rank fell from 1253 to 1264. I presume this resulted from one or more of my reviews getting blanked by Amazon, thus erasing the votes. I realize their system is complex and vast, but it certainly has room for improvement. I doubt that I will ever again be in the Top 1000 reviewers. Of course, the time I've spent on FR has cut way down on my time writing reviews, or for that matter, reading. Lately though I've ploughed through three or four books. The recent reviews were of items other than books. I've combined the February 3rd entries and the March 24th entries, as it seemed a bit silly to waste the space. Also, I reversed the order so the oldest precedes the youngest (i.o.w., makes sense). And I've taken four tries to get today's editing job done to my satisfaction. It sez here, "You've posted a total of 1,246 threads and 35,074 replies."

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	Monday April 2 2007	I fixed a typo in the February 19 entry. Also, in the March 31 entry, when I said, "I reversed the order so the oldest precedes the youngest," that referred only to the two pairs of entries I'd combined. Great, now you can sleep nights. I did very little over the weekend, and it seemed to last longer. Even the naps. I fiddled some more with those logo-making websites, and got a nicer one for the X-Planets list. Yesterday I worked over all the ping lists, and cleaned out the banned/suspended names. That pared down the GGG lists to 612 members. Vannrox has the largest profile that I've seen on FR. I'm going to try to take this week off from FR. I just have a lot to catch up. What this means -- I'll still be on each day to check for pingable topics and mail, but otherwise I'll do something in the real world, such as file my tax returns.

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	Thursday April 5 2007	FReeper cgk has updated the List of Ping Lists -- #8. Historically, there was at least one other attempt to compile such a list, but that guy went way overboard, using other actual ping lists and pinging everyone and their brother, then getting argumentative when taken to task for it. About three hours of that was all the mods put up with. :') And yet, they've put up with me for something like three years.

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	Wednesday April 18 2007	I had prepared an April 5th revision, but had never put it online until now. Still counts. Not sure how I managed to forget that. Late last week I stumbled across the Free Republic Memorial Wall and sadly, found that one of the names on it had to be removed from a ping list. I got my taxes done early Saturday morning, at work, after I punched out. Monday I paid the one I owed (a very small amount, one of the benefits of near-poverty). I've begun watching the DVD set of season 1, "Rome", the HBO series. This is my third or fourth trip through the whole thing. It is a smutty, bloody series, mostly a lot of fun, but there are some things I don't like to watch again. The box itself is really nice, nicest one I've ever seen. Generally it's simple to find it used at the local places, reasonably priced; I got mine last year at the enormous chain bookstore (I had a coupon), although I could have got it at the local warehouse club (one of them -- we've got two kinds now). A couple of weeks ago I'd intended to more or less take a week off from FR, and never managed to do that. So, I'm going to finish this, post maybe one more thing in a topic, then get offline. I need my rest.

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	Tuesday April 24 2007	I've written a review of the History Channel's Julius Caesar's Rome with the title "Getting your aqueducts in a row".

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	Thursday April 26 2007	I've just posted an Amazon review of the Mystery of the Sphinx with the title "The Lion's Share of Attention". It hasn't appeared yet (as of 1:05 PM, posted it five minutes ago). The fact is, I bought this DVD at the gift shop in the local museum, so take that! ;') I've also altered the Log Off link below so that it doesn't open in a new window. That has bugged me for a while.