Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Hmmm–maybe I have that backward, but it’s late. Late, yet I am determined to blog just a couple of great things that caught my eye recently.

• Lisa Williams blogs Orkut, and reminds me of the most awful days of my life–those early teen years where an imaginary audience was *noticing* if I sat alone in the cafeteria.
• After a year of world travels, Dervala (soon to be Meetup-ing in Manhattan) blogs her native scenery:
  

  “In winter it has the most dramatic of lighting designers, and the scene changes by the moment. Ireland will not be fixed: you cannot say you’ve seen it unless you live there, and even so the claim is shaky. Ireland is theatre, not painting, and you have only seen a production.”

• The funniest 3.2 Megs you’ll download today: mp3 of Sinister Ducks (blogged by Neil Gaiman, downloaded for me by my children.)

And in conclusion, I’d like to quote the March of the Sinister Ducks:

What are they doing at night in the park?
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Think of them waddling about in the dark.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!

Sneering and whispering and stealing your cars,
Reading pornography, smoking cigars.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!

The good: life full of adventures and surprises.

The bad: life too full–feels as if the last time I blogged was Christmas eve blogging the reasons for brown-sugar hard sauce.

The most dramatic event in my life this past week occured Wednesday morning just after I woke up–my little white Westie dog Marianne took one look at me and started moaning and yipping. I don’t need a Dog Decoder to know what this means:

“Something is wrong–so fix it, right now–waaaaa, I’m so unhappy!”

A trip outdoors–and rarely have I been so un-toothbrushed, uncombed, and generally half-asleep for our morning walk–did not make her feel better. My vet recommended me to an emergency vet who could see Marianne exactly at 9. (So I tried to set Feedster’s Feed of the Day before leaving–and that’s another crazy story…)

Cut to $200 of vet consultation and dog-tummy x-rays later. Marianne’s tummy contains a big bubble of gas and a large, smooth-edged mass that puzzles the vet. On the other hand, she is clearly feeling much better after throwing up, peeing, and pooping all over the floor.

Still with me? I drove her home, worried about the mysterious “mass” in her little fur tummy. Then I noticed–her dish full of breakfast dogfood was still in the fridge. Then I realized–my kindly husband had not forgotten to feed her. No, letting me sleep, he had given the dog a full bowl of….

BROWN SUGAR HARD SAUCE!

Marianne had wolfed down an exciting breakfast of butter (mostly) plus brown sugar and brandy. So the large smooth-edged mass in her tummy was:

BROWN SUGAR HARD SAUCE!

Well, as my husband explained, it looks just like dog food….

Heh–well, my dog feels fine now.

And, in other good news from the real life that keeps me from blogging, at this Thursday’s Dave Winer mtg:

• The always-amazing Jay McCarthy showed us how he blogs–when he’s not busy working or going to college.
• IRC friend I got to meet in real life: Jack Hodgson (Gone East)
• Berkman blogger who kindly consented to be the first guinea pig for my “busy smart person interview”: Steve Pomeroy (StaticFree).

http://archive.scripting.com/2004/01/23#theFamousDeanRant

I asked Jim Moore what that was about, he said it’s an Indian war yell or something like that, they used to do it in United Farm Workers rallies, and they adopted it at Dean For America. A few minutes later Dean let out the famous scream, it was the same scream I heard in the conference room.

They’re probably not saying this publicly because it wouldn’t seem contrite to do it, and they probably know they’d get roasted for saying the scream and ranting you heard was part of the motivational culture at DFA. Some have compared the Dean speech to a similar rant by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that made the rounds of the Net. So Dean gets a bit whacky, but after seeing it so many times, the shock value is fading. Taken at face value it wasn’t anger, it was a steam-letting, and an attempt to rally the troops, and totally understandable. The press, as usual, is making a big deal of catching a candidate being a human being.

Wow, January 22 is my first bloggiversary! (Blog backstory here, if you want it.)

A year ago I had a boring blog with zero readers, and now I have (at least) a more varied blog and a whole lot of blogfriends to show for the year just past.

Not to mention the conferences–thank you, Dave and Alex! — lunches and my bright yellow business cards with my blog address–or my new job working for Feedster–perhaps to keep me from putting Scott Johnson into any more amateur graphics….

January 22, 2004 is my first bloggiversary!

OK, I was posting some links and comments in my Slashdot journal a bit before that.

What happened a year ago was that I wanted my links to start getting counted by Blogdex. The Republican Astroturf scandal was big in the blogworld, but hadn’t yet been picked up by dead tree newspapers. Paul Boutin of Wired and Slate was blogging the story, but I pictured Blogdex as our ticket to feature treatment from CNN.

I wanted to add one more to the Blogdex-count of people who linked to any Astroturf story, helping to keep it on the front burner until the New York Times woke up and got into the act.

So a year ago, I signed up for weblogger (because that’s where Paul Boutin’s blog was), got a template as much like Paul Boutin’s template as I thought was decent (I changed the color), put up my first post, and registered my blog to be counted by Blogdex…..

At first, my blog was all politics, all the time. In fact, it was all Astroturf stories all the time. But before all my hypothetical readers dropped dead of boredom, I went to Dave Winer’s first Harvard blogging meeting and discovered there was more fun in blogging than getting your links enumerated by Blogdex.

Other big inspirations:

• Jeneane and Kalilily and Blogsisters.
• Getting a sudden boatload of traffic from Russell Crowe fansites after I blogged a gladiator sound effects striptease.
• Halley’s May 10 Boston Blogger Beach party where I met Feedster’s Scott Johnson and we all got sandy after eating fried clams.
• Bloggercon, where I met so many great people, and I want to thank Dave Winer and Harvard for comping me to the first day!
• Getting invited by Scott to start working for Feedster, which I have been loving doing.
• Learning how to use IRC for my new job, and meeting all the wonderful people in #joiito as a result–thanks, Joi!
• Reading a million new blogs and news feeds to pick out Feedster’s Feed of the Day.
• Having Feedster picked as a finalist for the Bloggies! (“Best web application for weblogs”)

Now, if you read my Fable of Three Bloggerconners, you know I don’t make blogging some kind of religion. But I surely wish, for myself and also for anyone who read this far, that next year will be as much fun for all of us as this year’s been for me.

First, the good news.

Dave Winer himself headed up to Burlington to start re-working the Dean team’s web technology. The first fruit of his effort is Channel Dean, also available in RSS.

If I didn’t already respect the good will and idealism of the Dean team–and of Dave Winer himself–this would make me do it.

First of all, Dave is not working “for” Dean. He’s expending this effort just for the sake of improved technology for democracy. And the Dean team is welcoming this outsider into their headquarters because, to quote the Channel Dean FAQ, “We believe that a more informed electorate is more likely to support our candidate.”

Think about the negative things Dave has said about Dean and his web effort. And if you really think about it, it makes their collaboration more impressive.

Now the bad news–the invisible primary got very visible last night.

What happened? I got some interesting insight from the blog of Iowa caucus member Eclectic Enigma. Before breakfast on January 19, she was undecided. By midnight, she had voted for Kerry.

Heh–glad to see Halley is back to blogging!

I had a good time with Halley yesterday. No surprise that hanging out with Halley is fun, but pretty remarkable when you consider our surroundings, a stacked-up waiting room for a behind-schedule doctor, and later the recovery room.

Halley of course quickly acquired a number of local fans, and I was glad to be able to smuggle her out, finally, without her getting married or signing any major contracts.

You’re not allowed to do those things within 24 hours after anesthesia. And there are a lot of even more enjoyable things that you can’t do in the first week or two…..

So, Halley, you might as well just blog and blog and blog….that would make the rest of us happy anyway.

Can you believe it?

Feedster, the little RSS-search engine that could, is up for a Bloggie Award at sxsw!!!

Category: Best web application for weblogs.

List of Finalists: Blogrolling.com, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger….and Feedster.

Yep. Pretty darn cool! That’s my little company (ok, not totally mine, but the one I work for and love) up there with the big guys! Woo hoo! Woot! And other cries of pleasure….

Hey, join the fun–head over to the Bloggies 2004. Easy links let you check out finalists who include some of the best blogs and metablogs on the globe.

And, while you’re over there, plllleeeeeeez vote for Feedster!!!

Please vote for Feedster!

What if you could visit any spot on the globe by paying exactly $1?

In that case, the book I just fell in love with–1,000 Places to See Before You Die–would cost a mere $1020.

The author, veteran travel writer Patricia Schwartz, is a lot more excited than I am by famous restaurants and chic hotels. I’ll save money and time by skipping places like those.

In Massachusetts, she picked only three must-sees: the Freedom Trail, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Legal Seafood. The first two are excellent choices, but the third is just–a restaurant. And how could she leave out Orchard House in Concord, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women?

So I’m entitled to take her other advice with a grain of salt. Scuba-diving with manatees in Florida or a polar bear safari in Manitoba? Oh sure, they sound like fun, but….

(Sticking my fingers in my ears) I can’t hear you, Patricia! La la la…..

No longer content with heartless attacks on Linux, SCO has moved on to

(brace yourself for the shock)

spamming referer logs.

How else in keduckus can I have two “referals” in my blog stats from the SCO home page?
There’s no damn link to my blog there.

Maybe they were hunting for my parody post, SCO Declares “Law of Gravity” Void…

Or maybe they are exploring a new business model.

(Drumroll, please.)

Spam Betsy’s stats/referers for fun and profit….
What’s next? A massive new push by Microsoft to monopolize all the lucrative spam-blogs action?

What do I like to see in my referer stats? Of course I’m thrilled if your blog pointed to mine. I also delight in mysterious searches for stuff I never said that brought folks here anyway–for example, searches on “LOVE & XXX 2004,” “mac sticky c virus,” or “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

What can I say about any of this but …. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Love and xxx from Betsy, January 14, 2004. May your Mac and mine remain free of the sticky C virus. (I’d hate to have real readers leaving here disappointed.)