RobotSkirts

I return home from Las Vegas today. It’s been a long week and it’ll be good to get home… until I move to Vegas next month.

Today marks my one year anniversary of daily blogging for Hack-A-Day. It’s also been one year since I got my mechanical engineering degree. Until today I had completely forgotten what I said on that momentous occasion.

create your own visited states map

I’m headed to San Francisco tomorrow for the Maker Faire. Richard and Dirk both posted maps of where they’ve been so I decided to do likewise since I met them on a previous trip. Fabienne has been putting together some cheat sheets for me while I try to get Hack-A-Day posts up through the weekend. Will is working on a ________ for the show (parts showed up yesterday and he laid out the board last night… madman… serial control from the iPod won’t be done though). I’ve already got plans to hang out with the folks from Midnight Research Labs. I’m looking forward to meeting Limor and other new people as well (and not having to explain what H-A-D is). Definitely going to be a trip to remember.

Hack-A-Day’s parent company has been sold to AOL. We’re still an independent company. AOL won’t be doing any direction or censorship so things won’t be changing that much; we’re keeping the same management team. We will be getting better contracts and our checks will be from AOL (I have to stop throwing out their mail). Here’s our CEO’s summary of the last few days. Someone went so far as to break down the approx. $25 million sale per blog. I am head editor of a blog worth $1 million. In an IM with my mother I challenged her because she doesn’t think this is a real job. I got this reply:

I am ol the school that a job is something you can’t do in pajamas.–unless you are a prostitute, and pajamas probably don’t enter into that either.

Clothes on or off I’m as good as a prostitute; here’s a picture of me at work.

Well, it looks like the entire Weblogs, inc. network has been defaced. The databases seem intact. Hopefully we’ll be back up soon. Damn, scriptkiddies.

UPDATE: Well our hosting company is on top of things. The offending pages are being removed and we should be back up soon.

UPDATE: We’re back up. The RSS feed is a little out of date, but everything else seems fine. Damn, now I don’t have an excuse not to work.

This is so aggravating. The trail goes Treehugger -> Slashdot -> MAKE:Blog. Hack-A-Day story from two days previous. Slashdot hasn’t linked to us in months, but makezine? That’s friggin’ BS. Torrone was the original editor for Hack-A-Day and is now posting a ton of the projects we feature once someone else strips off the original source.

The media server isn’t working out for some reason. If you happen to stumble across this post you’re a winner since this is the only place to get the podcast. First make sure the link is still down on Hack-A-Day. If it is you can get the podcast from here. If all else fails here is a mirror [link is down]. Vince did all of the production work and no, my voice is not that booming in real life.

So, Thursday’s story over at Hack-A-Day was about a mechatronic guitar. The story was picked up by Slashdot without any credit (I blame the submitters). Not really out of the ordinary since it has happened three other times in the last week-and-a-half. Once Slashdot had sanatized it, it was now safe for the hack aggregator to report it. I didn’t really feel burned till Engadget picked it up this morning and credited Slashdot. If you only made one blog post a day you’d think your boss would read it, right? Then of course the other gadget blog had to have it, but they got their hot tip from Music Thing. The initial tip for this was sent in July 1st so, I’m sure we were first on the blogoblock. Which is good, but some acknowledgement and more readers would be a nice bonus. This isn’t an isolated event; we’ve gotten a lot of scoop links in the last two months, but never any credit from a major site. At least our large readership can look at other sites and smuggly think “old news”. A reader did point out that we’re the first result when typing “hack” into google. Pretty good coming in #1 out of 14 million pages. Of course, thanks to me we are also the #1 result for the phrase “genital scorching“.

Well, my first post just went live over at hackaday. That’s right, I am Weblogs, Inc. newest contributing editor. An honor truly worthy of a delicious sandwich. Not only am I getting paid for a hobby I love, but being a paid blogger puts me in the 99.95 percentile of nerddom. All your base… etc, etc.

I’ve got a great announcement, but I’m going to keep my mouth shut for another two weeks till it is finalized. In its place I’ve constructed this delicious sandwich. Now what would justify such a delicious sandwich? You’ll just have to wait to find out.