blog.bharper: the blog of brandon harper » Site News

Officially Abandoned – Check Out My New Site

Brandon Harper — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 02:38:17 +0000

It’s safe to say this blog has been pretty much abandoned at this point. Between Facebook and Twitter, I’m not sure there is much of a point any longer for a personal blog, especially when it takes so long to write a real blog entry.

If I had to guess there are only a couple of people who even have this blog in their RSS feeds, but I thought I’d post anyway.

At the same time, I decided to start a new photo blog of sorts, but it’s more like a photo stream of daily life captured by my camera phone which basically replaces this blog. Check-out Brandon’s Mobile Bits and please add it to your RSS feeds as it seems to be something I can easily keep up with that might actually be fun for you too.

No idea how much longer I will keep maintaining this blog, but I’d say it’s probably done.

Interwebs Upgraded! I’m Finally All Web 2.AJAX

Brandon Harper — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 14:22:17 +0000

It was time to start separating my “professional” content from the personal stuff and give me a better place for /etc, so here’s the new blog. It’s got all of the buzzwords too, like flickr, AJAX, and even del.icio.us. I doubt I’ll get around to designing my own theme or doing much more than is easily automagically fancy, so this will have to do. I guess the good thing is I’ll be able to start writing/linking to stuff that interests me outside of software poo.

As for news and general life updates, I’ve really been very burnt-out on school (yet again) lately and decided to take a long break from it. It eats up all of my free time and between it and work it makes me very one dimensional. I’ll eventually go back like I always do, but I really need a break from it for awhile. I honestly struggle with whether or not I should finish. Part of me wants to take a few more of my CS theory classes and call it a day, and the other part wants to finish-up the degree and for some reason consider grad school.

I’ve started back up again on some minor projects around the house, and would finally like to start restoration/performance work on the Z in the Summer since I don’t plan on being back in school for at least a year. Lately I’ve also been poking around in Django as well as starting to browse through a Java certification book in my free time. I’ve been working in Java fairly exclusively (finally!) for a couple of months now and find myself enjoying it a lot more than doing scripting despite all of the falsehoods about how it’s “dead” now. Maybe it’s just because it’s a new tool, time will tell, but I find it actually enjoyable because of the tool support for it. That and I’m dealing with fun Computer Science problems like connection pooling and thread blocking rather than “can you make that phone red?” type boring bullshit.

Right now I’m on a needed two week break from teh works and am getting caught-up on a lot of things that I’ve been needing to get done.

Anyhow, I doubt I’ll write too many posts like this in the new blog as it keeps the stalkers a bit too informed. Not to mention, this isn’t a LiveJournal.

Oh, one other fleeting update after pulling an all-nighter to get this blog setup– it snowed.

Snakes On A Plane

Brandon Harper — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 07:02:55 +0000

A couple of days ago, I realized that I’ll be putting Snakes On A Plane on tomorrow– I’m flying on Friday to Seattle to spend about a week there for some exploring and relaxation in the Pacific Northwest. Of course my laptop is going with me, which has Python installed,. I’ll be taking plenty of pictures as usual, and maybe putting in a new entry or two in depending on how much time I spend in the many independent coffee shops in Seattle. I used Google Earth to find a few places within walking distance of the hotel, so we’ll see I guess.

If the site goes down while I’m gone, I guess it will be broken for awhile.

Yes, this is a pointless entry with no clear direction.

On that note…

My New Site: Reviewfoo — Tips, News, and Reviews for Everyone

Brandon Harper — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 04:31:05 +0000

I’ve been making minor changes here and there to this site lately, and in general trying to figure-out where all of my visitors come from (about 1,600 unique visitors per day). During the process I’ve noticed my entries which are the most organically popular happen to be my reviews and experiences with various products.

I spend quite a long time researching purchases of goods, to the point of becoming a bit of an expert on the range of products that compare to what I end-up purchasing, etc. Given the amount of time I spend on research and the popularity of the reviews on my site, I decided to create a new blog titled Reviewfoo. This will be the new home of my research and reviews going forward, and I plan to write more on the subject any time I spend a considerable amount of time researching something before a purchase.

As an avid web-surfer and first adopter, I also intend Reviewfoo to the the place for regularly passing news and tips for everyday things such as finance, “life hacks”, home improvement, etc between my reviews. It’s a fairly general interest blog and you might find a new useful tip there from time to time. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Stupid Lingo Router

Brandon Harper — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 19:36:35 +0000

So if you got a login and password prompt when you came to my site, my stupid Lingo router flaked-out. I’m still not even sure what the problem was.. after messing around with it and hard rebooting it, it finally fixed itself. So yeah, the site is back now.

Experimenting With Ads

Brandon Harper — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 07:49:34 +0000

If you’re a regular reader, you might have noticed thave I’ve added some text ads. I’ve added some AdBrite ads, and will also probably start adding Google AdSense text ads at the top of each entry if they approve my request. This is a trial thing for me– if I can’t earn enough change to pay for at least 50% of my ISP costs each month after trying them for a couple of months, away they go… not worth it.

It’s Zippy Like Tabasco

Brandon Harper — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 06:28:19 +0000

I’ve been spending a little time here and there in the last week moving my web stuff over to the new server while doing homework, and now it’s finally switched over. Let me know if anything is broken. In general the site should be like eleventy billion times faster now.

I still have yet to write much about the new server, the Slashdotting, etc, but maybe I can do that next weekend. This school and work thing leaves me with very little free time.

New Categories: Listening / Reading

Brandon Harper — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 01:10:09 +0000

Being someone who is always listening to music or reading something, I’ve decided to add a couple of categories under Personal for these sorts of items. I doubt I’ll really add much commentary to them most of the time, but I would at least like to put a few things out there just in case you’re interested in them.

Comment Spam Problems Fixed

Brandon Harper — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 01:12:13 +0000

After finally giving-up for awhile on the fight against those comment spam bastards, I got around to implementing James Seng’s Turing Test plug-in for Movable Type. All comments have been re-enabled on all entries, which means that all comments for the past several years on my site should also be showing-up again. Hopefully this fixes the spam problems I’ve been having.

Of course this is just another duct-tape measure until I somehow find some time to convert this site to WordPress…

Welcome Gary Barnett / Dr. Dave Hnida / Katie Hnida Visitors

Brandon Harper — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 07:14:24 +0000

Google has ranked my CU Rape Allegation rant or whatever you want to call it pretty highly, so suddenly my site is seeing about twice the amount of traffic per day as it normally sees. The day before yesterday, I had over 370 unique visitors in fact.

If you’re looking for more information about Gary Barnett, Katie Hnida, or Dr. Dave Hnida, perhaps I’ll add some information to that article since it seems like so many people are interested. Feel free to express your own opinions on the matter as well! It was just an observation of mine after hearing about it all day and night on various talk radio shows.