You know how I don’t usually do memes. Fragileheart tagged me on this one though. She also tagged Canucklehead. He agreed to do it so I’d feel left out if I didn’t.

The Rules:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’ve been tagged, and to read your blog.

My 8 Random facts/habits:

1. The book currently at my bedside is a textbook on endodontic microsurgery by Kim. The bookmark in it is a whole article on emergency management of restricted jaw opening. There’s nothing like having to choose whether to read the book you’re trying to read, or to read the bookmark instead.
2. Interacting with people drains my energy. Interacting with nature rejuvenates me: I touched each of the new White Birches on our property, they were planted last Autumn, and welcomed them to their new home. They felt good.
3. Edgar will be upset to hear that although everything I do at work is based on the scientific method, I live my life less strictly. The Silva Method (when it was less religious-based) provided me the tools to achieve what I have in life. I dabbled in NLP for a while back in dental school.
4. I believe that extra-terrestrials exist and have been a member of SETI@Home for uncountable years.
5. I believe in Karma.
6. Our friend, Mark, recently said something that I will remember for the rest of my life — and that too many dentists have forgotten: The largest influence towards a positive treatment outcome is that the treater (healer) cares about his patient. Those that have followed my blog for a while know how I feel about dentists that care more about the money than the patient.
7. I have been fingerprinted by the U.S. government.
8. I tried to fail 80% of the students in the last endodontics course that I taught. I haven’t taught since.

I’ve tagged:

Haley, Debbie, Tam, Edgar, Laney, Kamala, Rudy, and Ginny. Sorry guys, but rules are rules.

We’ve been crazy busy running around practising our dancing for the upcoming Pro Am and working away in Workland. The Girl is jumpy with excitement that she’ll be switching careers soon and doing something that she trained for years ago, but never fully switched over to.

We saw the last part of Nicholas Nickleby on the weekend and were awed not only by its magnitude but by the way it exploded Dickens’ themes into life. Bravo to the cast, crew, and musicians who brought the show our way.

Now on to the meat of this post:

Shortly after I posted that I accepted drug money as payment, my blog became erratically glitchy. Not only did I notice this, but my readers did as well. Well actually only fragileheart mentioned to me that she did. That’s probably because she’s on the internet 24/7 commenting on everyone’s blog. Basically if you have a blog, she’s probably commented on it. And if she hasn’t don’t worry, she’ll get to it eventually. Not that there’s anything wrong with that or anything. I think it’s really cool and she does liven up my blog with her comments.

Anyway, my theory about the whole thing is that Canada’s internal security service (our version of the FBI and MI5), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, probably got interested in the post because of the drug angle title. They don’t mount people too much these days but they do have a budget for surveillance.

Their packet sniffer is probably an old Intel 486 that they attached downstream from me. Instead of passively checking my readers out, it slowed everything down like crazy. The whole situation got me thinking though: What if my readers had something to hide from the RCMP? I’ve been trying to encourage people to comment on the blog, but what if some of those commenters on that post have things to hide?

So I did some bloggound checking on those commenters and sure enough, suspicions abound. Who actually might be the real drug users around here?

Let’s start with Erin. She (he?) seems to be hungover a lot. One hangover remedy they recommend involves vitamins that help to reduce pain: http://paintmorgantownred.com/…/sunday-hangover-cure-11/. Uh huh. Vitamins that reduce pain. Yup.

Then we have Monique who I didn’t know was a woman of colour. I thought all of the pictures on her website were underexposed. She seems angry about various things quite often. Her doctors have told her that she has tortured her body too much in the past (http://moniquerenae.com/…/im-going-to-diet/). Really…?

We have BT Cassidy who walks through dark alleys meeting people: http://theanatomy…/and-now-little-more-about-inspiration.html.

There’s Melo whose goal seems to be to make money one way or another on the internet. You know how it’s been said that money corrupts: http://www.i-tong.com/2008/03/05/money4banners/

Fonzie’s Ghost is my cockroach friend. If you’ve read my posts about him you’ll know what a good people-user he is. He’s smart but doesn’t have many morals…

Person Who Is Hormonal And Keeps Changing Their Name: They admitted that they’re almost addicted to pot.

Of course, there’s fragileheart who must have been on drugs to post this: http://www.fragileheart.com/…/its-like-a-trainwreck…/

Laney is a good friend of ours…a really good friend who now lives in Switzerland. We know her well enough to know that she’s not all that sweet and innocent as she appears in her blog. Stay away, far away — which isn’t a problem considering that she lives atop a mountain over there. Although I’ve had horse meat and found it very good, I’m still not sure how I feel about eating horses: http://whatsuphighup.blogspot.com/…/not-for-veggetarians.html

Finally, there’s Rudy whom I’ve known for a long time also. However, one of his recent posts lists a person who is most definitely a regular pot smoker. Guilt by association I say: http://www.amid.com/werd/good-people-day-2008/

So out of all of this I know that the RCMP will need to upgrade to a more powerful computer in order to track all of these other suspects. Hopefully that’ll take some of the heat and glitchiness off my site.

metaphor

noun.

1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world’s a stage” (Shakespeare).

Recently, I briefly posted about the benefits of EntreCard for a blogger attempting to promote their blog and who also might be looking for other interesting blogs to follow. Blogs that have registered with EntreCard are regularly updated and well-maintained. Owners of these blogs generally understand how interaction with commenters can drive visitation rates up. Whether they are interested in making money from their blog or just finding an interactive audience, EntreCard has proven to be a useful tool towards either end.

But there seems to be a Freudian undercurrent to the creation of EntreCard. Let’s consider the following:

1. It is more satisfying when my drop is reciprocated.
2. If I’m tired or don’t have time to do much dropping, it’s still nice to be dropped on.
3. I’ll drop on people for a while, but if there is no eventual reciprocation, I stop dropping on them.
4. I usually drop on people first and only afterwards read their blog to find out more about them.
5. If you drop on someone and they then drop on you but you are not interested in dropping on them anymore, is it rude to ignore them?
6. It’s really cool when I drop on someone and they drop on me at the same time.
7. I’ll drop on ugly or cute widgets, but I prefer to drop on cute ones.
8. I think twice before going back to drop on a blog that takes a long time to load or is too complicated for me.
9. It’s nice that there are no strings attached to dropping.
10. After dropping on people, they sometimes become your friends.
11. Some people talk to you more after you drop on them, others do not.
12. Sometimes EntreCard is up, sometimes it is down. It is mostly up.
13. The more EntreCard credits you have, the richer you are, and the more people that want to be your “friend”.

So there you have it–some food for thought. Gotta go. The Girl is waiting for me to drop on by.

Update (April 8, 2008): EntreCard has modified their economy and, in my opinion, reciprocation is not as big of a deal as it used to be. I’ll still try to reciprocate as much as I can though because I’m just that kind of a guy.

Update (January 1, 2010): I no longer have Entrecard attached to this blog for various reasons. At the top of the list: Change in ownership of the organization, unfilled promises, no time for dropping anymore.

Solitary Penguin has returned to the blogosphere after a prolonged absence. She has a good reason to have been away–her newly-bought practice has been causing her grief. facebook has probably gotten in the way too.

Before EntreCard, I had about 6 regular readers and only a few blogs that I felt personally interested in. Don’t get me wrong–I read quite a few blogs, but there were only a handful that I felt compelled to comment on. This was after almost a couple of years of blogging. I’ve never read anyone’s blog in its entirety.

After reading her last post I felt the urge to go backwards through her blog, or even start at the beginning and travel…but then I pictured myself doing that and felt like a stalker. So I didn’t.

Isn’t that strange?

As you know, I started my blog on blogger.com and then moved it over to a Wordpress system. When I was blogging on Blogger I sometimes used to click on their top toolbar to jump to a random blog to find something interesting to read. Through this method I never really found anything interesting enough to add to my RSS aggregator (at that time Bloglines, now Google Reader). In fact, I found many splogs that wasted my time.

I ended up mostly reading blogs that I fell into via Google’s Blogsearch or via comments to my blog. The novelty of facebook led to a decline in the quantity of posts to my blog for some time. However, as the facebook help page (shown above) says, I am a Blogger…

Through facebook, I found a university friend of mine and discovered his blog. Through his blog I found EntreCard. Through EntreCard I have found a repository of quality, well-maintained blogs.

EntreCard’s website has more information for you if you’re interested. You should be interested in EntreCard if you’re a blogger who is on the lookout for other interesting blogs to read and you want to increase your blog’s exposure to others that are also looking for interesting blogs to read. It’s really that simple.

Most people using the EntreCard system use it to try to increase visitors to their blog in order to expose their in-blog advertisements to a larger audience. This is definitely a legitimate use of EntreCard but has been the source of debate about its effectiveness for monetization.

I see EntreCard as the most effective blogging social network system out there right now. Thanks for the recommentation Rudy!

With all of the blogs that I was now subscribed to, keeping track of conversational threads in posts’ comments started becoming problematic for me. If the blog had no option to email me future comments related to the post, I would have to subscribe to the comment feed of the blog. All of this required a few steps that ended up being time consuming. Maintaining these comment feed subscriptions started to become unwieldly in my reader because there were so many of them and they wouldn’t be relevant after a certain amount of time.

Thanks to Lin, another EntreCard user, I found a more elegant solution. Although still in testing, CoComment is a comment aggregator that itself has a feed that my feed aggregator can read. Now I can keep up with comment threads easily.

Because all of this blog hopping has drawn my blog into more of a social blog network than it used to be, I’m tending to spend more time these days in the blogosphere than in facebook. I wanted to find a way to put facebook’s status update system on my blog so that I could still keep track of my fb friends. In order to try to maintain some level of protection of my super-secret identity on my blog, I had to use Feedburner to massage my facebook friends’ RSS status update feed before it could be posted on the blog (so that the feed doesn’t show my real name). Really, really, industrious and motivated individuals will likely still be able to discover my real identity, but you deserve to know it if you go to all that trouble.

Because my blogroll is now so long, it made more sense for me to find a way to show recent posts from the blogroll rather than links to the blogs themselves. So now recent blogroll posts are shown on my blog via a script courtesy of Google Reader. Blogs that show on here are just a handful of the total number of blogs that I’m subscribed to. I choose which ones get to show up based on a number of factors: Frequency of posting (blogs that post tons of material a day don’t go on here because I want to try to have a fair distribution of posts from other blogs), if you comment on my blog there’s a good chance your blog will get added to the list, and most importantly, blogs that represent topics I find most interesting show up on here. Oh, and obviously your blog needs to have a valid syndication feed.

Finally, there’s the “Current Context” headline at the top of the blog. This is from a Wordpress plugin that reads the status from Twitter. My Twitter updates get picked up on the blog and also by a facebook app that then updates my facebook status and keeps the two in sync. As far as I know, there are 2 facebook apps related to Twitter. Rudy uses the “official” one and I use the second which I like better because it doesn’t automatically prepend stuff to my update.

Now if anyone finds a plugin that will vacuum the house, wash the dishes, cook dinner, and shovel the driveway please let me know. The Girl is on a continuing education course all weekend and is just home at night so I have a good-sized TODO list to work on.

Blogging isn’t on the list.