Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

The problem with blogging every day? Sometimes you go on vacation. You come back from vacation, with the best of intentions: You are going to catch up on your work. You are going to tackle the piles of laundry that are so large and numerous that you are not sure how they made it into your flat. You are going to resume your normal blogging schedule.

It turns out, this is not true.

Instead, there is jetlag. You are tired, at strange times.
There is more work to be done than expected, because you have been gone for a week and a half, and there is a resulting backlog in things-that-must-be-done.
And that laundry needs to dry. You cannot just throw on the next load. The presently-drying-laundry must be dealt with first.

On top of all this, blogging takes time. Come up with idea. Expand on idea. Do a bit of research. Find links. Find photos. Ensure that you are being suitably opinionated — somebody ought to take offense at it, or you’re no blogger.

So you get to Wednesday. You have plans — after all, you have not seen friends in a couple of weeks. You have twenty minutes to write something in order to keep up with your blog schedule.

You are still on the “come up with idea” step.

This is the result.

Enjoy?

observations and opinions crappy blog entries, observations and opinions, real life, schedules, vacation

Last week, without warning, Google shut off more than half a dozen blogs that were hosted using their popular blogging service, blogger. Upon receiving notices that content on these blogs violated copyrights (which the story in The Guardian makes clear is not the case), they simply deleted them, and all their content. Mashable gives a bit more information here.

Whenever this happens, I think about my own writing here on the Big Bad Blog. This entry is the six-hundred-and-sixty-ninth article published here, and while there are a lot of Morning Coffees and poorly written articles that I might care little about, this blog is about giving myself the chance to write and create, and I would like to keep it.

There are, however, measures that can be taken to protect your content:

Host it yourself. Rather than allowing all your work to exist courtesy of the people at Google, LiveJournal or WordPress, get your own domain name and set yourself up outside their sphere of influence. Google will allow you to publish to your own site — though you run the risk that they will still be happy to delete it for you — WordPress, Moveable Type and others make a variety of tools that can be used to host your own blog.

Back it up. Additionally, almost every blog will allow you to back up your content. Do this regularly — particularly if your blog is in the publishing industry’s target-of-the-day category. Things they currently do include: the sending of takedown notices to music for which you have permission to publish, and the believe that linking is stealing.

Everybody who cares to keep their content should back up regularly. Those who do not have 100% control over where their content is stored should back up even more often. Those who post music, video, or summaries (and links to) news content should back up the most — particularly if somebody other than you can shut down your site if threatened by lawyers.

The important thing to remember is that, unless your content is kept on a server in your own home, it is on a machine that somebody else has control over. If you value it, keep a copy of it for yourself, on your own machine — the one on the Internet could disappear at any time, regardless of the esteem to which you hold your host.

I would say more, but I need to go back up the Big Bad Blog now.

Tech and World, observations and opinions backup, blogs, google, musicblogocide, observations and opinions, save, Wordpress Stuff

Hard as it might be to believe, it is one year ago that the Big Bad Blog began, with the necessary Hello World post, initial blog spam, and — a few hours later — the posting of a webcomic featuring Mr T. As with most things, it doesn’t feel like the Big Bad Blog has been going on for an entire year.

Or from another perspective, with 611 articles, it seems like the Big Bad Blog has been around for much longer.

We capped off 2009 with a look at the most popular articles of 2009. Unsurprisingly, the last ten days have not made a huge impact on what the most popular articles of the past year have been. Instead, to celebrate the Big Bad Birthday, we give you the most popular search terms that have been used to discover the Big Bad Blog.

We count down the five most popular search terms … approximately. Most of these have some slight variations to them, and I have tried to collect together the variations that occur within the top 50 search terms.

5: Sam Taylor-Wood

Or Sam Taylor Wood, and other varieties thereof.

This is an interesting one, as there is only a single article on the Big Bad Blog mentioning Ms. Taylor-Wood. And that article is a Morning Coffee, meaning that there is only a fleeting reference and an image, clearly indicating that Sam Taylor-Wood has too little of an online presence.

An additional point of interest is that Ms. Taylor-Wood would not have made the list prior to Christmas, despite the fact that the article dates back to February. Over the past two weeks, she has held the number one position in Big Bad Blog search terms to break into the top five.

4: Felicia Day

Most often, but not always, followed by the words “nude”, “naked”, or “sexy”, Felicia Day was the fourth-most popular search in the first year of Big Bad Blogging. Searches for Ms. Day first spiked during late September and early October, prompting me to wonder if the Internet was in need of more naked Felicia Day.

Unsurprisingly, asking that question on the Big Bad Blog did not result in fewer hits from those very search terms, and Ms. Day has continued to be a popular search term ever since.

For those looking for additional photographic Felicia Day material, you may be interested to know that The Chive has recently posted some photos of her.

3: Sexting

In third position, we get another topic that we do not talk about much here at the Big Bad Blog: Sexting.

This is because we do not care about it much. Teenagers are bags of hormones, and will take sexy pictures of themselves, with whatever is handy. Usually a handheld phone is handy. They also love to send text messages.

Nobody should be surprised by this. The only thing surprising is that large groups of adults seem bent on ruining children’s lives over behaving like children, by putting them on sex offender lists. I am guessing that the next target for these people will be to charge children who pee in the pool with public urination.

2: Origami Unicorn

I love that “origami unicorn” is the second-most common search term used to find the Big Bad Blog. Although there are only two instances of origami unicorns on the Big Bad Blog, I get reminded of them every time I check the Big Bad Blog stats.

Thank you, searchers. I love origami unicorns.

Number one. Tattoos

The number one search term used to find the Big Bad Blog in its first year is “weird tattoos”. Number four and five are “bad tattoos” and “bad tattoo”. Also in the top 50 are “weird tattoo” and various mis-spellings of the above mentioned search terms.

I have no idea why people come here for the tattoos, but they do.

Thank you, Tattoo lovers. We love you too.

observations and opinions birthday, felicia day, meta, observations and opinions, origami unicorn, sam taylor-wood, search, searching, sexting, tattoos

There is a reason we do not often follow big news stories here at the Big Bad Blog: they develop. Our team of one (sometimes two, even more rarely three) simply cannot stay on top of the story. There are too many other things that are distracting. News organisations that presumably have some sort of revenue stream tend to do a much better job.

However, when the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) in the United States reacted to a terrorist on a plane on Christmas, many people were on holiday — reaction was muted. And here on the Big Bad Blog, we wrote about it.

Since then, many others have written about it, and the story has (indeed) developed. We are happy to say that we have yet to read an opinion that would seem to indicate support for the latest TSA changes. Everybody seems to believe that they will merely inconvenience passengers without improving their safety.

A (non-comprehensive) summary of things to read, for those who wish to follow the story further:

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, CNN asked the (rhetorical question): Is aviation security mostly for show? Gizmodo asked President Obama to fire the TSA.

The best line from any of the articles covering the attack and changes to security comes from Maureen Dowd of The New York Times:
If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

Following the dispersal of new security measures, they were (of course) leaked onto the Internet. In a stunning show of efficiency, the TSA tracked down the bloggers who published the information, seeking the source of the leak. If only they could find bomb-carrying terrorists with such efficient determination.

Or maybe not so efficient. The agent they sent out then lost his notebook, which contained details of the investigation into the security breach at the agency. And the TSA decided to drop all legal action against the bloggers they threatened following the (unexpected?) bad press and some fighting back by the bloggers themselves.

One of the bloggers is interviewed here.

And the TSA screening manual is available online (as a PDF) here. They posted it online accidentally, so a news agency picked it up. Naturally.

For those wondering why Israeli airports do not have the same kind of security issues, you are not alone. The Toronto Star wondered why and decided to find out. It would seem that they focus their search on terrorists, rather than “dangerous” substances. Which makes sense — substances are only dangerous if used dangerously.

Most recently, the TSA has now decided that passengers from fourteen countries will have to suffer through “enhanced screening”. (CNN, New York Times)

If you read that last paragraph, and compare it to the Toronto Star article, you can see the disconnect is still there. The TSA is still approaching it wrong — trying to throw a blanket over anybody who might be flying from or hold a passport from places such as Saudi Arabia. Anybody under that blanket has their possessions searched thoroughly.

Terrorists are individuals, not nationalities. Security should be watching for individuals.

Terrorists are humans, and can be creative. Security at airports should not simply be watching for what they believe to be the latest terrorist trend. Chances are, it will be something new. So do not worry too much about their water, their shoes, or the last hour of a flight. Pay attention to the person.

The only constant in these attempts has been what the person is trying to do.

(Photo by Thomas Cain/Wired.com)

observations and opinions developing story, law, observations and opinions, security, terrorism, terrorists, travel, TSA