Excuse the upgrade dust

I just upgraded from WordPress 2.0.5 to 2.1, and a few things broke. (Most notably, the blogroll). I’m working on getting it recovered.

If you notice any other obvious errors, please let me know.

….In the blog software…. not the LOST theories. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Update

Things are pretty much fixed; You won’t be seeing any PHP or SQL messages (I think).

The Site Links and Blogroll got rolled together when the upgrade happened. I’ll look into fixing the rest soon.

Weird shopping at Woot.com

Since this is the shopping season, I thought I’d mention a few different thing on the Web that are interesting. One I ran across a while ago is Woot.com. This is kind of like a clearing house for merchandise, as near as I can tell. At 12:00 midnight eastern, they put an item of for sale. They call this a “Woot”. Sometimes the deals are pretty good. Sometimes they’re just “ok”. For example, today’s Woot is a Dreamโ€™eo Enza 20GB Portable Media Center, which they are selling for $129. I suppose if you’re looking for something like that, that might be quite a deal. (I passed it up). Anyway, it will either sell out before the end day, or it’ll just remain there until midnight rolls around again. Then there will be a new Woot for sale.

Ever so often, they have a “Woot-Off”. A Woot-Off works basically the same way as Woot usually does, but instead of waiting until midnight for a new item to show up, they’ll put a new Woot up for sale as soon as the last item is sold out. What makes this interesting is that you can get some really good deals on things, but you have to be quick.

Sometimes during the Woot-off (and during “regular” days, for that matter) they’ll sell grab bags for one dollar each. You can buy up to three, and you’ll be charged $5 for shipping. They call these grab bags “Random Crap”. Customers on the message boards generally call them a BOC (Bag of Crap), but make up new names using those initials: Bandoleer of Carrots, Bunch of Cartoons, Barrel of Chimpanzees (etc). These things sell out VERY quickly. People post pictures of what they get on the message boards, and sometimes it’s hilarious. People have received stuffed dogs with rainbow afros, strange monkey sculptures, and beaded flag vests.

So, why do they sell out so quickly? Sometimes people get things that are a lot better than that. When I did this, I received a Thermos Pub mug & a camera bag (I think nearly everyone got those), a couple of Gel pens…. and a Geneva Elite Watch! The watch works, and from what I’ve been able to tell, it’s worth about $40 or $50. Other people have recieved a RoboSapien, a Roomba and even a 61-inch television! In fact, when those went out, two people got televisions.

Now, you don’t always get something great. Sometimes things that come are broken. Sometimes you’ll open a box that says “laptop”, only to find a broken laptop power supply. But it is “Random Crap” after all.

Woot.com definitely does not take itself seriously, and it’s worth seeing what goes on there even if you don’t buy anything.

The 2006 Herald Hunt

Imagine thousands of people running around Miami looking for a bus terminal so they can tell a bum there the word “Booger”. Imagine standing on a beach, looking at a pair of giant dice while a rabbit runs around saying “What’s up Doc?” Imagine giant inflatable pool balls sitting in various locations around town, without explanation.

Weird dreams? Well, sort of. It’s what you’ll see at the Herald Hunt. The Herald Hunt is a fantastic puzzle game put on by Miami Herald masterminds Tom Shroder and Dave Barry.

I wasn’t able to go to the Herald Hunt this year, but a couple of friends of mine did. One of them, Andy Wenzel did a fantastic job documenting the Hunt this year, on his website TropicHunt.com. (Why “Tropic Hunt” and not “Herald Hunt”? Tropic Hunt was the original name, until the demise of Tropic Magazine, the magazine supplement to the Miami Herald).

Be sure and check out TropicHunt.com!

Update: Andy (The TropicHunt.com Guy) Wenzel and I worked on a special write-up of The Hunt which incorporates “24” in the form of a report from Chloe. Hope you like it.

Visitor spike!

Wow…. Large spike of new visitors yesterday, after Dave’s posting about 24 -The Next Day episodes page I put together.

I went through the visitors log from yesterday, and saw a lot of visits to that page. I actually get a lot more traffic to the LOST and LOST Spoilers pages, then the “24” pages, usually. The LOST pages are more of those “random neural firings” about what in the heck is going on in that TV show.

Look who found the blog!

I had to run home to take care of a few things today, and while I was out, this posting was made over at Dave Barry’s blog. I was surprised to say the least!

If you’re visiting from there, welcome! If I knew you were headed over here, I would have cleaned the place up first!

If you haven’t checked out Dave’s Blog, you really should. Lots of fun folks over there, and a lot of general craziness.