On January 10, 2002, Dyers.org started with a simple Hello World. Since then, the site has landed my face on television, in a couple of newspapers, in an iPhone app, and all over the web. In web years, Dyers.org is wearing a white belt, white shoes, and should be packing up its polyester pants to drive the Caddy down to Florida.

How Long Ago Is 10 Years In the WebSphere?

Dyers.org started up on MindSpring account when the fastest connection a geek could hope for was 1.5 megabit DSL. It ran on the Blogger platform before Blogger was eaten by Google. It predates American Idol, The Bachelor, and even the G4 Network. Back then, we were all talking about this new iPod thing that came out a couple of months before, which cost an unbelievable $399 for 5Gb of storage. We all thought we should’ve invented it, and we might’ve if we weren’t so busy playing Grand Theft Auto III day and night on our PS2s. Owners of the brand new Xbox console might’ve had a better chance if they weren’t so wrapped up with Halo.

Tweeting was 4 years away, and Tumblr and StumbleUpon were counting their anniversaries in months. No one was using LinkedIn, MySpace, or even Friendster because they hadn’t been thought of. Hell, Mark Zuckerberg was still a couple of years away from coming up with the Harvard-only web app he called “TheFacebook.”

Without vast virtual social networks in which to envelop themselves, nerds either sat home watching The X-Files and drooling about the possible release of Warcraft III, or they started blogs and blathered on and on about nothing.

And I stood there with a bunch of other nerds (wearing onions on our belts, which was the style at the time) and said, “people want to know what we eat for breakfast. We know they do.” Those other nerds became successful pro-bloggers, or hit the delete key when they realized that blogging was for teenage girls.

Despite being the wrong gender and age, I had an astounding 30 readers that I felt compelled to entertain. I kept blogging. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

What followed were years of meandering introspective blather, a couple of years of earnest pro-blogging, and 3 years of Life of Riley posts about what it’s like to quit your job and end up a stay at home dad.

And there were beards. Lots and lots of beards.

And by publishing every time I thought, “If I publish this, I’m going to look really stupid,” the original 30 expanded into a horde of really unique and interesting people. And although I don’t give you much of a reason to visit anymore, what with all the tweeting, and the texting, and the Facebooking, I know you’re still out there somewhere and I hope you’re doing well.

A Few Things I’ve Learned In A Decade Of Blogging

• The web loves lists.
• If Mother Theresa had a blog, someone out there would send her hate mail. You’re not Mother Theresa. You’ll get worse.
• You can say 2+2=4 and someone is going to call you a conspiracy theorist who has been bought by the mainstream media.
• Most of what you hope will do well won’t, and you will shake your head at what succeeds.
• Proper tagging and promotion can more than make up for bad writing and lack of content.
• Over time, blogging will turn you into a writer with no time to actually write.
• Beware of bloggers who blog about blogging. There is a good chance that they are salesmen selling sales seminars.
• Deadlines are more important than perfection because writing is never done perfect.
• Write short, scannable text.
• The web is fickle.
• Give before you ask.
• There are secret cabals of savvy folks out there who cross promote articles for each other to drive traffic. They sometimes work.
• Blogging means that you will never be able to tell a story without someone cutting you off and saying that they read it already.
• People you’ve never met will feel like they know you, but most of the time you’ll wonder if anyone’s really out there.
• Stats can be exciting, but they really don’t matter.
• You need to promote your posts, but promoting your own posts rarely works.
• Your blog can get you in the paper and on TV. But, then what?
• You can have your face circle the web for years and no one will recognize you on the street.
• Whatever you publish in anger will be embarrassing in a couple of years.
• You can be a big beard freak at the top of Google stats and there will be people will still want to hire you.
• If your blog is not a labor of love, you’re going to have a hard time defining its success.

Going Forward

Now that the site is in its golden years, it’s sluggish and lazy, sleeping in a recliner covered in Cheetos. It occasionally snores itself awake long enough to drop something funny or facial hair related before drifting off again…which reminds me of a funny story about your Aunt Bernie. Or was it Phyl? No, no. That’s right, it was your Uncle Bob’s cousin, Linda. The one with the limp.

Hey, did you ever get that finger looked at when you went to the doctor’s last time? Because I got this stuff down at the drugstore that works wonders on… What? Oh, right.

Anyway.

Bob’s cousin Linda, you’re going to love this, falls into…Oh, jeepers Christmas, now I’m late for bingo. Listen, just stay here and I’ll tell the story when I get back. There’s shortbread in the cupboard, and tea in the…hey, can you program a VCR? The clock on there keeps flash…what do you mean “what’s a VCR?” The thing you tape Matlock with. What’s taping? Oh, for cry eye. Listen, I gotta go. I don’t have time to explain what VCRs, VAX clusters, or a 56k modem are. Huh? My pants? why they’re right on my…aw fudge.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

-Jon

Roll A D6

This parody deals 2d6+3 damage against jocks, so I shall secret it away into my virtual bag of holding, me thinks.

Ah, the red shirts: the pawns of the Star Trek Universe. When three main characters and “Ensign Larry” beam down to the planet, you know who’s going to take the poisonous spikes to the face from the native plant, or the shot the chest from an angry laser-toting robot. I happen to be wearing a red shirt this morning. I should probably plan to just stay indoors after I finish cleaning all the sharks out of the mega-nitroglycerin grinder in cargo bay two.

Oh, shoot. Hey, if you’re reading this, could you come down and open the air lock door? If I don’t get the grinder cleaned before the captain gets back, I’m a dead man. Oh, and could you bring down the air lock timer manual? The damned thing is counting backwards…

Pwning The Pawns Of The Star Trek Universe

Can Darth Vader’s younger brother, Chad identify the various characters he meets on his recent reconnaissance mission to Dragon*Con? You bet your big, black life support helmet he can. Sort of. Mostly. In a way.

75 Costumes At Dragon Con With Chad Vader

(via Great White Snark)

I’ve been known to get a little worked up over Hollywood’s agenda of burying my favorite childhood memories under a mountain of re-released garbage, but my anger is a Bic lighter compared to the napalm that these guys drop. From movies to comics to games to tech, they burn just about every geek franchise out there in under six minutes.

Star Trek TNG Redubbed

“We’ll put on ‘Zeppelin and eat cheddar cheese.”

Look. I don’t know where the rumor came from, but this blog is absolutely NOT ghost written by Wil Wheaton.

Yes, we both have brown hair.
Yes, we are essentially the same height.
Yes, we both have been known to have beards.
Yes, we are on the geeky end of the scale.
Yes, we both have blogs that were surprisingly close in Alexa traffic and rank last year.
No, we are not the same person.

Wil Wheaton is a TV star (Star Trek), movie star (Stand By Me), and author who lives on the West Coast. I am a blogger, beardsmith, and man of leisure who lives on the East Coast. I am not a character written by Wheaton to test something different on a new audience. I’m not a marketing scheme. I’m a real person and I exist. I don’t understand why people would think otherwise.

“That sounds exactly like something you’d say to throw us off. Point out the glaring similarities between actor and character before we do, and then convince us that they’re insignificant and coincidental. To be a good actor you have to create a detailed character, and if he has some of your personality traits, it just makes it easier for you to portray him.

Once you get the framework created, you just need to add a few quirks to make him more believable. Maybe you give his girlfriend a geeky enough moniker that it could be part of a secure password. Maybe you make him do something that everyone dreams of like quitting his job. Maybe you create a little conflict with stories of a mysteriously never ending house renovation. Hell, maybe you even make him grow a crazy beard every year just for fun.”

Whoa. Those are real things. I do have #1GF!, I did walk away from my job for no good reason, and I have been growing an annual beard for a decade.

“Uh huh.”

I’ve developed a few WordPress plugins and I love to hack WordPress, so there are times when I need to write and test PHP within the WordPress framework. Because my plugins are site-wide sidebar widgets, any errors I may introduce while testing have the potential to affect every page on my site.

Instead of testing my widgets live, I test the underlying PHP in a designated test area that his hidden from regular readers. That way, if PHP barks at me for missing an underscore, it’s more of a private message to me, and not a public broadcast to all of my readers.

Creating a WordPress test area is a simple addition of a page template and test page to your WordPress theme files. Any PHP that you put in the test template can be executed by refreshing a draft preview of the page assigned to it. Because the test page is never actually published, there’s no possibility of it reaching your readers and interrupting the flow of your site.

Want to set up your own WordPress PHP test area?

While I stand by my original ending for last week’s CERN cartoon, I did have a few alternate endings that didn’t make the cut. Six of them are pictured below.

Now, a lot of these were a little too obvious, but I have to say that General Zod and the Yamato were closing in on the Sleestaks for the final cut.

I know there are better jokes out there though, so I thought I’d provide a template in case any of you can provide a geekier alternative. What do you think? Are you up for a little geekery?

Damnit, I can’t believe I forgot The Herculoids and Dr. Who. Gah. So many options…

Good luck.

#1GF! and I are sitting in Chachky’s or Flingers, and there are piles of seemingly random crap tacked up to the walls. Among the junk on the wall opposite me, there is a picture of the cast of Star Trek and a rubber Yoda mask…

Me: Hey, there’s a picture of Star Trek on that wall.
#1GF!: [turns] Yes, I agree.
Me: And there’s a Yoda head there, too.
#1GF!: [turns and turns back]
Me: You don’t know who Yoda is.
#1GF!: Uh… E.T.?
Me: [thumps head on table]

You know what happens if Vulcans don’t mate with in 8 days of going into heat? They die. It’s a little known fact that Spock would occasionally rely on his human side to sail through the pon farr by heating up The Enterprise with the wheels of steel. Don’t hate the playa. Spock might’ve been the biggest pimp in the known universe, but his life depended on it.

DJ Spock

When you want to include a photo retouch on your web site, displaying the before and after photos side by side makes it difficult for people to see the differences between the original and your work. A better way to showcase your fixes is to use a mouseover to display the original photo in place of the retouched version when someone hovers their mouse over it.

There are a lot of ways to do mouseovers, but I use a javascript one liner because its simple and portable between different blogging systems. I can’t really take credit for writing this code because similar ideas have been floating around the web for over a decade.

All you have to do is paste the following code into your web page, taking care to replace the one instance of original.png and two instances of retouch.png with the locations of your own photos. If you want the mouseover to link somewhere, be sure to replace the # with a valid link.

Simple Code For A Javascript Mouseover

<a href="#" onMouseOver="document.the_image.src='original.png';" onMouseOut="document.the_image.src='retouch.png';"> <img src="retouch.png" name="the_image" /></a>

The code above uses the_image as the image name, which works fine for a single image, but if you want to use show multiple mouseovers on the same page, copying and pasting the code above several times won’t work without a quick modification. Because each image needs to be named independently, you would need to change the three instances of the_image in the second copy of the code to something like the_image2. The third would have to be changed to the_image3, and so on.

Multiple Javascript Mouseovers On A Sigle Page

<a href="#" onMouseOver="document.the_image.src=original1.png';" onMouseOut="document.the_image.src='retouch1.png';"> <img src="retouch1.png" name="the_image" /></a>

<a href="#" onMouseOver="document.the_image2.src='original2.png';" onMouseOut="document.the_image2.src='retouch2.png';"> <img src="retouch2.png" name="the_image2" /></a>

Javascript Mouseover In Action

Hold your mouse over the “Geekantium” image to change it.

If you’ve ever encountered my lack of fashion sense in the real world, you know that I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with not looking like you stepped out of a magazine, but in order to learn how to retouch photos with the GIMP, I’ve had to pick someone to practice on. Because they are really easy to find, I figured that I’d try to enhance some of those pictures of celebrities when they get caught looking like the rest of us.

Here’s a picture of Alicia Silverstone that I retouched. To see the original from Top Socialite’s Celebrities Without Makeup Page, hover your mouse over the picture

I’m no pro and Ms. Silverstone can afford way better retouchers, so I gave up with a “good enough” before I wasted too many hours on it. I’m trying to learn how to retouch things while preserving natural skin texture, but the original photo was a little too pixelated to get any real detail out of even if I had the skill. You can see where I gave up near the hairline, but I think the eyes, eyebrow, and that little bit of hair over the ear show that I’m making progress.

Can You Help Me Out?

Retouching celebrity pictures feels pointless because it’s unlikely that they would ever see the results or care if they did. If I know that someone is going to see the result, I’m more likely to spend time on it, so I’d like to ask a little favor:

If you have a photo that you would let me take a shot at retouching, I would really appreciate the practice.

This is free, and the worse the photo, the better the practice. I know it might be embarrassing for some of you to send me bad pictures of yourself, but I wouldn’t think of putting the results on my site without your permission because I respect your privacy and recognize you as the owner of your pictures. You would be doing me a big favor by helping me to learn how to enhance photos, and hopefully you’ll end up with a picture that you really like.

If you’re game, drop me a comment or use my contact page. The best photos to send are the ones where you think, “This would be a great picture if only [insert issue here].”

And you know that I think your fine just the way you are.

Thanks for your help.

If you can hear the Super Mario theme and feel like you’re home, then two things are true: you’re old and you’re a geek. Yesterday, while watching Attack of the Show, I saw a video of a radio controlled car playing the Super Mario Brothers Theme and thought it was awesome enough to add to my list of 44 Ways to Enjoy the Super Mario Theme.

After watching it a few times, I’m not so sure that I should’ve included it. The tones of the bottles during the test runs at the beginning of the video really don’t match with the tones when the theme is playing, making it seem like it might be a hoax.

What do you think? Is this a fake?

I usually don’t post about things that I stumble, but this was too geeky not to share. It’s a flow chart of what happens to people who are exposed to D&D early in life. You’ll probably have to view the full-sized version to see that “No” leads to “Sunlight” and ultimately to “Girls”, and that both the TRS-80 and Khaaan! are mentioned.

found via BoingBoing

A friend of mine has dedicated his working life to speech recognition and synthesis, and sometimes he gives me phone numbers or websites to see what I think of their speech systems from a user’s perspective. As a friend, I should say something like, “Hey that’s really good”, but most of the time, I just try to trip up the application so that it responds positively to something foul. It’s a bad habit that I’ve been carrying since the days when we’d sit around a monochrome screen and snicker over the plethora of disgusting things that we could make ZORK tell us that it didn’t know how to do.

The following conversation took place with computer generated virtual assistant for Alaska Airlines. Although some of the responses seem human, they are all pre-programmed.

Sometimes I wish that there was an catless offshoot of LOLCats for geeks like…

LOLWars

or

LOLTrek

Don’t you?

As I was looking for songs for the upcoming PSI PHI edition of FineTune Friday, I ran across a song that I haven’t heard in a thousand years called, “I am Chewbacca”. It’s by a band called DVDA, which is made up of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and some of the other guys from South Park.

Over the last two days, I’ve gotten the song so lodged in my head, that my brain hasn’t been able to stop my mouth from blurting out the lyrics at inappropriate moments. Most people think it’s funny “uh oh” rather than funny “haha” when a crazy looking dude with a beard randomly mutters, “Don’t Fucking Cross Me! I am Chewbacca!” in the checkout line at the supermarket.

Because there’s no fun in having an earworm if you don’t spread it, I’m spreading this song to you. If you find the song oddly familiar, you might’ve heard it in a little cult classic called Clerks.

Here’s the “I am Chewbacca” Audio and Lyrics to get you started.

Enjoy!

Catch the Brainwaves of Jon Dyer
Hey this is pretty cool for me. Mark, the guy behind Broadcasting Brain interviewed me as part of his series on bloggers and social media (Thanks, Mark!). So far, the series has included a number of new media celebrities (Shana Albert, Chris Brogan, Patrick Bisaillon, and more), so I was pleasantly surprised to be included.

My answers included references to porn, beards, DJ’s, the Kobra Kai, LARPing, and Mr. T, so I probably came off a tad on the geeky side, but then, I’ve never claimed to be cool.

Be sure to let me know what you think.

While researching my own Holiday Gift Guide, I found that the web is littered with holiday gift guides trying to wrangle my dollars from me. I couldn’t get more than two clicks in without hitting a “guide” that wasn’t worth the 1′s and 0′s that it was printed on. Of the 100+ guides that I went through, I only came across 15 or so that were worth sharing.

If you’re like me and still haven’t started your shopping yet, maybe these will get the gift ideas flowing. I hope they help!

The holidays are fast approaching, and as predicted, I haven’t done a bit of Christmas shopping. If you’re in the same boat as me, I compiled this list of holiday gift ideas to get you going.

1. Satisfy Their Gadget Needs

Mug Boss ($4.99)
Got a handy-man or handy-man wannabe on your list? Give them a way to keep their workbench tidy while showing off their manly side with the Mug Boss.

Super Mario Sound FX Keychain ($5.99)
If you spend any amount of time with game geeks, this is the gadget to have. The device will play six sound effects from Super Mario (Coin, Start Music, Extra Life, Jump, Grow, and Death Music) so that you can properly accentuate your conversations.

THE RTFM Mug ($7.99)
Have a tech support grunt on your list? Well there’s nothing that support folks hate more than N00bs who interrupt perfectly good days with their refusal to take basic steps to solving their own problems. The only thing worse is when other techies follow suit. Let your tech support grunt express his frustrations with the Read The Manual Mug.

Humping USB Dog ($9.99)
I don’t know if there’s anything more distracting than a tiny USB dog that humps your computer as you work. Do you?

The Better Blogroll is a WordPress widget that I wrote to replace the default “Links’ widget. It works by displaying a random subset of links from your blogroll which change each time the page is refreshed. To provide a reader some better insight into what they might be clicking, the category of each link is displayed to its right (you can see this widget in action in my sidebar under the heading “Rolling Blogroll”).

Displaying link categories doesn’t really make sense for bloggers who only use one category, so I updated the plugin to make the visibility of the link categories optional in this release.

More information about the widget and the download link can be found on my Better Blogroll Widget for WordPress Page.

Take it for a spin and help your readers to get more out of your blogroll.

Unless you read a lot about web marketing and SEO, you may not have heard of Sphinn, a Digg-like community where people go to share and vote on web marketing articles.

Because I’ve gotten spoiled by the simplicity of adding bookmarks to StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us through buttons on my Firefox tool bar, submitting good articles to Sphinn seemed like too many steps. It’s certainly not a big deal to copy a url, open Sphinn, find the submit page, and so on, but it’s not as easy as clicking a button.

Well, now it is.

If you’re a Sphinn user, I created a Firefox extension which will allow you to quickly add the current page you’re reading to Sphinn. When you find a page that you want to add, clicking the Sphinn It! toolbar button will open a new tab and submit the url for you.

If you want it, head over to my Sphinn Toolbar Button For Firefox page.

Enjoy!

On Monday, WordPress 2.3 was released, and it contains some major changes that are making people nervous about upgrading. After making the jump to WordPress 2.3 on my own site and upgrading my Better Blogroll Widget for WordPress, I thought I should share some of the information that helped me survive the upgrade with minimal damage.

Things You Need To Know Before Upgrading To WordPress 2.3

• The Basics
  What’s New In WordPress 2.3
  How to Install WordPress 2.3
  How to Upgrade to WordPress 2.3
  WordPress 2.3 Download
• You Might Not Be Able To Log In
  Some users are experiencing “ERROR: WordPress requires Cookies but your browser does not support them or they are blocked.” when trying to login after a WordPress 2.3 upgrade. It happened to me, and there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re in the clear and then being locked out of your own site. Do yourself a favor and solve the issue before it happens by downloading an updated version of wp-login.php.
  Update: This was written for upgrading to 2.3 and has been shown by some people to not be effective with a 2.3.1 upgrade. There may be more information available in this WordPress support thread.
  
  Continue Reading…

Two things that I love to do are writing, fixing problems, and helping people out. After quitting my job of 13 years in the PC and Server Support field, I have plenty of time to write, but not a lot of problems to fix.

This week, I tackled Mo-licous’s virus issues and took on explaining drive fragmentation to the non-computer wizard, and in the past, I’ve tackled social bookmarking, social networking, instant messangers, why you should be using RSS, and even how to fix your PS2. These are topics are sometimes missing from the radar of people who don’t live and breathe by the PC, but many find them beneficial once they understand them.

So, I’m going to make an offer to my readers: If you have a PC or tech related problem, or a topic that you’d like explained in regular terms, drop me a note with my contact form and I’ll pick one submission and try to fix or explain it to you in a post.

It’s free tech support from a qualified geek who wants to help you. How can you go wrong?