BlogCatalog T-Shirt Slogans

BlogCatalog is probably one of the best bloggers’ online hangouts nowadays. It’s a blog directory, a help forum for bloggers, a general discussion board, a social network, and much more - all rolled into one site.

Anyway, the other day, the BlogCatalog admins were looking for a slogan for a new BlogCatalog T-Shirt. First I thought about paraphrasing Julius Caesar, so I came up with “I came, I saw, I bookmarked…” – but it’s wasn’t that creative. So I thought, why not motivate new users to sign up? “AdSense money not enough for alcohol and hookers? Post your blog here!” - but I wasn’t sure they approve of using curse words like AdSense. Then I thought about the fact that I visit this site on a daily basis, so I offered “Destroying offline social lives since 2004…” – but that was too sad and pretty lame. I almost retreated to using an old one of mine like “The servers cost a fortune, the least you can do is check out the site…”, but as I said, it’s an old one. It’s a social network too, I said to myself, and came up with “Meeting your friends as in MySpace, minus the epileptic seizure effect…” – but I wasn’t sure it’s wise to aggravate a site in that magnitude. Then, I thought, why hold back? “Where even the greatest blogging legends are reduced to a 50x50 avatars…”, “It's not a smudge on your shirt, it's our logo”, “Please sign up; our admin is sick of creating fictive accounts…”, “We paid $9.29 for the domain; a few more years and we might even return the initial investment…”, “In this community, it's the members' intellect returning the 404 errors…”

I wonder which one they’ll pick.

~~~
p.s. Was that 1000 bytes in a kilobyte, or 1024 meters in a kilometer? (credit not mine)

Happy 1st Birthday!!! This Blog is One Year Old!!!

Today, the 25th of January 2008, is Urikalization’s first birthday!!!

The past year has been a great experience for me. After a few years of ignoring the phenomena, I finally joined the Blogosphere. It was a great fun, even when it kept me up till 3:30AM when I need to wake up at 7:30AM.

During this year, I created 40 posts, that’s an average of about 1 new post every 9 days. I admit this rate of publishing is quite low relative to other blogs out there, but the truth is that many of my posts require me to do some research before I write them. Sometimes, while researching, I’m getting tossed to another subject, and completely forget about the original subject I was going to post about; sometimes, I simply don’t have the time or mood, and sometimes I’m just being lazy.

A few thousand visitors from all over the globe dropped by this blog, resulting in a total of 14,000 visits. Some of them even stayed for a while, read the posts, and left some very interesting comments. Got myself some great reviews, some surprising awards, and best of all - some new cool friends.

It’s hard for me to define Urikalization, but I think I like what it turned out to be.

~~~
p.s. Why build a space shuttle when we can simply fold paper 42 times?

The Elegant Path to a Higher Google PageRank

* Rob a bank and leave a picture of you with your blog URL written on your forehead. You'll see, the gullible policemen will handle all your advertising for free.

* Go to the zoo and exchange links with caged animals; preferably, exotic ones (just don’t trust bunnies, they’ll probably screw you).

* For your site about necrophilia use a domain name like games-for-kids dot com. Some parents might be amused… ok… maybe just semi-amused… Important: if they’re coming for you with torches – RUN!

* Write all your posts in Eskimo language, it will look like an intelligent blog. Only you will know it’s actually just a list of their 23,719 words for ‘snow’.

* Use a flickering shiny shocking green GIF image as your background; this way your visitors will be forced to stay on your site for a few minutes - at least until their epileptic seizure is over.

* Write your URL all over your naked body; then take a shower, you pervert! And don’t forget to scrub!

* Add this site to your blogroll. It won't help you get a higher Google PageRank, but it might impress the chicks.

~~~
p.s. If someone dies from a broken heart, is it responsible to transplant his pump?

16,777,215 Ways to Be Original

Do you remember why you started blogging in the first place? Try to remember… Way back, before you found out all you do is recycle content from other websites, before you scrolled down and discovered your whole blog is embedded with stupid movies from YouTube, before the HitCounter rush, before the FeedBurner hysteria, before the Analytics reports, before the AdSense clicks… It was about making your unique mark, wasn't it? It was about saying something that hasn’t been said yet; it was about launching your jagged observations to the cyberspace and the hell with the consequences; it was about changing the world one bit at a time, remember? Why don’t you stop recycling and start creating some original content? After all, Web2.0 is all about user created content, right? Yes, it’s hard. Copy-and-paste two-minutes-per-post is a habit easy to acquire and it won’t go down without a fight. Why don’t you start with something simple, like choosing a new background color for your blog? Yes, I know white is the new trend, but don’t you think it’s time for you to replace that ultra-clean over-dignified hyper-boring white background with something a little more original? You’ve got 24 bits of RGB at your disposal, that’s 16,777,215 colors other than white for you to choose from. Come one, take a risk! Be bold! Make it shocking-pink! Make it slimy-green! Enough with all these pale web pages! Light up those pixels! First step - paint the web; next step – change the world!

~~~
p.s. I predict one day Second Life’s avatars will sell their human owners on Second eBay!

Hello World - Birth of a New Blogger

To be honest, I’ve always thought blogs are just pink static HTML pages designed by 13 year old girls with pigtails writing about how they love Britney Spears. Although pictures of Spears are probably considered well spent kilobytes by most of the Y chromosomes on the western world, writing about her seems to me like a complete waste of good hosting server disk space. I never read a blog and never posted a comment in the first 32 years of my life.

The last war between Israel and Lebanon changed all that. During the war, I’ve found myself almost every night surfing several popular Lebanese blogs, exchanging thoughts and ideas, while we all tried to understand how things are perceived on the other side of the border, striving for a sane solution for an insane situation. Towards the end of the war I was drafted too. I've spent two weeks actually fighting in northern Israel, and another two weeks on the Golan height on alert. When I got back home to my family, I already knew - I will soon become a blogger myself. Oren Ellenbogen, a colleague and a friend of mine, with his excellent and popular blog on software development, gave me the last push, and the rest is history.

In this blog, I will present some ideas of mine (and others) about computers, biology, philosophy, mythology, physics, math and science fiction. I'll try and keep my posts short, sort of like an introduction to a subject, and hope for an interesting debate on the comments section. I hope you'll like my blog. If not, please tell me and I will delete all the text and just post pictures of Britney.

~~~
p.s. PETA officials continue to insist armadillos do not taste like bananas.