Category: Web

On New Years Day, Jami forwarded an e-mail from an old friend of mine from high school who had contacted her asking for my contact info. Since the message had gone through Facebook, I didn’t have an e-mail address for him, so I went to Facebook to see if I could post something to him. But you have to sign up for an account first. So I went ahead and signed up, giving them my name, e-mail, a password, my high school, college, and where I live. Then I had to make that guy my friend to write to him and I gave him my e-mail address.

By the next morning five people put in requests to be my friends. Three of them were people who had gone to my birthday parties when I was like 10 years old, including Joel N. and David M., people I haven’t heard from since high school or even before then since we went our separate ways in high school. Today I got a friend request from a woman I had gone steady with for an hour in 7th grade and who is now married to my AP Biology lab partner. And they can all tell me what they are doing today. What a bizarre thing.

I’ve never joined any sites like this because I don’t really see the point, but it is kind of neat.

My old roommate, Rich, sent me this website. He has a Master’s in Physics and another one in Engineering Science and knew I would like it. I can’t really explain it, so you will just have to visit. Basically you build mechanical contraptions to move an object to a certain spot.

http://www.fantasticcontraption.com

It starts out easy, of course. Then it gets harder and harder and the contraptions required get more and more complicated. I started out by always building a little car that would take the object wherever it needed to go. Once you finish a level you can save it or you can look at other people’s solutions. If you buy the program, then you can rate people’s solutions. There are thousands of solutions, but the really good ones are the 4 and 5 star solutions. The 5-star solutions are just amazing. There are catapults, chains, spear throwers, cranes, lifts, and so on. Some solutions just stumble along, some are just beautiful. Mine are usually cars.

Try the game out first. The tutorial is pretty short and you can do the first few levels in a few minutes each. After you check things out, you can look at some of the ones I did, with links below. Feel free to share your own designs too.

Continue reading “Fantastic Contraption”

A guy wrote to me last weekend and said it would be nice to have a blog or discussion area on legislative issues for the Engineer’s Association website. I know that the web hosting company will allow a blog because we already have a discussion area set up that I’ve talked about before.

Continue reading “WordPress Blog”

Because I never was getting much traffic at the iGirder website, I moved my revenue-generating pages back to Speedfactory and, in July renewed the dialup plan for $99 for a year just to take advantage of the free personal website that comes with that. So earlier this month, traffic dropped way, way off and I saw that the Speedfactory server wasn’t working. This happens for a day sometimes, so I wasn’t that worried, but after a few days I wrote to their tech support people to ask what the deal was. I didn’t hear back so I wrote again to a different e-mail address. Still no response. I wrote a third time. Then I called and got to talk to an actual person who said she would have someone call me back. One thing going on is that Speedfactory was bought by Next Phase Wireless a year or so ago. Nobody called me back. At this point it has been a couple of weeks and I am making almost no AdSense revenue and have only 3 orders for the month from Amazon, all during a period when new iPods are being introduced and I could potentially be getting a lot of traffic. Traffic was down from Google was still referring people to the old site until late this week when they must have realized the site was down and started sending people to iGirder, but with my page being way down the first page of results (instead of first; I still have a Page Rank of 3 at iGirder). I called again Thursday. The woman answering the phone asked how long the site had been down. I said a few weeks. She said “And you’re just now calling?” I said well, I had sent three e-mails and called once and no one had gotten back to me. She said “Oh boy.” I could tell she was really horrified. She said she would make sure people got the message and she would call me back either way to give me the status. She did call back later that day and left a message that it was being looked at. Then yesterday a guy called and asked me some questions. He was handling the site from New Jersey (so I’m thinking the local Speed Team quit or was laid off) and wasn’t aware SpeedFactory even offered free webspace but said it might just be a matter of fixing a DNS entry. It still doesn’t work, but it does sound like they are working on it.

Here’s a graph of traffic which includes both Speedfactory and iGirder traffic. Of course after the dropoff, everything is either iGirder or cached versions from the search engines.

Last year, I wrote about installing a bulletin board on the Engineer’s Association website. One of the advantages of the A Small Orange web hosting plan was that it supported MySQL and PHP, allowing me to install a bulletin board.

Over the last year, the board hasn’t exactly caught fire. About 5 people have signed up and nobody has posted anything substantial. It was free and it is a good tool potentially, so I think it is worth the trouble for now.

Continue reading “Bulletin Board Maintenance”