How To Spot A Psychopath

This post on the bitter and twisted Coding Horror alerted me to two significant problems with this blog.

I had a Useless Calendar Widget, and no way for readers to figure out who the heck I was.

Both fixed now.

I’m pretty light on the rest of the Web 2.0 bingo stuff, but perhaps your own beautiful and unique snowflake of a blog is not.

(And actually, I always figured that Phil Greenspun punctuated his writing with random pictures just to make sure that his readers never forget how many photos he’s taken of naked women.)

In homage to dansdata.com’s humungous altindex.html, this blog now has a full index page.

I know the formatting’s a bit wiggy at the moment, but at least it’s there. It ought to help Google straighten out their results, too; currently there are various odd feed pages and such that come higher in Google results than the actual straightforward post pages that people want to find.

I’ve made a page with a bunch of my old free-gift wallpaper images, and a couple of new ones. Enjoy!

Dan’s Data has a new reviewer.

Every now and then someone offers to write reviews for Dan’s Data. Some of them seem to be reasonably talented, some don’t, but I reject them all, for this site is mine, all mine, and has been for eight years, which is longer than Rupert Murdoch’s been alive, in Web years.

But, you see, I went to school with Mark Cocquio.

So his first review is here.

What can you say about Mark?

Man of action, gadget enthusiast, seasoned IT writer, Touched by Lord Vader. And, as you may have noticed, he’s also a comic strip character, which is more than I’ve ever achieved.

(Plus, his comic strip character looks quite like him. Cough.)

Mark’s own site is here. His trip around Australia is particularly good.

It is decided. At least for the time being.

This blog is, as of now, “How To Spot A Psychopath”, as suggested by user Stark, who signed up (Userid 2! 1337!) almost immediately after I asked for suggestions. For which promptness he was punished by having his post eaten, thanks to my developmentally-delayed fiddling with the spam blocker.

The title, of course, comes from my Dan’s Data page of the same name, which is celebrating its seventh birthday around now.

(How To Destroy Your Computer could have been in the running, too.)

Those in search of further evidence of my unbalanced nature may care to read what I have to say about deadly poisons, killing yourself with electricity, and bombs, of both the sparkler and atomic variety.

Oh, and kids: Don’t pay attention in school.

At last I have taken the mighty leap into the late ’90s, and added my own tiny rectangle to the blogofractal.

If you add the man who came up with the term "weblog" to the man who shortened the word to "blog" and divide by two, then you get something that looks quite like me.

So, clearly, my own idle words of timeless wisdom, and of course the insightful commentary of my faithful readers, will similarly revolutionise the weblog, uh, paradigm.

I’ll still be doing Dan’s Data, of course; the reviews and endless bloomin’ letters columns will continue. This blog’s for… everything else.

First order of business: This blog needs a name (and a tagline).

I’ve never been very good at names. I came up with "Dan’s Data", in 1998, because Blue’s News seemed to have been doing quite well. That’s about as far as my own naming talent goes.

So I invite you all, friends, strangers and spambots, to make your name (and/or tagline) suggestions in the comments.

[UPDATE: My brillant Spaminator config just terminated the first few comments, probably because they contained the letter "i" or something. I’ve set it back to defaults. E-mail me if your valid comments keep being flagged as spam, especially if you have a deep and intimate understanding of Wordpress and can put me on the fast track to Getting It Right. I hate overactive comment spam blockers (hello, Joe!), and I’m determined to make sure that jive don’t happen here. Well, not often, anyway.]