Remember back in the mid-2000's when I was having annual Blogiversary contests and creating cool Blogography swag for prizes and purchase?

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

And so do I every time I open my closet. That's because I kept a number of the T-shirts for myself. Most of them I wear only on special occasions because I'm down to my last shirt. But others? I wear to death. They don't look all that great now because the ink is flaking off, but the shirts themselves were quality and are still in good shape so I am happy to wear them anyway because they're darn comfortable.

There is one of my designs from 2006 that actually looks better the more it ages...

So cool. If I could have found a way to print like this when they were new, I would have absolutely done it!

Interesting to note that at the time I designed the shirt, Bad Monkey looked quite different...

And that was when Lil' Dave still had "mitten hands" as well. In-Between when I designed the shirt for the contest and actually printed it, Bad Monkey had changed to his current, thinner version... and Lil' Dave has actual fingers.

Good times. Good times.

Something I need given that there's no new episode of Ted Lasso tomorrow.

Well, as expected, the bought-and-paid-for representatives in The House have voted with the bought-and-paid-for senators in The Senate to strip away privacy protections for internet access. Now the legislation will be passed to President Trump so he can sign off on it.

Everything you are online will soon be in the hands of your Internet Service Provider.

Who will sell everything from your browser history to your location data to whomever will pay for it. And, believe me folks, they will.

Read it and weep.

The Republican spin about how this is a Good Thing is total bullshit. There is nothing more important than your privacy when it comes to the internet. There cannot be enough protections to ensure your privacy on the internet. Any claims to the contrary can be nothing but bullshit.

So... be sure to look into a VPN if you plan on browsing the internet in the future.

Also... please pardon the mess at Blogography for a while. I'm switching the entire site over to an SSL security certificate, so images, videos, and such will probably be messed up until I get everything sorted. If you check the URL in your browser address bar, you'll see that Blogography is now HTTPS secure. You can hover over the badge at the bottom of my sidebar to verify it.

Next up? Killing off net neutrality, I'm sure.

UPDATE: Here's a handy list of how much your senators and representatives were paid to sell out your privacy. Pig fuckers, every one of them. But especially The Right Dishonorable Cathy McMorris-Rogers and the Right Dishonorable Daniel Newhouse, Representatives from my Great State of Washington. Enjoy the tens of thousands of dollars you took in betrayal of your fellow Washingtonians and their privacy, assholes.

I once again forgot about my blogiversary... Blogography turned 12 years old on the 18th.

Not that I blame me. Now that blogs are essentially dead, blogiversaries are not what they used to be. Back in the day when 50 comments on every entry was the norm and the blogging community was strong, I'd count down the days until my blogiversary and have week-long contests with fabulous prizes. Fun times ensued, and I'd energized enough about blogging to carry me through to the next year's celebration.

Those were the days.

So...

A dozen years posting stupid shit to the internet.

Yay, me.

When Blogography broke down (again) on Monday, I was half-way tempted to just leave it broken.

This was just the excuse I needed to hang up blogging once and for all, as lately it seems more like a chore I have to do rather than an activity I want to do. But I've gone through rough patches like this before and have always cone around, so I thought it best to get things running again. If I'm going to quit, it should be a decision I make instead of a decision I'm forced into.

So here I am.

Still.

Guess there's no better reason to do a meme than that...

1. There's something about you. What is it? A sense of adventure.
2. You know the way you do that thing? What is it? It's all in the wrist.
3. What grey areas of your life scare you the most? None of them. I accepted long ago that things are rarely black & white, and am perfectly content with that.
4. What is something that you wish you knew the answer to, but would never try to find out? What it feels like to free-solo climb Half Dome in Yosemite.
5. Everyone has that 'thing'. Their 'it'. What is yours? Not being afraid to step outside my comfort zone.
6. What is that one thing you just can't seem to put your finger on? How people can hate something so vehemently that they have made no effort to understand.
7. If you could leave this world discovering one thing, what would it be? Extraterrestrial intelligence.
8. Why do you love them? They earned it.
9. Why do they love you? I earned it.
10. This time of the year makes you... Bored.
11. The way to your heart is... which way? By showing kindness to others.
12. It gets under your skin when...? People behave badly or stupidly or rudely in public. By clipping your toenails in a restaurant or letting your kids run ape-shit in a grocery store or talking on your phone during a movie or whatever... you're infringing on other people's peace and making it hard for everybody to just get along.
13. Why did you leave? It wasn't my choice. I was forced out.
14. What is something you stopped believing in? American justice.
15. What is something you'll never give up on? Humanity's ability to eventually sort itself out... as unlikely as that may seem.
16. You forgot what they said, you forgot what they did, but what feelings do you remember? Rage.
17. Open up. About anything. I have no desire...none whatsoever... to be in another romantic relationship. Ever. I have been so much happier since I've stopped trying. Friends, family, and occasional kindness of strangers are all I need to feel complete.
18. Whenever you smell it, what does it remind you of? Maui.
19. Close your eyes and smile. What memory did you think of? Africa.
20. You'll never understand why... There are people who have absolutely no regard for others. And usually they are politicians who are supposed to be doing exactly that.
21. What was the moment when 'it' hit you? Bangkok, Thailand, 1998.
22. What's keeping you from moving on? Responsibilities.
23. No one likes to dwell, but if you could go back, what would you change? I would not have wasted my precious time on those who ended up undeserving of it.
24. If you could predict your future, you'd want it to look like...? Like Back to the Future II... THE FUTURE IS NOW, BITCHES!
25. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, if I looked in yours, I'd see...? Hope.

See you tomorrow, I guess.

Late last night while I was waiting for an email response, I thought that I'd go through the 37 abandoned blog posts in my "drafts" folder. The majority of them were unfinished, but a few were completed entries that I decided not to post for one reason or another (usually because they were angry rants that I thought I had better sit on for a few days). Surprisingly, a full half of the abandoned posts were either geeky or technical in nature, and I ended up ditching them because nobody except me would ever care to read them.

Then, just as I was ready to do a DELETE->ALL on my drafts folder, I had a change of heart. That was a lot of work I was about to trash, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it. This is what always happens, and I justify it by saying "well, I'll finish them up and post them someday"... secretly knowing that it will never happen. That's how I ended up with 37 drafts in the first place.

But just because I didn't want to post them here doesn't mean that I can't find another home for them. It was then that I got the bright idea to dust off my Tumblr account and re-brand it as a repository for all the crap that's left over from my blog. Blogography Bits was born...

I've temporarily slapped a DaveToon on a Tumblr template, but I'll eventually integrate it into my site when I find some free time.

So far I've posted...

• An "Ask Me Anything!" form. I already had one of these at Formspring, but thought it would be easier to manage here. If you've ever wanted to ask me something, here's your chance! You can even ask anonymously if you want. Replies then get posted back to Tumblr once I've had a chance to answer them. Rude, abusive, or offensive questions will be deleted, but I'll try to answer whatever else I can.
• A rant spelling out my frustrations with Gowalla. Here's a perfect example of something I wrote a while back and didn't publish because I didn't think anybody would care. But, if you're a Gowalla user, it might be worth a read, so off to Blogography Bits it goes.
• A transcript from a completely useless chat with Charter Cable. Just like always, I got the runaround followed by a long, drawn-out bag of crap that solved nothing. What's funny is that I Tweeted my frustrations and got immediate help from Charter's excellent customer service agents on Twitter. They fixed everything they could on their end, then gave me clear instructions on how to solve the problem on my end. Brilliant. THIS is customer service!
• A link to NASA's Big Blue Marble Shot on Flickr. And here's an example of something I tried to make into a blog post, but failed to make work (hey, it happens!). Usually I would hold these until Bullet Sunday and dump them there, but sometimes it will be easier to just dump them on Tumblr. If this really takes off for me, Bullet Sunday may eventually transition to be bullets with the "Best of Blogography Bits" or something.

With more to come.

Maybe nobody will bother reading my leftover crap, but that's okay. It's still a happier alternative to deleting stuff that doesn't work out for my blog!

It's just another Bullet Sunday (whoa o whoaoooo). Wish it was Saturday (whoa o whoaoooo). 'Cause that's my fun day (whoa o whoaoooo). My I-don't-have-to-run day (whoa o whoaoooo). It's just another Bullet Sunday...

   
• One-Up. The latest round of one-upmanship going on is truly stellar. AT&T and Verizon are battling it out over who has the best 3G service when Sprint jumps into the fray with commercials saying "We got 4G, bitches!!" Never mind that their 4G coverage map is anemic at best, it still makes AT&T and Verizon's argument look petty and antiquated. And then there's the mobile phone battle... Nokia sues Apple for patent infringement, and so now Apple fires back with a lawsuit of its own saying "we want Nokia phone imports BANNED, bitch!" I guess where millions and millions of dollars are involved, this kind of thing is inevitable, but it all seems so stupid. Everybody shut the fuck up, put the legal fees into making your products and services better, and may the best mobile phone and network win.

   
• Golden Globes. I really, really, don't care about the Golden Globes. Though hearing that the brilliant Christoph Waltz rightly won Best Supporting actor makes me want to watch Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds all over again.

   
• Team Conan. I'm sure Jay Leno is a nice guy and I'm sure some people think he's very funny. I don't think he's funny at all, which is why I am firmly on Team Conan in the whole late-night talk show battle that's raging. But, putting funny aside, I'd still be on Team Conan after watching this clip over at Funny or Die...

So, basically, Jay let Conan hang on for five years with the promise of getting the show... then took it back when his new show tanked. One could argue that this has nothing to do with Jay, and it's all the network's fault, but the simple fact is that Conan would not be getting the boot if Jay turned down the network's offer to take the show back like he pretty much premised he would in this clip. Lame.

   
• Blogography. Today I got an email from somebody telling me that they have a photography blog they've named "Blogography" and I should hand over my domain because they are using it for business purposes. This is not the first time. A while back I got an email from somebody who was "concerned" that my blog was confusing to people because they were using "Blogography" for their blog, and I should sell my domain to them. For $50. To which I politely respond "no." As I've blogged before, I Googled "Blogography" before I bought the domain, and the word did not exist. And even though I scrapped the first year of my blog when I rebooted it in 2003, I've been using "blogography.com" continuously since I purchased it in March of 2002. With that in mind, I remain mystified as to how anybody thinks they deserve my domain more than I do.

   
• Haiti Help. I've written many times about my love, admiration, and respect for Doctors Without Borders and the incredible work they do. Often going where angels fear to tread, DWB is an international medical humanitarian organization working in more than 60 countries to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe. They are in Haiti right now, doing everything they can to tend to the victims of the earthquake. If you can help them to help others, please visit their website and make a donation...

   
And now I should probably get some work done. Heaven only knows there's enough of it laying around.