The old one was okay, but it was what people called me briefly in 3rd grade when the movie WarGames came out. Few people remember it and there’s several other people using it. It’s kind of neat that it is a real-sounding name, but I think it is better to use one that signals to people “this is an alias that I’m giving you” rather than to purport to be someone else.

Dreaming up a trademark is tough work. It’s very hard to think of globally available names. CypherGhost, after more than 100 other ideas, fit the bill. The domain name was available. Google produced no hits. All trademarks were available.

CypherGhost came about partly because of my cypherpunk interests (cryptography, anonymity, etc.) and because I tend to be invisible in social situations. I’m not particularly introverted or anything, but I frequently make suggestions or comments that just go in one ear and out the other. A short time later, someone else will think of the same idea and, all of a sudden, the idea is brilliant. I just consider myself ahead of my time, but it’s an eerie and recurring phenomenon.

New business cards, and of course hacking the CallerID again, will come later when I get more time.

I’ve been holding off on some blogging until I get the design out the door and I just never seem to have time to finish it. It’s taken a lot of work to figure out the quirks in the way WordPress works. The pages aren’t XML valid yet as there is some conflict with the blocks on un-numbered lists, but the pages seem to be displaying okay, so I’m going to push it out the door anyway and fix those details later – hopefully before this blog is a year old (March 17th).

Well, not much bloggable stuff has been going on. It’s hot and humid outside and we’ve had lots of rain. That’s been slowing down cool outdoor activities. I’ve been working on a couple of development projects (about 5 at once, actually) and none of those are bloggable yet (some never will be.) Then some other time-wasting projects have popped up. I had to de-mold the HVAC system, and the shelves in my closet collapsed and scrambled everything. My closet is big – about the size of a small self-storage locker. I knew getting sidetracked was a risk when I started blogging again.

Anyway, I’m starting to break free from the doldrums again and have a few things to blog about. I’ve also finished burning a stack of CDs for friends with more Italy pictures, so I’m kind of excited to start writing about those too.

Look forward to a few posts about things like –

• my trip to the new IKEA store,
• fixing up my bike and doing some street riding,
• maybe some modifications to my bike,
• hopefully a few road trips,
• a more detailed write up about my trip to Italy (along with a bunch of photos),
• DragonCon and
• a new on-line handle and site design.

So, long story short, I expect to have more to write about in the next few weeks, so don’t drop your feed just yet.

I have noticed a couple of things about blog writing that I didn’t expect that are just differences in the medium or the format.

First, when I choose pictures, I’m looking for an almost panoramic composition. I’m now thinking about that format in addition to the usual 4:3 for backgrounds, vertical for posters, 3:2 for mouse pads, square for calendars, etc.

The other thing is that there is a field for an “excerpt” or summary of each post. I like to think of myself as being a pretty brief and concise person, but I now realize that sometimes I’m overly conversational when I write and highly detailed when I verbalize. It’s good practice to try and condense the entire post into three or four sentences.

Anyway, since I want the services to pick up my posts, I stopped setting future dates, planning to just do them manually for the time being. I just haven’t had time to investigate the code to see if what I think I’m seeing is really a bug or not. It might just be a matter of perspective. Maybe they were indexing all the articles on the date I published them, even though they didn’t appear.

In other blog news – some statistics…

Looks like I got about 90 visitors last month, 20 came from bots. I’m on some of the search engines, and they are picking up some decent search terms. It looks like I have at least one RSS subscriber.

Ping-o-matic appears to get about 40 submissions per second.

Upon reading the logs, however, I discovered that they were all blog bots. Well, it looks like there might be one actual human that came by, which is okay since I’ve not really “annouced” site site as of yet.

Actually, it’s a far cry better than building traditional web sites. Normally, it takes months before you see any significant search bot activity.

1) We’re having some glitching with the database at the data center. I don’t want to officialy launch this and add to the database load until that problem is stabilized.
2) I want to get my own customized URL rewrites working. The documentation for rewrites is really poor and most of the demos and tutorials address specific cases and examples without really explaining them. I’m not fully satisfied with WordPress’s permalink formatting.
3) I want to build my own theme. I wouldn’t delay launching if the theme isn’t ready. In fact, it just gives me something to write about. I’m trying to think of something postal that centers around my experimenting with the post office, but I want a new handle/moniker to call myself if I do that and I haven’t found a good one with an open domain name. Barring that, I’ll create something “circuit board” looking like my calling cards. I also want something that allows text to wrap around photos.

I want several of the articles to be auto-submitted to the various blog trackers, so I want to wait to go live outside the firewall before I do that.

In a radio interview on NPR, Wil Wheaton said that the most important part about becoming a writer is to write every day – even if it isn’t always good. This makes sense in that things usually don’t “get good” until several layers of editing and months of work. That’s obviously not going to happen around here, so we’ll just have to make due.