Yes, yet another joint project between myself and Mark Dormand. And this one rocks even more. Yes it is blog, and no there aren’t enough scifi/geek themed blogs out there. At least not with awesome style like that.

This does mean that my posting intervals on here might decrease as I’ll most likely be posting things on sgncore, but I’m not going to kill this blog just yet. It’s still my little baby.

And the music! It reminds me so much of Cowboy Bebop (*insert sad face here*).

Obviously don’t be silly and think that this is the real deal. At this point I’d actually like to do another related thing. And that would be to admit it and say that I did like (read: enjoy) Uwe Boll’s Postal. There, I said it.

Source: Joystiq.

Well then it’s quite easy. A friend of mine has started up a new music blog (yes, we know that there are hundreds of them out there already), but he has an awesome taste in music which is quite close to my own. And ever since he suggested Brad Sucks to me I’ve been closely following his blog, a series of hellos.

Not many posts there yet, but it’s always about the quality and not the quantity, and so far it hasn’t disappointed. So if you want some new good and exciting music head over to a series of hellos and see what the good man has posted there.

Yes yes, shameless plug of someone else, but that’s what friends are for. So keep up your excellent work Sebastian. Oh and be sure to check out his own band Janice Prix.

So here are my favourite recent posts from English Russia.

Another English Textbook

The Lynx and the Cat

Mixed Daily Shots

Guide to Russia

And finally my favourite one:

Russian Nerds Party

And yes, there are quite a few videos like this one on YouTube and other sites, but in my opinion none of them really have anything on this one. Or well maybe there is something…

Warning: Plenty of swearing, and other questionable content. And yes, I know about the adult version of this video as well (and yes again, it is better as well, but not about to start posting things like that here).

Coincidences are a funny thing. Just few days ago I decided to revive my blog and start posting on a regular basis. After I had upgraded the blog to the latest nightly version (yes, living dangerously) and posted my first post in a few months, I had a look at my blog AwStats.

At first I thought it was some sort of bug, or mistake, but it was trying to tell me that I had more than ten thousand unique visitors last month. Usually it’s somewhere between one and two thousand, but November had ten thousand. Upon further investigation, it turned out that two of my posts had been stumbled without me knowing about it.

How did it happen?

To be honest when I look at those two posts that got stumbled, they aren’t really that special and in my opinion I’ve written and/or posted more interesting things in the past. So the first conclusion that I draw is that StumbleUpon users are quite random, and one can never really know what will get stumbled or when.

How well did the blog/server perform?

Traffic wise, and generally as far as the server performance goes (I’m hosted with site5.com, and have been for years now) I can’t really say anything, as it all happened without me noticing, and I wasn’t using the server enough to really notice if there were any slowdowns, or even if the server went belly up. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next time to see how well the server performs.

Did it make me rich?

Ah, before I forget, another interesting thing I noticed is my Google AdSense statistics. Last month I still had my old theme for the blog, and that had three AdSense blocks, two in the navigational bar and one in the footer. AdSense panel tells me that I had thirteen thousand page impressions in November, and zero clicks. So the next conclusion is that getting stumbled won’t generate you AdSense profit.

I’ll admit that I’m no good with ad positioning, but I’m pretty sure what happens in most cases is that the users don’t even see the ads, be it because of browser extensions or an innate ability to ignore ads. And of course what you don’t see, you can’t click on. So yeah, AdSense and StumbleUpon won’t make you rich. At least it didn’t make me rich.

Aftermath and conclusion

It’s great being stumbled. Lots and lots of people will see the website. Sadly, there really isn’t any recipe, or formula on how to get stumbled, other than posting something that has a wide appeal and is just awesome. The only thing that I can suggest is that you should become an active StumbleUpon user yourself.

Use it often, stumble other websites, post/create something awesome of your own and you’ll be stumbled yourself one day.

So they have come out with their own list of 50 Skills Every Real Geek Should Have.

Why Checklist in the title? Because I want to see how many of those things I’ve done/can do. And maybe even update it from time to time, if I don’t get all lazy again and start doing something else, which seems to happen quite often lately. Without further ado, let us begin!

MaximumPC List

1. Name These Connectors! (DDR Memory, Dual Channel RIMM, PCI Express Connector)
2. Run All Your Essential Apps on a USB Stick
3. Straighten the Pins on an Older CPU
4. Know the 13 Basic HTML Tags (can even point out mistakes in their little explanation)
5. Get Through to Executive Customer Service
6. Beat Quake in Under an Hour
7. Build a Hackintosh (have a macbook, so no idea how useful this really is)
8. Watch TV Shows on the Internet (Legally!)
9. Get Around the Content Filter on Public Computers
10. Recite pi to 23 Decimal Places (the use of being able to do this escapes me)
11. Replace the Controller Board on a Hard Drive
12. Benchmark Your Computer
13. Decorate Your Room Using Only Printer Paper (love these things!)
14. Securely Erase Your Data So it Can’t be Recovered
15. Get into a Windows Computer if you Forgot Your Password (rainbow tables for the win!)
16. Hide Porn from Your Significant Other
17. Explain What E=MC^2 Means to a Liberal Arts Major (should try this, really)
18. Abstain from Buying Extended Warranties
19. Use Photoshop or GIMP to Imperceptibly Doctor a Photo (I do it almost every day)
20. Use a DSLR in Full Manual Mode
21. Mooch Your Neighbor’s Wi-Fi (done it, but it’s a bad thing to do!)
22. Protect your Wi-Fi
23. Create an Animated Spray in Valve Games
24. Set up a RAID
25. Calculate a Pitcher’s Earned Run Average (baseball, yuck)
26. Run Two Operating Systems
27. Install a Hard Drive in a Laptop
28. Pull Off an Elaborate Prank
29. Rocket Jump Without Using a Macro
30. Wire Your Home with Ethernet Cable
31. Know the 6 Most Important Linux Commands
32. Rip Your CDs to FLAC
33. Stream Your Movies, Music, and Photos to Any TV in Your House
34. Install and Configure a Virtual Machine
35. Run Multiple Monitors Like a Pro
36. Hack Firmware on a Router
37. Pick a Lock
38. Differentiate Between Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb (if we had either of them here, maybe)
39. Avoid DRM on everything
40. Download Flash Video and Bend it to Your Will
41. Get Around In DOS
42. Rip a DVD to h.264
43. Overclock Your PC and Tune Your BIOS
44. Use Remote Desktop (use it quite often for work already)
45. Debate the Relative Merits of an Imperial Star Destroyer vs. the USS Enterprise (never!)
46. Build Your Own Computer

Total: 36 out 46.

So much for there actually being 50 skills. Hmm oh well, I’m still quite happy with the outcome. Just 10 things that I haven’t done, for whatever reason. Though with some of the things on the list I’ll probably not be able to complete this list anytime soon. Sadly. Oh well.

My favourite excerpts from the article:

“Mrs Carrington tried out the program for herself on Ethan’s hand-held DS console and was taken aback when her ‘opponent’ laid down the word ‘t*ts’.”

“Any doubt was removed when the next word the computer offered was ‘f*ckers’, which it defined as ‘a slang word for chavs’.”

“‘I would have been horrified if Ethan had seen that word. “Sh*t” had come up as well. I was absolutely mortified.’”

My oh my, shits and tits. Though I really find the fuckers bit hilarious. A slang word for chavs indeed. You can read the full article here.