Entrecard Drop list
I've been trying to come up with an easy way to fulfill my Entrecard dropping responsibilities, and until now I couldn't figure out a way that reconciled fairness with my absolute laziness. So I decided to create an Entrecard drop list.
It's not as neato as Matthias', in that it doesn't check for widgets. I figure I'll just manually ban people from it if I go to their site and they don't have a widget. What I do is have a script that checks my drop list periodically, and then adds an entry when someone drops.
Then when I go to the drop list page, it organizes the list by the number of times each user has dropped on me in the last 30 days. That way I'm dropping on the folks who religiously drop on me first, instead of using the toolbar which neglects some really fanatical droppers if they should wait until after I've done my run to drop on my site.
Previous to this, I was using the toolbar to drop (because it's faster than dropping from the EC website, which is heinously slow these days). I was putting people who drop a lot into my favourites, but maintaining that system was time consuming, so I neglected it. I get the feeling that I might have been dropping on some people daily who weren't reciprocating, I was just dragging people around like dead weight in Delsey luggage. 
So yeah, that's my grand plan #2 to organize my drops. Previous mentioned rules will of course land people in the drop slammer. 
Homebrew Security Systems?
So I've been tossing around this idea for a while now. Our house is pretty big, and basically no one is downstairs at night once the last person is done watching TV, and the doors downstairs aren't exactly the greatest in security (someone with simple tools could easily pry them open).
So I've been thinking about trying to get a security system from a yard sale or whatever and installing it, but the problem is that I can't find any. Then there's the fact that most alarm systems probably won't do entirely what I want to anyway, and in true hungry hacker fashion I've been jotting down notes to try and build my own.
I don't have an oscilloscope any more, and I haven't done any research into the way that motion sensors and whatnot communicate with the control module - I think they're just either normally open or normally closed, and that's all there is to it. So I'm toying with the idea of writing a controller using an MSP430, and coming up with some kind of a concentrator system to allow me to fix many different detectors to a simple bus.
I think the cool thing about building my own would be that I don't always want the alarm to sound if something happens. For instance, it might be nice just to have the system beep if the door opens during the day, or what have you. Rolling my own system would let me figure out all the things I want to do. I could even build an intercom and doorbell system into it as well, and have the whole thing have different operating modes for when people are here and/or asleep.
The possibilities associated with this project are pretty exciting, and I think I can build the whole thing much cheaper than going and buying a system. I smell an article coming in the future, hehe.
WHG Blog release
If you've been following my entries here, you'd know that I'm an internet kind of guy. Web hosting and web development is what I do, and even if I couldn't make money doing it I'd still do it as a hobby - I've enjoyed solving problems ever since I was a little kid, hacking away in BASIC on my family's C64.
I read all the latest industry news, trawl forums, spend countless hours conversing with other administrators, all trying to keep ahead of the curve. I'll bookmark the odd site when it contains pertinent information that's updated, particularly when it comes to things like optimizations. WHG have added a blog to their website, which looks as though as time goes by it'll become increasingly relevant.
I've ranted time and time before about people shopping for hosting looking purely at megabytes and gigabytes and ignoring other factors, and how important it is to make an informed decision. If you're new to the industry, a site like WHG can be a godsend to help you compare services from different companies, and their web hosting blog can give you some insight into the industry, and perhaps even teach you a thing or two you didn't know.
As an example, one of their recent entries "Do you really need a .com domain?", basically reiterates what I was explaining to a pro bono client I have. Basically I was saying how people will associate "company name dot com" in their brain, and will more or less forget about other TLDs, so when naming your new venture it's important to take this into consideration. The only way you can learn things like this is through experience, and gaining your own experience is costly - you're much better off to learn through other people's experience.
