Ok, so I made the plunge — Geocaching has now become my guilty pleasure and in order to do it properly, I’ve purchased a proper GPS — The Garmin 60CSx.

Although totally unnecessary — “Capital C” has two Garmin eTrex units — I just couldn’t go another day without the promise of faster satellite locks and better reception. I am, afterall, a fuckin’ gadget geek.

A full review of the unit will follow as soon as it gets here and I get to run it through it’s paces.

Should I really be this excited?

Oh, BTW — after much research, Amazon.com wins for best price. Under $350 with free shipping.

It’s true. “Capital C” took my son and I out on our first GeoCache a couple weeks ago, and now I find myself addicted to it.

I never really took to outdoors in-the-woods type activities, they never really made much sense. Hiking, for instance, always seemed like such a pointless thing. Traipsing around the woods, ticks and mosquitos all over the place, dirt … And for what? Just to do it?

So, now — introduce a little technology and a purpose — I can’t get enough. Hiked at least a couple of miles through some pretty thick brush to discover 6 caches yesterday.

For those of you that aren’t in the know, Geocaching is basically a treasure hunt. You get yourself a GPS, head over to a site like (duh!) www.geocaching.com and look up a cache, get coordinates, program your GPS and head out on the hunt.

The goal is to find the cache, usually an ammo box or some sort of waterproof container hidden somewhere out in the woods, sign the log book and trade trinkets. There’s also GeoCoins and Travel bugs — these are trackable via website — that you try to keep moving from cache to cache.

So dorky … But somehow I can’t get enough. If the weather was a bit better today, I’d be out doing it again. Perhaps I’ll try an urban cache — being that I’m a die-hard city kid. I’ve heard some pretty weird caches exist in parking garages and various other areas of downtown Chicago. Might have to pickup a handgun or some mace first though.

Whatever … the only people that are pissed off about this whole thing are the people that are trying to manipulate it …  Reality — And yes, I am a part of the reality — Doesn’t matter.  Sites like this one will always end up on top; not because we try to fuck with the stats — because content is king.  Even though what I say matters to very few, it matters.  Trying to be anything but real will eventually stop you in your tracks…

Be real, have something real to say, and the SEO stops making all that much of a difference.   Deal with it.

No, it’s not another ‘top-ten things to do to give you a (false) sense of accomplishment and draw thousands of (useless) hits to your site” type article . All of those are mostly bullshit anyway.

Sure — you could try link-building, link-baiting, doing that “real content” thing or hundreds of other things to build your site popularity. But why?

Why not just find a really disgusting photo of Courtney Love being ever-so-unsexy, post it to your site with some amazingly interesting copy, and prepare to upgrade your server.

It really does seem that all you have to do to get thousands of fresh new visitors to your site every day is to post this image on your site.

It’s become so popular here that it’s by far the #1 most viewed article on my site — logging nearly 10,000 hits a day.

So the next time you’re sitting around and thinking to yourself, “I really wish I knew how to increase my unique daily visitor stats”, think: sick picture of heroin addicted bitch-from-hell flopping her tits around on stage.

About a week ago, I mentioned my disappointment about there not being a Linux beta for Joost. Today I received this very enlightening response:

From: Brian @ Joost PR To: TheAntiBlogger
Subj: Re: PRESS Any word for Linux users?

Thanks for your interest in Joost. Yes, a Linux version is planned, but the timeline for that is TBD right now.

Brian

Gotta love the canned PR response. I was, at the very least, hoping for some hyped up PR bullshit. TheAntiBlogger walks away unsatisfied.

Ok, so … I’ve confined myself to using Linux — At least until the replacement for my dead new laptop shows up.

One of my clients needed me to quickly throw together a violator/badge and so I decided to torture myself by using GIMP rather than booting up my backup Windows machine.

Masochistic, I know.

(more…)

So, not exactly a planned thing… My new(ish) laptop started having problems a few weeks back and being the lazy procrastinating ass I am, I’ve been using a gifted ThinkPad T40 that I was using to test OpenSUSE 10.2…

The first few days drove me nuts.

Yes, the first few days of using nothing but Linux & KDE drove me a bit insane. It’s not that I found it any more difficult than Windows XP, it’s the general awkwardness of functioning in a new environment. That little tiny learning curve that comes with anything new.

(more…)

I was happy to see that Joost finally opened up the doors to beta testers … That is until I went to download it and found no Linux support.  I don’t know why I thought for a second that they’d come out of the gate with some love for Linux… Wishful thinking I suppose.