DVD Review @ twelveblackcodemonkeys.blog-city.com

Down Time

Levi Wallach — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 01:08:00 GMT

Well, it seems that my blog host, Blog City, is finally releasing the next version of the software. This is the first big overhaul in a year or perhaps a bit more and was originally scheduled for the beginning of the year, but I guess BC wanted to make good and sure that everything would work with little or no problem. For the last big release I remember that we were down for around a week, give or take! But this time it's only supposed to be for a couple of hours early Monday morning, June 6. But you never know, there could be some additional downtime.

From what we hear, this new version is going to be chock full of all kinds of cool new features and enhancements, and I hope to implement a lot of these as well as do some redesigning of the site to improve legibility. Thanks for your patience if this takes longer than expected. In the mean time you might want to check out Blog City yourself if you have a blog or are thinking of creating one. Like Blogger they have both a free version as well as a subscription-based one, but the subscription fee is pretty nominal especially if you sign up for a year. And their features, as far as I can tell, are much more even with the current version, than what Blogger offers.

Of course you can also host your blog somewhere that sets you up with Moveable Type or something similar as well. While I do web development professionaly, personally I opted for something where I didn't need to get into all kinds of config files and template files to tweak something. BC is driven by a set of adminastrative tools which don't necessarily involve any coding. However, it's not quite as easy as a program built from the ground up which hand-holds you through everything. You can also get into the code, but at least with the current version you can't customize everything you might with something like Moveable Type. In any case, Moveable Type isn't their competition, I don't think as much as Blogger, since they similarly treat the user by allowing them to do a lot (but not everything) with an interface that isn't to cryptic.

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Happy Birthday, TBCM!

Levi Wallach — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 17:29:00 GMT

Well, this blog has officially just turned 2 years old today – at least according to Blog City, my blog host! I had a few blog posts over at Blogger before I switched to Blog City, but I might as well consider this the birthday for the blog. It's been an interesting two years. The first year or so was fairly slow as I didn't have a real focus on what I wanted to blog about. It was really anything and everything. If you look back in the archives, many of the entries are pretty short, especially considering the mammoth posts I tend to write often these days! Things really started getting cooking last August after I posted an article that garnered a ton of traffic. That was a comparison between my T-Mobile Sidekick and the Treo 600 that a friend had sold me. I found that I really enjoyed writing in-depth reviews, and have done this at least a couple more times with a review of the Humax DRT-800 and another comparison review of two GPS navigation programs for the Treo, Mapopolis NavCard and TomTom Navigator. Last September I was picked up by a new venture called Project DU that is part of SBC. They selected a group of bloggers to sponsor and syndicate as the default feeds in their custom built "Project DU Blog Reader." Project DU "hired" me to blog about gadgets and tech, and so that has definitely been my focus over the last nine months. Of course I will occasionally rant about something regarding health and nutrition, or other random topics as they may strike me, but for the most part Twelve Black Code Monkeys is now really mostly a tech blog. Along the way I also got my own domain name for the blog so that instead of being at http://twelveblackcodemonkeys.blog-city.com, I can be accessed at the slightly shorter http://twelveblackcodemonkeys.com.

I want to specifically thank the guy that got me into blogging in the first place, Eric McErlain of Off Wing Opinion. I still remember at some party him mentioning to me something about his "blog" to which I dumbly replied "huh? What is that?" This was back in 2002, and I felt ashamed for not knowing about this incredible phenomenon that even then blogging had become when I considered myself somewhat of a guru when it came to the internet – having first gotten involved in grad school back in the early 90's. I also want to thank all of those in my Friends section of my blogroll (to the right), who I've gotten countless ideas and help from over the last couple of years!

What does the future hold for Twelve Black Code Monkeys? I really don't know! Part of that I guess is up to you! To those who read this blog (or even those just visiting for the first time), I ask you how can I make this better? Would you rather I tone down on the length of my entries and concentrate on providing a greater number of articles about different things? What other subjects outside of those I've been a bit obsessed about recently would you like to hear about? I already know that the layout of my blog is not optimal. Blog City is about to come out with a new version, and so I have been waiting for it before I try to redesign anything, but I do plan on doing some redesign soon, making things easier to read, less cluttered, etc. In the mean time, of course, if you haven't been doing this already, you can always look at the plain text of my entries via your favorite news reader.

Oh, I guess I should also thank you, my readers! While it's nice to just write and get things off my chest, or share some cool stuff with a few friends and family who I know read my blog, it's awfully nice to hear, especially when I put tons of effort into writing something, that it's actually helping people out there. I've gotten a lot of great feedback on the reviews I've written, as well as a big piece I did comparing mobile data plans. According to my stats, I've gotten 369 comments, or more than one every other day over the last couple of years. It's also a little more than the 362… er, 363 blog entries I've written. Of course a bulk of them are concentrated in the very popular entries that I've mentioned above, but still! It's been great to know that I've done something that has helped others. It's also great to get feedback when I mess something up and assumed something I shouldn't have. You've definitely made this a much better blog by keeping me honest (and being awfully nice about it too)!

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My first poll!

Levi Wallach — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:36:00 GMT

Ok, I've been writing this blog for almost two years now and I thought it was about time to get an impression of how my users are accessing the content here. I know that some of you read entries on your web browser as I get traffic reports from Blog City as well as SiteMeter. I also get a sense of how many people may be subscribing to my RSS feeds, at least those who use Bloglines, because it tells you how many subscribers there are for a given feed – in my case there seem to be 28 at last count, excluding myself and counting all the various RSS feeds that I have set up. I also apparently have a whopping 4 people who have signed up with Blog City to receive email notifications when a new entry is posted (note: see below if you want to subscribe to this list).

As many of those who write blogs know, except for Bloglines, it's very difficult to get statistics on how many people are subscribed to your blog via a news reader. This is due to the nature of RSS and aggregators which collect the content and distribute it, kind of like a middleman. So unlike a website, you are not getting people to come individually to access your content and so have no idea how many people may be looking.

So, with that said, I thought I would ask all you folks out there to fill in my visitor poll in the upper right corner of my site. If you're reading this via a newsreader, just follow this link to my site. I've made it so that you can specify more than one method. For example, while I use Bloglines a lot to read content, I also use the newsreader software for my Treo 650 phone, QuickNews.

Don't worry about filling this out if you just happened across this site today but don't subscribe to one of the feeds or otherwise check the site every once in a while.

I really appreciate your taking the time to help me figure out how my readers are getting the content. In the future I hope to have other polls that will be a little more interesting and will let me get to know you better.

* If you want to get email notifications, you can do this by entering your email address in the text box on the left next to the "?" button, under the "GetFirefox" Button and "Mailing List" banner text. After typing in your address, click the ">> >>" button.

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Scrubs

Levi Wallach — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 15:09:00 GMT

Scrubs is one of my favorite shows on TV these days. Probably the only comedy show that I watch on a regular basis. The first season of Scrubs is coming out on DVD next month so I am helping Buena Vista get the word out on my DVDMon.com site. You have a chance of winning a box set of the first season if you fill out a short survey (takes about 5 minutes) about which of five commercials you like the best and least. The nice thing is that you find out immediately if you've won or not. You have an additional chance of winning one if you send a link to the contest to a friend. I've never won a contest like this online but hopefully one of you Scrubs fans will. If you do happen to win one following the link on my DVDMON.com site, please let me know!

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Live Aid Giveaway Contest on DVDMon.com

Levi Wallach — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 04:59:00 GMT

Just a note that I just started a DVD Giveaway contest on my DVDMon.com site:

For many Baby Boomers, Woodstock was a defining moment in their lives, musically and otherwise. For gen-X’ers like myself Live Aid was not quite that defining, but it was still one of the most memorable musical events of my teen years. Warner Strategic Marketing recently came out with a 4-DVD set of this mammoth 1985 concert containing over 10 hours of live music. As luck would have it, we happen to have 3 copies of this DVD set to give away! That’s right. All you have to do is write a small story about how you remember the event in your own life. If you were too young to remember it yourself, ask an older sibling, an aunt, uncle, or friend. We’ll review the answers and post the 3 winning ones here. This contest starts today, January 12, 2005, and wraps up at 11:59:59 PM EST on Sunday, January 16, 2005. Unfortunately, we can only afford to pay for domestic shipping, so we will have to limit the contest to those who want their dvd’s shipped to addresses in the United States. We’ll announce the winners as soon as we can, hopefully by Monday. Good luck! Email your stories to us at levi@dvdmon.com [Actually if folks want to leave their entries here as comments, that would be cool too!] . More about the dvd set can be found here.

UPDATE: Well, it looks like my timeframe was a bit too short, or people have gotten tired of contests. I've only gotten a couple of entries so far. To make things a bit more fair, I've decided to make the contest a bit more open-ended. I will keep this open until I get 7 more entries, for a total of nine, which means that each entry will have a 1 in 3 chance of winning. Pretty good odds for writing a paragraph or two, if you ask me! Anyway, here's a direct link to the page with the contest as I will be putting up new news on the site which will push it off the front page: http://www.dvdmon.com/individual.asp?keyNewsID=189

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Ed Wood Review

Levi Wallach — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 06:53:00 GMT

As some of you know, I also run a dvd review site called DVDMon.com. I review dvd’s on the site along with some other reviewers and I just posted a review of Ed Wood. It’s a great movie and the DVD has a great commentary track, so if you are an Ed Wood fan, a Johnny Depp fan, or a Tim Burton Fan, you might want to check it out.

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New Reviews on DVDMon.com

Levi Wallach — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 18:53:00 GMT

I've been posting some new reviews on my other website, my first website which I neglected for quite a while but have finally been nursing back to help, DVDMon.com. I thought I'd post links to the several new recent reviews I've posted. I'll try to post links here as the reviews are posted in the future

In a New York Minute
Pride
Da Ali G Show: The Complete First Season
From Homeless to Harvard

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