I’ve been using OpenDNS for my domain name servers (DNS) for the past 6 months or so. DNS is the magic that happens on the internet to connect your computer to wherever you are going. So if you wanted to go to Google.com, your computer asks your DNS for the address of google.com. If it doesn’t know it asks it’s DNS for the address of Google.com. OpenDNS has a massive distributed network which helps speed up its lookups. It also has some options like domain blocking, which could be used for blocking pornography, but I use it for blocking the largest advertising companies. Check out OpenDNS.com for details and instructions on how to set this up. I’ve been very pleased with OpenDNS.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This allows you to read my newer articles without having to visit the site again. Thanks for visiting! Mike

My wife and I run a podcast/blog/wiki covering live theater in the Washington DC area I just spent the last 25 minutes editing the audio for a review for a show we saw on Thursday night. We use Audacity to record our conversation about the show. Audaucity lets me see our words, and it is quite easy to remove the umms or other hiccups that hit when we are recording.

Now Laura gets to do the transcript of our conversation. She uses Transcriva to type the transcript. Transcriva lets her hit Apple-Enter to slide the audio back a few seconds, and then easily switch between different speakers.

It’s taken us a while to work out a system, but the process we are using is great.

I have the following screen savers installed on my Powerbook:

• GPULife the game of Life rendered using only your video card
• Electric Sheep distributed computing sued to create what computers dream of when they are asleep
• Fracture creates fractals. View the gallery of fractals created with Fracture
• Chemical Burn a traffic estimator
• Soundstream responds to sounds in the room

Wow, it’s that time of year, the time when we all give our once annual pat on the back to the wonderful staff that keep the networks, computers, laptops, and servers up and running. System Administration Appreciation Day . So, Mike, this one’s for you.

I’ve finally upgraded my WordPress to the newest version. There’s also a newer version of Akismet included, so hopefully when I deactivate some of my anti-spam comment features for the Blogathon on Saturday, I won’t get as much spam as I thought I might. If you see any problems with the blog, please let me know, especially with regards to submitting comments and when reading past posts.

It’s interesting that Akismet upgrades get so little notice from the community. Akismet doesn’t announce updates, they just slipstream updates into WordPress updates.

Tomorrow (today!) I’ll double check all of my other plugins to see if any of them should be updated.

I just fixed a misspelling in the Wikipedia entry for M*A*S*H. Woohoo!

I actually have made other changes to the Wikipedia, and created a couple entries in the past. But those were not under a username, and were simply recorded with the IP address I used at the time.

I recently entered a contest to come up with phrases that describe blogging. I didn’t win, but here are my entries:

• I blog therefore I am
• Blog! You’re it!
• Think outside the blog.
• Parlez vous blog?
• Usted habla el blog?
• I’m bilingual, I speak English and Blog
• I read more blogs before 6am than most people read all day
• got blog?
• front: My blog never mentions Paris Hilton
  back: Except for this post
• My other website is a blog too
• Ask me about my long tail
• Ask me about my contribution to the net’s long tail
• You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be blogged.