Catch Up, Not Ketchup

Some quick notes to catch up on:

We were recently linked to on H3N2FLU.us in this article linking back to our recently posted “Oink, Oink My Good Man” article. The site is dedicated to the latest news on the H3N2 virus (the virus formerly known as “Swine Flu”) and contains a wide variety of interesting information from reputable news sources. Be sure to check it out.

Follow up, on “Paranormal Activity” the movie – I received an email this evening (told you they couldn’t resist it) letting me know the following:

Hit 1,000,000 Demands and Paranormal Activity will open nationwide in the U.S. and Canada!

In addition, Paramount is giving two lucky fans a VIP screening of Paranormal Activity in their home town with the film’s director/writer/producer Oren Peli.

One fan will be selected randomly from all Demanders. The second fan will be selected from the city with the most Demands!

So there you go– the marketing campaign worked and we’ll all get to see what the buzz is about. Go us (?).

The number once Google.com image search for digitalflood.com for the past two months is “missing milk carton”. We come up on the first page and as result you can find our infamous image all over the place:

Some examples of df.com image hack jobs can be found here, here, and here… just to name a few. Glad to know we’re popular, but it’d be nice to get a little credit every once in awhile (*sheesh*).

It was painful watching my second favorite MLB team, the Detroit Tigers, lose to the Minnesota Twins; but it was cool watching the longest regular season one game play off match ever (12 innings, 5-6). History has been made. Looks like I got to find a team to root for in the play offs (and no it won’t be the NY Yankees no matter how much you try to convince me it should be). I think it’s going to be an LA Angels post season and I’m pretty big fan already (I had most of their outfield on my fantasy baseball team this year) of their players so maybe that will work.

Our second most searched image is our “Cats, the other white meat” logo:

As such, I’d like to remind you we do have ringer tees, dog tees, girlie tees, and even coffee mugs with that logo on it. Now you can let the whole world know what a sick SOB you really are… which makes you one of us so that’s just fine with me. Rock on!

This Friday (10/9/09) at TGI Friday’s in Middletown, NY (directions here) my friend Dave will be playing a gig at 10 pm EST. If you’re looking for something to do I’d highly recommend it. Dave plays a little bit of folk, a little bit of jazz, and some rock. I think you’d enjoy it (because I know I will) so show up or something.

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DF.com V11.0 Final Released

I’m happy to announce we have finalized and generally released version 11.0 final of digitalflood.com. This concludes our public Beta. Thank you again to all of you who helped out with development and gave feedback. Together we have built a product I’m very proud of. We’ll begin moving now onto other projects (including the return of digitalflood Pirate Radio) along with continuing to improve the site, as well as, add features over time. I’ve moved the code tracker to its own page (which can be found here or under the “About DF.com” sub-menu “DF.com Code Info”). And with that– it’s time to start the second decade of df.com. So it begins again anew!

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Countdown to Go Live

Last night I began making final preparations for df.com v11 final to go live. I finished up some final security audits and permissions checks. I also ran some final performance checks. All passed flawlessly. I’ve checked over the pages for any final typos or lay out flaws– I found none. There are no open issues reports and we made some final changes to content:

With that we appear ready for final go live on 10/7/09 barring any further issues. Thank you to everyone who gave feedback and looked over the site for me. Six months of work is about to come full head and the fruits of my labor is arguably the best web site I’ve produced to date.

Now comes the hard (and fun) part– filling it with more Pirate Radio and art for you to enjoy, as well as, the uncanny articles you’ve come to love as filler in-between.

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Odds & Ends

Susan G. Komen For The CureAs we move onto df.com version 11.0_RC(2.5b), I’ve been hard at work on some code clean up:

  • Improved site caching to speed load time
  • Optimized code for Google Searches (among other search engines)
  • Fixed Star Rating & Comment system (was actually trying to speed up load times when I broke it)
  • Upgraded theme code improving cross web browser functionality

We also ran into some anomalies linked to background server tasks that were bogging down late night load times. I’ve move some of those various maintenance jobs off from peak hours and so far so good.

We’ve actually been taking on a lot of traffic because of my recent “Paranormal Activity” blog. I’ve somehow ended up number four on Google when you search for “paranormal activity movie leak”. I apologize to all those who came here looking for pirate movies (having a web show called Pirate Radio cannot help things either), but unfortunately I have no more info than the meager amounts given out by all the mainstream media outlets.

The Pirate Radio Facebook Group is taking off. At last check earlier today, we had 57 members in the group and that’s not bad for two weeks with little/no advertising about it. As always, word of mouth has proved to be our biggest friend when it comes to marketing the site.

Long term feedback is great so far for the new site layout and features. I’m getting a lot of kudos from people when I run into them and it’s good to know the majority of you like the new site.

Last, but not least– this month you will find a pick ribbon on the left side of the web site. We’re supporting the efforts of The Susan G. Komen Foundation. October is breast cancer awareness month. The Komen Foundation is a key supporter in searching for a cure for breast cancer and helps raise awareness for those most at risk (including educating both men and women how to proactively locate tumors through routine check ups etc…). This is a cause both near and dear to my heart. My father died of throat and mouth cancer back in 1998. His mother (my grandmother) died of breast cancer. His father (my grandfather) died of lung cancer. Obviously cancer research is very important to me and my family. There are very few of us out there who do not know someone who has survived cancer or died of it. I hope you’ll join me in showing your support and if possible sending donations via their site to help them continue their good works.

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Digitalflood – The Lifetime Movie Network Version

Lifetime Movie NetworkIt’s no secret that my wife loves the Lifetime Movie Network, just like every other red blooded American woman in this fine country we call the United States of America. I’m not sure what it is about women and Lifetime. I know it’s the “network for women”, but there’s something more to it. As a man I’m hard pressed to even remotely grasp the concept of watching movies made during the mid to late 80s that were not popular, but starred medium tier B grade actors/actresses. I’m even more hard pressed to understand how movies about women being raped, murdered, beaten, forced into the sex slave trade, or generally harassed by every male character within a 100′ of the main female lead is compelling TV; but as I type this a Lifetime Movie blares away in the background with my wife in its firm memorizing grip.

This particular gem is about a woman who has such severe menstrual cycles she risks monthly hemorrhaging. To escalate issues further she also happens to be a detective trying to solve the cold case murder of a young girl by some evil country club reject who was cheating on her with his older lover. There’s also some Japanese rapist OBGYN hanging around during this whole thing and I’m not quite sure why; but there he is being creepy. I can’t make this stuff up– this is the plot. I’m not sure of the title, but if I had to take a wild guess I call it “Bleeding Heart” or maybe “The Women In The Ditch”. I’m not sure that it even matters.

90% of Lifetime Movies are about how horrible men are. 98% of male characters on Lifetime are rapists, murders, or the often overlooked rapist-murder. There’s an occasional nice guy, but he either ends up dead or turns out to be gay. There’s always some evil woman involved. She’s usually some angry cougar on the prowl looking to use her late 50s sex appeal to her advantage. Somehow she aligns with the murder-rapist male, but never ends up dead until the very end. The odds are often overwhelming for the female lead. They could be obstacles of emotion, spirit, and the occasional ankle cramp from too many Pilate cycle sessions.

The law enforcement agents tend to be clueless if not indifferent. I can honestly say I’ve never seen an African American male on Lifetime that I can recall. I’ll be on the look out, but it appears black men don’t exist in Lifetime Movies. Perhaps they were the only ones smart enough to move away from an area where there is such a dense population of murder-rapists and their cougar cold-hearted accomplices.

I’m pretty sure if digitalflood.com was turned into a Lifetime Movie we’d be some evil underground society using the web to extort underage teenage girls in a heroin for popcorn prostitution ring covered by an illegal web cast program. None of that can be further from the truth, but the story writes itself better than an over weight man typing on his computer late at night while his wife watches the TV. Let’s face it– nobody would sit through that. The murder-rapist though; clear winner.

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