The other day a web banner popped up while I was on some site or another. Now, I know the internet hasn’t exactly discovered truth in advertising yet (otherwise lots of men would have really large penises, a great mortgage rate, three Russian wives, and a pharmacopia of fun drugs), but up came this little ad for a facial cream. Now, I’m no dermatologist, no really, I’m not, but I don’t think anyone can get results like these without consuming the blood of small children on a daily basis (this is what keeps me so youthful looking). I really wish I could remember which website I was on so I could take them to task for allowing their site to be used liked this, but sadly, it may have been my site. Ha! You couldn’t get results like this with hourly Botox injections, and if it worked Joan Rivers would be it’s spokeswoman.

Now, I was on WebMD last night trying to figure out if there was a better way to masturbate (or at least to make sure I was doing it right) when I cam across this happy little couple. Now, she’s got all the charm of a Stepford wife (look at the lack of eyes, that vacuous stare), and he’s actually jealous of a Ken doll’s privates. I mean come on! It’s not that I want my web graphics to be salacious, but is it too much to ask that these two be anatomically correct on a medical site? What’s the point of keeping them neutered? So as not to offend someone? These graphics allow you to zoom in on various body parts and say, “Here’s where my scaly flakey rash is,” and it will give you the most likely diagnosis and treatment.

I love spending time on this site, mostly because I am a hypochondriac and I want to make sure I have my symptoms right when I go to my doctor. Otherwise I’ll be unable to get a prescription for Methylphenidate.

Well, I found this nugget of wisdom on webMD:

“Masturbation is a very common behavior, even among people who have sexual relations with a partner. In one national study, 95% of males and 89% of females reported that they have masturbated.”

Phhheewww! That’s reassuring, a load off my mind, nearly everyone does it! I didn’t find the study where they found 5% of males and 11% of females lie about it though. Well, I think that’s enough of my daily mockery. Tune in tomorrow, dear reader, for another exciting day in my life!

Ok, maybe not. 65 isn’t that big of a deal. I just actually got around to looking and that’s the number I am at. A bit over two months of posting. Seems to be going pretty well so far, and judging from my weblogs I get more readership than I would expect. I think it’s from people googling various search terms and finding out I wrote about this author or that movie or a certain band. What would be interesting to me, and I don’t know if there is any good way to figure this out, is how many people are return visitors? How many come back on a regular basis? I mean once you knock out the obvious friends, family, and stalkers.

I am glad I decided to revamp this site. It’s been pretty fun and I have learned a lot. And by doing this I have been able to reshuffle the other domains I have ownership of and start working on them as well. You can pop over to thisflapfirst.com for a preview of how I want that site to look. I am just waiting for a certificate from paypal to set up my little shop. Then I will be seeing chapbooks of poetry, indulgences, and other knickknacks, bric-a-brac, and widgets.

I think things over there are pretty ready to go. So I am going to be making some small changes to the ads on this site. Not exactly more, but more variety, and hopefully more along the lines of items I believe in. You know, celebrity endorsements and all, I have to decide carefully where I will extend the christopher.jorgensen brand. Can’t just go having any old product out there with my name on it. Well, unless they want to give me a big enough check. I’ll sell out to the money truck in a heartbeat.

Seems like I often know what I am going to write about before I start hitting keys. I have many half finished little essays in the wings, and even one or two that are completely done. Then there is always poetry when I am at a complete loss (or is the beginning of a week). Hell, I can even repost something from one of my older blogs that I still find interesting. I seldom have writers’ block (unless I am writing fiction). But today I have no idea what to write about. Not idea whatsoever.

I’ve been trying to make daily posts, and for the most part have been doing fairly well. A missed day here or there, but few of those. I don’t think this is my record for consistently journalling, but it’s getting to be close. Maybe I have just run out of all the good ideas. See, that last line was sort of a joke, since with the exception of a few posts, I would say there is little here of interest to the general public, but then again, they’re not my audience. I am my own best audience. If I only worry about making myself laugh I can go to bed at night convinced I am clever.

Seriously, if others out there find amusement with what is written here, or find my pages through some google search on some random topic, great, otherwise I don’t really care. I don’t want to sit around writing in here full time, don’t expect the site to even cover its own expenses. This site isn’t about or for that. All I am trying to do is record some meanderings and maybe in a few years I can come back and be amazed that I once thought…well, I guess it will be a few years before I can finish that sentence.

Sometimes I don’t think people think these online journals through. With traditional journals (you know, the paper kind) a person can hope the journals will outlive them. Your grand kids’ kids will know what it was like to live during the 80s. “Dear Diary…” But with these database backed hosted sites, well, they take money to keep going. After you are dead your hosting company will stop being paid and eventually shut your site down. Then what? Nothing preserve for posterity, nothing to pass along to future generations. No one gives a rat’s ass about your myspage now and in 10 years no one will even know what a facebook was. Can you digg that? All these places you participate in online will most likely be either gone or in a form you cannot imagine in 10 years from now. As proof, I offer up 10 years ago. In 1998 if you were talking about a device like the iPhone, people would have called you crazy, and at best it they would have thought it would be the size of a small microwave and have a hard drive of 800 mbs. Go back to what people were writing back then. Try to find one prediction that comes close to online gaming, handheld video that imagines multiple movies on one device, or the speeds of computers or networking, or that kids would kill themselves over something someone wrote about them on their personal page.

You know, the idea that these journals are ephemeral is actually appealing to me. People can put forth opinions about the stupidest things, can place deep meaning in an online community, can consider the people they meet in these places to be greater friends than any ever made in real life, and it won’t matter to anyone other than a digital archeologist in 25 years.

The other day I set out to rent “No Country for Old Men.” I fired up iTunes, since this seemed like the perfect movie to try out their rentals with. I figured save my ass a drive to the store, and since it would only be a bit more than at the local store, I’d actually rent a digital copy. Nope, they only sell it. Well, la de fricken da, so does Amazon for one whole dollar more. For a buck, I’ll take the physical media, thank you very much! (Either way I don’t have to get dressed or get out of bed.) Then I can lend it to friends, play it on any DVD player I like, and sell it used to recoup some of my expense if I don’t like it. An Apple movie I can only watch on iTuneses that are authorized by my account. That’s no fun. Nope, no fun at all.

So I swung by my local rental store, they had like 100 copies, but all or them were out. I guess this movie is popular or something. Anyway, I figured, “Screw it. I’ll just wait until it’s on ABC Family,” but then, while doing my grocery shopping, I have it pointed out to me by someone (she knows who she is. Happy Birthday!), that there’s this Redbox thingie, it might have it. Yep, it does. But after looking it over, I’m thinking there’s got to be a catch.

Nope, not really. I rented my first movie, returned it to a different location the next day, and it all went swimmingly. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! By the time I got home I had a receipt in my inbox and my card was charged one whole dollar the next morning, so take that, no-movie-having-Hastings, take that DRM-no-physical-copy-Apple, take that can’t-watch-it-for-three-days-Amazon.

I’ll be hitting this thing a lot more. Oh, and in full disclosure, I guess there are two catches. No porn, and they have a bit more limited selection than any of the above, but they are primarily new releases, so I’m guessing I’ll most often be able to find something to watch. So easy, so legal, someone finally came up to an answer to torrenting. I’ll be happy until they raise their prices.

At some point I may get around to writing about the movie, but really, what can I say that hasn’t been said 1,000 times already?

Like a lot of people with my problem, admitting you have a problem is the first step. For me the second step is firing up pairNIC.com and seeing if the URL is already taken. Usually it is. That’s the thing about ideas…few are new. Which is good, since another axiom is there is only so much time in a day. I already have more sites than I can currently work on, more hobbies than I can find time for, and less money than I would like to spend on both.

I was driving home from work the other day and thought of weareb.org (“we are borg” for you URL dyslexic out there, a trekkie reference for those of you people with lives). Got to my computer, fired it up, and yep. Taken. I did learn something about Wegeners disease, but the website was definitely taken. 60bpm.com was taken. And not being used for web services at all. I sent the owner an email, but it will bounce. They always do. With this site I just wanted to put up a flash project I’d created of a heart that, you guessed it, beats at 60 BPM. And to be fair, one thing a lot of non-techie people don’t understand is there is a lot that can be done with a domain name besides web services. There is ftp and email to name the obvious ones. Sometime people, gasp, don’t even want a website. Let’s see, then there was crap4sale.com, which seems to be owned by Yahoo! (who have a little more money than me). This site was expiring last month, so I made a calendar event to try to snag it for myself, nope! Crap! Renewed. Probably automatically, since they’re still doing nothing with it (that I can tell). Oh well, will check again next year.

Usually, I send email to these admins, but it always bounces, which sucks, since you are supposed to be required to keep your contact info current. I hate the idea of people parking their asses on a domain and doing nothing with it probably more than I hate front running or squatters. Take any word in the dictionary and put a .com after it and it’s most likely taken. Take any two or three word combo, or letter combo, and you run a good chance. Test your url at some of the unethical registrars and it will be registered immediately, forcing you to buy it from them if you really want it, which is one of the reasons I support pairNIC.com.

I’m not asking for much here, just throw up a simple graphic like we do over at sandbenders.net (a good example of what I was talking about when I said you don’t really have to have a website. We use that server for email, as a test box for technologies we want to test out, offsite storage and backups (oh the irony!), and as an ftp server. It’s never really had much more of a web presence beyond that splash screen (I made the melted motherboard graphic!). And I registered somedarkplace.com even though it will be a long time before I get around to messing with it, but I obviously do have plans for it. A simple graphic and countdown script (thanks, Jim!) let people know I am not just some hooplehead keeping others from a site.

To prove my point: squatters.com, frontrunning.com, and saggyfunbags.com are all taken. Ok, so saggyfunbags is only taken because I just checked it’s availability through Network Solutions (that unethical registrar I was talking about above), which causes it to immediately become unavailable. You know what’s worse than being an unethical fucktard? It’s when you don’t know you are an unethical fucktard. These guys espouse the laughable position that they are doing clients a service, since if you have an idea, and check its availability, you’ll probably want to come back later and buy it at their inflated prices (remember kiddies, when it’s in print it’s not slander, it’s libel). In theory, this would be a nice practice, but in usage, companies will register 1,000s of URLs (like in my first two examples) and put up ads and links, they then check their web log files to see how much traffic the site gets. If it gets enough, it’s kept. If not, they ask for a refund. And as already mentioned some unethical registrars lock up and whois searches or buy the most frequently searched ones.

This means that the majority of sites out there aren’t even sites! They are just URLs tied up, when the intent behind the refund period was for people to return and reregister a URL that was registered with a typo. Personally, I feel if you can’t at least spell the name of the site you want, then you should have to pay for the mistake. You get several chances to confirm before buying. Idiots.

Anyway, I have a lot of sites I would like to own, but I know I have too many already. But on the bright side, if you’re wanting saggyfunbags.com it should be open soon!