Go to the comedy show!

Tomorrow night, at the Comedy Zone in West Knoxville (off Cedar Bluff). I know Jesse and Chad-- they are really funnny guys.

Black Friday: North Knoxville reports

Wal-Mart had 8 big surprises, 2 of them were: the Thomas the Tank Engine BIG motorized train thing, the one that your kid'll ride on, was deeply discounted, further below the ad from yesterday. And that crazy FurReal ""Butterscotch" pony? The near-life size robotic doohickey? It's $149! That's hugely dicounted (normally it's $250).
Good luck getting those, haha. Apparently it got ugly with the ponies.

Target: just pallettes of stuff. Most everything in the ads, but scattered. The Jensen iPod clock/radio dock gizmo (we got one) was in the middle of the men's section.

Kmart doesn't have the Craftsman tool bench they advertised in the paper. Sad, as our little guy would have loved it, and $30 instead of $50 was a great deal... Apparently my wife stood in line for an hour to find this out, but it wasn't all a waste.

JC Penney is out of those globes by now, but we managed to snag one (they opened about 15 min. early).

Long lines abound-- Kohl's wrapped from the front register to the customer service area, all the way back, to check out.

Stuff you won't find: the Transformers Star Wars set (Millenium Falcon), or those flat-screen TV's under 30" for cheap... Oh, and no more Wii's or PS3's. I saw the Wii on Amazon, used, for $800! Ouch!

LaFollette: more land than brains

One of the worst humans I know comes from LaFollette, which might explain the stupidity I read about in the paper this morning (something in the water?). It seems a city council member is in trouble for protecting himself and his property...

See, some dipstick crook tried to steal the councilman's stuff, and said councilman held the criminal at gunpoint until the cops arrived. When they did arrive, they found the councilman holding a gun to the bad dude's head, they asked him to lower the weapon, he did, and they promptly arrested the criminal.

THEN they decided (the DA I presume) to press charges against the COUNCILMAN because he "pointed a gun at somebody, and that's against the law." What? Excuse me?

I didn't know "catch and release" applied to crooks in LaFollette. Sounds like a great place to be a law-abiding citizen, don't it?

BREAKING NEWS: PS3's spotted in Knoxville!

Just got word that one of our PS3 spotters has found at least 3 at the Target on Clinton Hwy (next to Kroger's). Grab 'em while you can folks!

-- posted at 10:40am 10/22/06

UPDATE (12:23 PM): just got a call from the wife, who went to pick one up for my brother, and there was a guy in line with the last one!

If anyone finds any more, post in the comments. From what Joystiq was reporting, many retailers have been secretly hanging on to units, possibly in a plan to trickle them out. Although my guess is that this particular Target just happened to get some in today.

In either case, I'm waiting March 8 for a Wii, as Mario Party 8 will be released on that day...

Making money from your blog

Last Wednesday night I had the pleasure to speak at a Knoxville blogger group, and the topic was monetizing your blog. It's a tough game out there, with "A-listers" like Om Malik, Cory Doctorow, etc. already making tons off their work. How does the average person do it? In my mind there are at least three key things you'll have to have in a blog:
1. Strong, original content
2. Daily (or if longer-form, weekly) content
3. Links galore

Let me clarify:
1. I'm talking how-to's, event coverage, or something "unique" that's hard to find elsewhere. One advantage in the blogosphere is a rapid-fire response rate. This gives writers an advantage over mass media, who are slow to react. Think guerilla coverage, or hacker how-to's.
2. Daily content keeps RSS readers fresh, and keeps readers flocking to your pages. We have found, when working with a swarm of bloggers on one blog, that over 20 posts a day keeps a lot of traffic moving through. Think BoingBoing.
3. I don't mean a linkfarm! Any time to reference someone else, you link back. This is etiquette, and Google "juice" for search ranking.

Anciallaries flow from this like:
- Avoid re-posting content
- Think SEO
- Treat it like a business
- Try things out, see if they work, retool if necessary
- Participate in the blogosphere as a whole
- Diversify your ad revenue (Google is big, but not the only game in town)

As they say, you gotta be in it to win it. If this is only a hobby, that's all it may ever be. Maybe if you're really lucky, and Joe Namath passes out at your house, you'll get noticed. But just wiling away the hours on Myspace blogging about cute socks will get you nowhere fast. Choose a platform that'll allow you to maximize your ad revenues, and keep up-to-date on technology.

Good luck!

A Thumpin'

Yep, that's what the Vols got tonight. But I must say it was an honorable loss. Arkansas whupped us, fair and square. Granted, we've lost a lot of good guys this season (injury, trouble). But the Razorbacks totally deserve a trip to Atlanta. The football I saw tonight was simply excellent. Defense was lightning, and that running game is amazing. So yeah, even thought we lost, it was a great game.

5,000 votes stuck in Knoxville

Looks like we get our share of voting machine madness: Knoxville has 5,000 votes locked inside one machine. According to WBIR, the folks in charge of counting the votes are getting an expert to fly down here and somehow extract the information. Unfortunately, I have no idea who the manufacturer is. Could it be Diebold, makers of the majority of new, electronic systems?

http://voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2006-11-01-voa51.cfm

The real point is-- we won't know until tomorrow what the final count is. These are early votes too, from the Downtown West location. 5,000 votes, that could mean all kinds of things! Exciting and frustrating at the same time...

VOTE!

No matter who you vote for, or what, or when... just do it. I know, I often hear that no choice IS a choice. And I guess that me an easy thing to say, but I would contend that participating in democracy, even if you believe it is a futile exercise, is still a function of living in a proper democracy. Doesn't it depress anyone that we have one of the LOWEST participation rates of 1st-world democracies in the world???

Oh well. Those who will, will, and those who won't, won't. Glad it's not raining.

Also, if you need further evidence of why folks should be more involved in the government that increasingly is getting into their business...
Check out the Cycle of Democracy

Where do you think we are in the cycle? Just as a junky can kick the stuff and become a productive human, we can also stop the cycle before we slip into dependence (again).

VOTE!