Shyzer.com

I find my self continually wondering if I’ll ever stop being amazed by Lady Luck. When I’m 50 or 60, will I still find myself stunned by her sudden appearance? A large part of me hopes the answer is “hell no.”

After being turned down for countless jobs, learning far too much bad news, and being stricken by what medical professionals can only describe as Bubonic Plague, Ms. Luck decided to part the dark clouds of gloom and smile down upon me.

Last week, the November edition of ShopSmart magazine hit newsstands (yeah, I know November is two months away) and Hey, It’s Free was surprisingly mentioned as one of it’s top seven money saving sites on the Internet. (page 34!) For those of you who don’t keep up to date with the Freebie World, this is akin to an athlete being profiled in Sports Illustrated. The only way this could have been better is had they done a full page spread on HIF.

Words can’t express the amount of pride and validation that has bubbled up within me thanks to this surprise of surprises. My first national print mention! I’ve sunk more blood, sweat, and tears into that site than any other project in my life – including most relationships. At the very least, the bump in ad revenue and countless local news mentions was a lovely bonus.

And yet on the grand scale of awesome news learned during the month of September, that ranks a distant second. You might be wondering what possibly could top such a wondrous occasions? Did the Seattle Mariners offer me a job? Did Barack Obama ask me to join his foreign policy team? Even better.

Try finding out that I’m back on my mom’s free airline passes. For a year. Minimum.

Let that sink in for a moment.

I CAN FLY FOR FREE TO PRACTICALLY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD FOR ANOTHER YEAR!

I really don’t know how to put this to people. I’m a traveler at heart. I’ve spent the last three years of my life helping out my family and there’s no better thing in this world that I could be doing. But I can’t wait to get back out there on the open road. I’m at my best when I’m moving with the tide, flowing from here to there with no regard for the unforeseen.

World, here I come. But first I need to hit up New York. And Spartanburg. And Louisville. And Orlando. There are a few people I need to visit.

Am I the only one who ends up having hallucinogenic dreams after taking NyQuil? I’ve been sick as a dog this week and finally decided to give NyQuil a shot the other night. Long story short, I spent the entire evening battling demons after being shrunk down to the size of a pea. Suddenly the wrinkles in my blankets were mountains and I was convinced I needed to tramp through them down to my dogs at the foot of the bed. I think I made it about half-way before daybreak.

Then last night I realized DayQuil has the exact same benefits as its counterpart, minus all the crazy.

Is it wrong that I’m slightly missing the crazy?

I’m not sure how many of you have noticed, but during the Olympics Shyzer underwent a pretty extensive makeover. Most of the aesthetic changes have simply been to “clean” up the site. The RSS feed is now much more prominent, the search bar actually stays in the sidebar(!), links now have a dotted underline to make them more noticeable, the footer has been cleaned up, and now the comments like approximately 1 gazillion times better. I’ve even incorporated gravatars! The only page that still needs work is the archives and I can live with that for now.

All of this is a long-winded way to say that I’m kinda happy with the way Shyzer looks. And kinda proud. I don’t usually pat myself on the back, but I really enjoy this theme now. I’m even contemplating releasing it to the world as a freebie and letting anybody use it.

I would like to add that I’m aware Shyzer looks like ass when using IE6. My response? Which one of you fools are still using IE6!?! I know there’s at least one of you as it has a 2% market share in my stats. So, uh…stop? Please? The entire Internet thanks you.

Oh, and the Firebug extension for Firefox is a damned Godsend. You can test out edits LIVE! I know nobody reading this runs their own website, so I’ll shut up now. I just wanted to get that in for the record so that when I look back, I’ll know when it was that I finally discovered Firebug.

You know when you sit down to perform an activity that should only take five minutes and then you look up at the clock and eight hours have passed?

Yeah, I hate that.

In my quest to find a suitable chat software for the freebie forums, I was led to God knows how many different forums on the web. Unfortunately for me, in order to test out their chat software, I had to register on them all and make a few posts before I was granted access to the rooms. In doing so, I was reminded of something that I find peculiar about the Internet.

People love virtual Yes Men.

Time after time and time, I found forums that were dedicated to certain niches and which made little to no effort to bring in people with opposing views. I fully understand seeking out people with similar viewpoints and interests. But making it a closed group of only like-minded individuals sitting around in a virtual circle jerk kind of seems counterintuitive to me.

How good are you at telling where somebody is from based on their accents?

I scored 29 points, should have been 32 though. Click more to see my answers and compare them to yours if you so desire.

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EDIT: Yeah, thanks for telling me that video was dead now, losers. It’s back to the NBC link.

EDIT: I changed the link to a different video site because NBC sucks.

Somebody get this man his own TV show. He’s been the most entertaining part of the Olympics by far. I’d pay good money just to have him follow me around and provide commentary on whatever I was doing.

Datz a good typing. Yes, yes, go to Shyzer! Ohh, ohhhh, de page is loading! Itz haz loaded!!!! Jou are champion at ze Internetz!! Woooo!

Auburn University has seven Olympic medals so far, more than India, Brazil, and every other nation except for about a dozen. Phelps swims for the University of Michigan, which means they’d probably rank in the top 5, but unfortunately their athletic site was last updated in July so screw them.

Or how about this. The nation of Georgia is in the midst of an invasion by Russia and has three medals in the Olympics.

Canada has zero. There’s really no correlation between a war and Olympic medals, but it’s still funny as hell.

I don’t mean to make light of the situation in Georgia though. I’ve been absolutely glued to a million different news outlets in an attempt to absorb as much info as possible. I’ll spare the lecture, but I do want to share this amazing Slate article about the cyber warfare that’s going on now.

At first glance most people think of cyber warfare as some futuristic War Games type of fantasy. But it’s not only real, it’s here and it’s effective.

Long story short, pretty much all of Georgia’s main websites are down. Some of the news agencies have moved to Blogger (it says something when Google is the most secure option a company has) and nobody knows if the attack is being coordinated by the Russian government / military, a collection of “hired guns” by the former, or an outright loose coalition of random hackers who saw this war as a perfect opportunity for a little fun.

Needless to say, the latter is the scariest scenario. It’s only a few steps away from a handful of people being able to shut down a country’s entire Internet infrastructure. Think of it like Die Hard 4, but without the crappy acting and shitty plot.

Ever wonder which countries are still holding out against using the metric system?