The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

I had a little problem with the text of my posts not showing up in my technology blog, Global Nerdy, earlier today. After trying the fixes I was aware of, I’d run out of ideas and decided to file a support ticket with my host, PressHarbor. Within an hour, they’d identified the problem: the “ShareThis” plug-in that I’d updated earlier this morning seemed to be incompatible with WordPress 3.8. They disabled it, confirmed that it was the culprit, and emailed me to tell me that my blog was back in business.

That’s what I like about PressHarbor: they’re not just a web host, they’re a full-service WordPress host. They maintain the WordPress installations, make the necessary patches, tune the databases, and all those little things that you need to do to keep a WordPress installation running at its best so that I don’t have to. Better still, during the few times I’ve had to file a support ticket, they’ve been quick and helpful.

The other great thing about PressHarbor is that they’ve been able to handle it when one of my blogs — either The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century or Global Nerdy — has a hit. Recently, my post about how terrible Millennials are in the workplace, despite having been posted without much fanfare back in June, started getting pageviews by the boatload near the end of November. I ended up getting nearly a million hits last month, with nearly 150,000 on Friday, November 22nd alone:

I’ve been with hosting services that would’ve melted under the click-rage-fueled deluge of visits by huffy twenty-somethings and the people who don’t think highly of them, but PressHarbor kept ticking along, smoothly switching into high gear without a hiccup. I just sat back, watched StatCounter climb, and enjoyed as my AdSense revenues literally paid the November rent on a two-bedroom Toronto apartment. (Annoying millennials is profitable, apparently.)

Yes, social media is still useful, since it pretty much guarantees that what you post will be seen as long as at least one other person is in your network. However, for long-term findability, Googlejuice, making money from ads and other things, and just plain old control over your content and how it’s formatted, nothing beats a blog. And in my experience with blog hosting, nothing beats PressHarbor. If you rely on your blogs like I do, you need PressHarbor. Drop ’em a line, and tell them Joey sent you.

Full disclosure: No, PressHarbor didn’t ask me to promote them. In fact, they have no idea I’m doing this. I’ve just been so pleased with them over the past month for being great at what they do.

It all started with a tweet, and from that tweet came on of Toronto’s best annual charity events, HoHoTO. And it’s taking place again this year: tonight, in fact, at The Mod Club!

Since its inception in 2008 by a group of techies and marketing folk in Toronto, HoHoTO has thrown one of the best holiday parties and raised nearly CDN$300,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank. If you’re looking for a good time tonight and want to support a good cause in the process, there’s still time to get tickets.

When you type search terms into Google, it makes suggestions based on similar searches that other people have made. Here’s what I see when I go to Google and type “Is it normal to” in the search box:

What I see when I type “Is it normal to” into Google.
Click the screen capture to see it at full size.

Google results vary from person to person because it uses individual factors such as your browser history. Here’s what someone else got when typing “Is it normal to” into Google. I wonder what sites this guy’s been visiting:

What another person saw when typing “Is it normal to” into Google.
From AcidCow.com. Click the screen capture to see it at full size.

(For those of you who live outside North America, Skittles are fruit-flavoured candy.

Do you get any…odd suggestions?

If you’re lining up videos to watch during the upcoming holiday downtime and you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons or similar fantasy role-playing games, you might want to get your paws on Zero Charisma. If you’ve ever had to contend with a misanthropic overbearing gamemaster who’s never quite grown up out of that oh-so-painful adolescent fanboy phase and has no life beyond the GM screen, you’ll find Scott, the protagonist, oh-so-familiar. In the film, Scott’s world comes crashing down when all sort of unwelcome changes come into his life, from the return of his estranged mom, to the entry of a new, much hipper nerd into the gaming group, to a visit by a Gary Gygax-esque game designer.

Zero Charisma won an audience award at SXSW 2013, JoBlo.com calls it “like TAXI DRIVER for fanboys”, and Anitra both let out sighs of rueful recognition and guffaws when we watched it last night (she also noted some similarities between me and one of the characters). You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, you’ll want to make a saving throw.

The Wreath of Khan is a creation of Annie Shapiro’s, and yes, it features the original Khan played by Ricardo Montalban in what’s still considered to be one of the best (if not the best) Star Trek film.

Here’s the original, cheesetastic, so-eighties-it-hurts trailer for the 1982 film:

Found via Laughing Squid.

as they used to say on G.I. Joe, “…and knowing is half the battle.”

Found via Reddit, which probably explains a lot.

In cartoons, especially ones with genius-level babies who have their own time machines, death is not forever.

Or, as Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane more colourfully put it in a recent tweet:

I mean, you didn’t really think we’d kill off Brian, did you? Jesus, we’d have to be fucking high.

— Seth MacFarlane (@SethMacFarlane) December 16, 2013

However, in reality, tattoos are a little more permanent. I wonder what the guy with this tattoo is thinking now that Brian is alive again:

This is probably a good time to revisit screenwriter Max Landis’ celebrity- and curse-word laden video essay, The Death and Return of Superman, his (mostly accurate) take on that time in the 1990s when they killed off Superman: