Recently in Dr Mike Category

As many of you know, I work with a number of area churches and organizations that assist the area homeless.  Recently, Van Miller, a columnist for Charlotte Magazine, wrote an article on one couple who I help.  Their names are Arthur and Debbie and I've been helping them since about 2000.  They come uptown three times a week and pass out upwards of 500 hot dogs, soda, clothing and supplies.  Arthur's been doing it for about 16 or 17 years now.

The article is an interesting read.  I have to admit though that I take exception to characterizing all the folks who come out as having "hair [that is] unkempt, their clothes dirty, fingernails long, teeth brown."  That kind of bothers me.  Yes, some folks are like that but far from all of them which is how I read the article.

There's some pictures up in the gallery.  They're all mixed in together though.  I'll sort them if I have time tomorrow.  The photo I've included here is from the article. (My own pictures aren't that good.)

Arthur, the hot dog guy

...At least around here.  The data is taken from the beginning of the year and looks so very close.

The Netscape at 6th place is probably me.  I wonder what this site looks like when viewed with a Playstation Portable.

Looks like I "offended" Matt Mullenweg a bit too much.  Write a pair of posts describing how they have ignored a long list of splog reports and I now have my wordpress.com account suspended and my posts in the support forums edited without permission.  But in addition to that, I've been blackballed by Akismet and it appears that my comments on wordpress.com are being trashed automatically. (A picture of that after the fold.  Guess I won't be posting comments to your blog anymore, wank.)

What bothers me about all this is that it started on Matt's end when I suggested that since most of the support forum volunteers were not going to be able to attend the first WordCamp, that it would be a great idea if Automattic would drop each of them a tshirt into the mail.  That way Matt and crew would show how thankful they were for the time and the work that they put in.  This, of course, didn't fly over too well and since that point, many of us noticed a "cooling" of staff's attitudes towards those who helped out.

There, I said it.  All this because of a lousy tshirt.  A simple gesture that would have taken at most an hour or two and would have meant a lot of some people.  Hell, the gallery folks sent me a tshirt for reporting an issue with their website. (I still need to blog about that.  There's pictures here and here.  Yes, it was 6:30 in the morning.  It was early and I was tired and hadn't shaved.)

Since that time, I've had Matt and others from Automattic lie about me, post insults, make light of my physical handicaps, and make light of my former relationship with my ex fiancee.  While he goes on and on about how approachable he is, he has refused numerous times to discuss how his company has acted towards me and has refused to follow up on the questions that I raised.

All this does prove three things though.  Wordpress.com is not pro free speech, not pro customer service and fully believes in censorship.  Can't wait for the next time Matt gets up on his soap box shouting out to the whole world how they support it so much. 

Well, May, 2008, has come and gone and I've gone ahead and dug out the numbers.  Rather different numbers compared to the previous month.  Let's take a look.

The most read post for the month is a collection of fan drawn Kim Possible artworks posted to DevianArt.  Probably should fix how the thumbnails look on that page someday.

Runner up is a link to a rather interesting collection of Mac Desktop Wallpapers.

Third and fourth posts in that list is a list of Dragon Magazines that you can download as *.pdfs.

Fifth post is our take on how Mediamax screwed over its clients.  Sixth is a link to an MSNBC article on hypermilers.  Seventh is a video from Family Guy of Peter singing the song Rock Lobster.

Eighth is where I was wonder which Happy Potter I should get: Go see the movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, or get the new book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Of course at the time, I thought it was moot as we thought we could download the new Harry Potter novel.

Ninth post on the list was some more Kim Possible pictures posted to Deviantart.  Tenth was some Harry Potter artwork posted on deviantart.

Other posts of interest were:

• Godaddy spam
• UPS bans left turns to save gas - When will NASCAR do the same?
• 50 things not to do at Hogwarts
• My Daria fanfiction - Pairings
• My Daria fanfiction - Cynic Hood
• Wordpress says no to Sponsored Links in Themes but gets caught adding them into their own sites
• Is nofollow worth it?
• My links page
• Robot Chicken's Charlie Brown and The Great Pumpkin
• Google Adsense cuts their rates

Here's a couple of my own choices:

Kim Possible's Mission to Hell (I fixed the missing chapter 2 link)
Crash on Volturnus (I really should work on both of those.)

The most read post for the year so far?  The mac desktop wallpapers one.

Per a request and a suggestion, I'm now on Twitter.

doctor_mike