Category Archives: Other

Uncategorized stuff.


Lauren Axelrod’s Archeology Review

Posted on by

I met Lauren at Daytona State College in the fall of 2008 at one of my math classes. She’s a dedicated blogger and archeology student who is attending DSC with the goal of becoming a Doctor of Archeology. In fact, she is so sure she will accomplish this that she’s calling herself a doctor already! That is misleading, but I admire her dedication and I hear she makes a good income through freelance writing.

You can see all of her articles on her Triond profile page. I like her article, Did Christianity Cause the Fall of the Roman Empire?, where she concludes in layman’s terms that the Roman Empire fell because of mismanagement, not a change in religion. It’s much like how the United States is going to fall by completely ruining the U.S. dollar over the next few years (buy gold, silver, firearms, and canned goods quick!).

Here’s her main blog, which has some interesting links and information:

The Ancient Digger

She also wrote a short post about me and my photo, Bongos for Peace.

If you’re studying to be a journalist, an archeologist, a psychologist, a photographer, or whatever, one of the best ways to get your name out there is to start a blog and write lots of useful articles. You don’t have to do original research. Analyzing or even summarizing concepts in your field of study will be useful both to yourself and others. If you use WordPress and pay for your own hosting like I do, you’ll pick up a lot of web development skills along the way (there’s no other choice!). If you’re studying to be an archeologist but writing an archeology blog makes you sick, you’re in the wrong field. For Lauren, this is definitely not the case. Don’t sit on the sidelines just because you have 40 hours of college coursework per week. :wink:

2009-11-11 Update: Lauren gave me and some other bloggers a Best Blog Award. Check that out!

Hello Daytona State College Visitors!

Posted on by

If you typed in my web address from a print I gave you at Daytona State College, make yourself known by leaving a comment here.

I’ve been giving out a lot of prints I had made in 2007 when it was very cheap. These are the ones I backprinted in the same year, with my old and very long web address, richardxthripp.richardxthripp.com, which now forwards here. At the time other family members had other subdomains and the home page was a portal, but now I have thripp.com and I’m the only one left blogging.

If you come here again, type rxthripp.com instead which I use in all new print advertisements.

Have a look around at my photos and personal development articles. Feel free to comment on anything you see with the link at the end of each post; I read and respond to everything.

The photos I’ve given out so far are Leafy Droplets on Monday, Symmetry today (Wednesday), and on Friday I’ll be giving Ketchup and Ketchup 2 out as a set. This is on the Daytona State College main campus between 10 A.M. and 2 P.M.

If you need me to take photos for you, I am offering my services at a reduced rate of $20 per hour (min. $20) with free editing and a CD. The economy is bad now so we all have to pick up the slack. I have a DSLR with two good lenses (portrait and zoom).

Enjoy and keep studying!

Southern North Virginia

Posted on by

A comedy skit I wrote:

Did I tell you that I’m going to be staying in North Virginia this summer? Every time I go there, my mother KILLS me! She says I don’t visit enough.

Oh, you mean North Virginia as in *North* Virginia?

SOUTHERN North Virginia.

Do you really mean to tell me, that, that you’ll be staying in SOUTHERN North Virginia?

Well yeah, of course. Why is that such a surprise to you?

And, and your mother will be staying there too?

I hope so.

Why would you wish such a thing on her?

It’s where she lives! What are you stupid? All the great Smiths retire to Southern North Virginia. A few of them even like it better in South Virginia.

South Virginia? No way! I hear it’s too hot there.

It ain’t that bad, try Florida if you want hot.

I had no idea that, that you and your family were such bad people.

Now why would you say a thing like that about my family?

Most of the good people I know… well, they go to North Virginia.

Some of the really good ones go to NORTH North Virginia.

I knew a bank robber once, and he went to South Virginia.

Another guy was a rapist, and he went to SOUTH South Virginia.

Well what does that have to do with anything?

I just thought, you see, that you were a good family man… and you went to church every Sunday… and you were on the mission for four years… yet now I find out it all means nothing. What kind of game are you playing with me? Is your life all a lie?

Listen, I’m only going to South North Virginia because my mother couldn’t afford to move further North. She wanted to be near the rest of the family.

NEAR the rest of the family? Why would she want to suffer through that?

Now your insulting my family? What’s with you today?

What about the gnawing nervousness and guilt?

We keep it under control.

Maybe I should come too. I had no idea that pugatory was such a fun place!

Pugatory? What’s that have to do with anything?

Well, you said… that your mother was going to kill you. I assumed you were talking about the afterlife.

She doesn’t kill me, she just scolds me. You have to stop being so literal.

Oh, so now you tell me you’re not very literal.

Of course.

Most of the good people I know would be shocked by that. They’re very literal. My mother, she was a saint, and she was the most literal person I know…

The Pyramids were Built by Aliens

Posted on by

Hello folks. I haven’t been doing much of anything recently. I’ve been working on a summer course in computer programming and doing photography on and off.

My spring project was an open-source integrated library system (ILS) in PHP called Bookley. It allows you to manage patrons, items, check-ins and check-outs, renewals, fines, records, cover scans, and more. Try it out if you want to set up your own public or private library. It’s over 4000 lines of code and took 120 hours to program.

Th8.us has been going down a lot lately, but I fixed this today by removing lists of URLs and hit counters (resource hogs). This site and Th8.us will be rock-solid now.

I will be blogging, Twittering, commenting, and posting photos regularly again. In fact, I think I have more than ever to blog about.

If you haven’t heard, there is a lot of evidence that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built by aliens. Mainly, it consists of two million stones weighing 5000 pounds each quarried five miles away. The theory is they rolled them on logs to transport them, but the logs would be worn after each stone and would likely get bogged down in the sand. This means new logs would be needed for each of the two million stones, which is unlikely because Egypt is a desert with few trees. If it was built in 13 years, this means one stone was added every three minutes and thirty-five seconds, which I find implausible. If they stopped working at nights, that means an even faster pace. Aliens built it before they were here. Egyptians kept no records of the construction of the Pyramids.

Poem: The Night

Posted on by

Out of the darkness and into the light
The past is distant and the horizon bright
But in the fog of the night, there is a warning
Be fast and unseen, for danger is queen

The shadows on the wall seem so tall
The evils of the world take over all
But in the day they cringe in seclusion
Seems they are nothing but an illusion

Simplicity is an over-valued trait
Most systems are neither simple nor elegant
The world is too complex for perfection
There are just too many inflections

Colors and light dance in the night
Mystery abounds in the shadowy realm
But in the day there is no bite
Everything is plain and clear in the light

It’s difficult to preach from experience
More easy is it to read from a script
But to a new conscript, experience is nigh
The script becomes a blip, and the preacher high

At the helm of darkness, a solemn-eyed misfit
Yearns for acceptance among his criminal peers
But only in their destruction can he see
How much he fears his very own tears

Peace without justice is a prison worse than all
Tyrants remain and stonewalling reigns
But with justice comes freedom higher than law
Anarchy was never a good system, after all

Speak with ease through danger and you shall see
Most of life’s dangers will merely appease
The threat is real for eyes unseen
But known and identified, it isn’t mean

Kindness and gratitude are enviable traits
But mired in tactics, they’re filled with hate
A gift given, but left unseen
Should not be identified, or placed as a lean

It is without fanfare, that you should speak
For the fall of the mighty and the rise of the meek
The meek are not weak, they’re smarter than all
They hide no skeletons, nor run from creaks

A ballad in the night sings loud and calls
Forces of darkness seek only believers
Burn them with hatred and tragedy you’ll find
But accept them as one and blessings you’ll mind

The Library on Hold

Posted on by

If you follow my Twitter, you know I’ve been consumed with coding the OPAC for my public library these past seven days. Also, I pissed off greatly angered my Dad recently. I’m constantly negative / patronizing around him. It’s like a subconscious force. So much for trying to be personally developed.

The library is looking really great now; check out this search for example. I’m putting it on hold starting right now. I won’t work any more on it for one month. Hold me to that promise, okay?

The problem with it is that it’s not the best way for my to contribute to the world at the moment. The world starts at home, so it doesn’t matter how much you’re contributing if you’re leeching at home. I have some work to do.

I listened to a lot of back episodes from Uncontrolled Vocabulary. Fascinating talk show on librarianship. I didn’t know that people talked about things like taxonomy schemas and Library of Congress subject headings en masse.

I’m going to take and post some new photos. Maybe I’ll even write something. Or if I’m feeling lazy, I’ll take a photo and then write a short paragraph about it. It’s all good.

I wrote three posts on Daytona State College News a few days ago. That thing gets tons of search traffic. Must be because of it’s high ranking.

I’m counting… I have 18 days till the return to college. 10 days till birthday #17. I still have time to make some progress.

I replaced the $20/day plaque with one that says $1/day. That’s more reasonable. My online ventures are averaging 60 cents per day this month. It’s in reach, I say!

See y’all around. Actually, not around. Right here.

The Return from the Vacation

Posted on by

Hello again. I’m back from my exciting four-day vacation. I stayed around Palm Beach for three days with my aunt, uncle, cousin, and grandma. It was 200 miles down there. We had a lot of fun, my aunt cooked great food, there was a cool storm, and we played volleyball in the pool. Afterward, I stayed with my Grandma for Sunday and part of Monday, and my Dad brought me home three hours ago. I’ve been unpacking and clearing out emails.

Here’s some photos. I won’t show family because they don’t want to be shown.

20080626-193703rxt.jpg

20080626-194032rxt.jpg

20080626-214430rxt.jpg

20080626-214442rxt.jpg

20080626-220828rxt.jpg

20080627-220417rxt.jpg

20080627-224146rxt.jpg

20080628-181613rxt.jpg

20080628-201811rxt.jpg

20080629-120149rxt.jpg

The portrait is me. I’ll be cooking up some edited versions which you’ll see over the next few days. It was hard not having Internet for four days; no computers or Wi-Fi with the family, and all the neighbors had passwords on their networks. I’m glad to be back working on the mission here. I wrote two photography articles I’ll be polishing up tomorrow.

This site and the thripp.com network chugged along fine while I was gone. 2000 unique visitors across both. The HTML caching + gzip compression is working great. I had about 60 new users, but 30 were blatant spam by the same person, which I deleted on the spot. Two-thirds of the rest are non-blatant spam, but I don’t mind that.

The total number of thripp.com blogs is 115, and the MySQL database is up to 40MB. Still working fine on SYN shared Hosting, fortunately. I’ve used 4GB of bandwidth in my 10 days with them. I have 120GB/month, so I’m at 10% capacity. Most of the bandwidth is from my photography, especially the high-res stock photos. If the going gets rough, I’ll outsource the busiest to ImageShack and hotlink.

I made a decision: I’m going to switch to rxthripp.com for future labeling on my prints and photos here. richardxthripp.thripp.com was the old one, but it’s a bit lengthy and just redirects here like rxthripp.com because I’m using subdirectories for thripp.com users (I’m richardxthripp.thripp.com), so I may as well use the shorter one now. All three addresses will work forever. I set up a regex expression with Apache’s mod_rewrite, so even subdirectories redirect: rxthripp.com/gallery goes right to richardxthripp.thripp.com/gallery, for example. Cool stuff.

I came home to find that I’ve made $6.91 from the Google AdSense advertising on thripp.com. $2.51 is from ads on my photography pages here, while the other $4.40 is from clicks on ads on my users’ pages. While it would only take me an hour to earn this when I was working at the library, this is particularly sweet because I earned it while on vacation, not working at all. So it’s “passive income” instead of “active income.” Instead of working every minute for every dollar, you earn while you sleep. A website with ads is the perfect way to do that.

I’ve got till August 25 (when college resumes) to work on my photography. Expect a lot of stuff from me here. :grin:

Going on Vacation

Posted on by

Hello! If you’ve been following my Twitter updates, you know I had my final test in precalculus algebra today, got my grades back, and passed with an A. I have two months off now. I’m traveling to South Florida with my Grandma to visit family in a few minutes, and I’ll be gone till Monday (2008-06-30). I haven’t been posting as much here, as I’ve been making a lot of progress with thripp.com, but I’ll come back with some great photos and ideas for articles, plus plenty of time to execute them.

Thanks everyone, and leave me some comments to come back to. Till later. :sunglasses: