For the non-Mormon readers, I thought I'd post a small scale glossary of missionary terms that I'm likely to use.  This is certainly not exhaustive and is molded by my personal experience.  The reason I decided to post this now is that I have been cooking up a blog post for the last few days that draws on an experience from my mission.  For greater understanding of this and future posts, I thought I'd provide some definitions.

Missionary - Worthy and desirous Mormon men aged 19-25 and women 21-30 (? forgot the upper bound) can be full time missionaries.  Men's missions are for 24 months and women's for 18.  The title for a man is Elder and for a woman is Sister.  Most missions are proselytizing though humanitarian aid-only or other service-only missions exist too.  Missionaries are volunteer only and are not materially compensated for their time.  Typically, the missionary and his/her families pay for the missionary's support in the mission field.  There is also a church missionary fund that ensures all missionaries have funds for the necessities - housing, food, etc.

Mission / Mission field - this the place where a missionary works.  The mission name is a specific place but the term "mission field" is a general term.  For instance, I was a missionary in the Russia Moscow Mission, so for me Moscow, Russia and a few other nearby cities were the mission field.

President - each mission is headed by a mission president and his wife.  They are the priesthood authority for the missionaries and the top of the chain of command, so to speak.  The president's title is President and his wife's is Sister.

Assistant to President (AP) - typically, the mission president has two APs from the rank and file elders.  Their function is at the president's discretion.  Typical tasks for APs include - the top of the chain for gathering weekly statistics, training (missionary skills and language (for foreign missions)), and event organizing (conferences and other large scale meetings).

Zone Leader (ZL) - a mission is divided up into one or more zones.  Each zone has a zone leader who is similar in function to an AP but only for the scope of his zone.

District Leader (DL) - a zone is divided up into one or more districts.  Each district has a district leader who is similar in function to an AP but only for the scope of his district.

Area - a district is divided into one or more areas.  An area is a geographical location within a district where a single companionship of missionaries work.

Companionship - missionaries typically serve in pairs (though sometimes in threesomes).  A pair of elders or a pair of sisters are called a companionship.  Companionships are not mixed gender.

Trainer - when new missionary enters the field, his first companion is his trainer.  The trainer's responsibility, along with the standard duties he/she has in the area, is to train the new missionary in missionary skills and to help learn the language if it is a foreign mission.

Senior companion / Junior Companion / Co-companion - generally, the senior missionary (the one who has been in the field the longest) is designated as the senior companion while the other is the junior companion.  Senior companion is a title (like DL, ZL, or AP) and can be given to the companion with less time in the field.  If the two companions are not united in their opinion of what to do, where to go, etc., the senior makes the final call.  Some missions have co-companions or co-senior companions.  Here, there is no tie breaker vote, so to speak.

Stats - missionaries keep weekly stats on their activities.  These include metrics such as total proselytizing hours, non-proselytizing service hours, number of first time contacts, number of baptismal commitments, number of baptisms, etc.

Transfers - roughly once a month, new missionaries enter the field.  This is also the time when in the field missionaries might be assigned to new areas.  Transfers occur differently depending on the mission (more than anything how they happen is a function of the geography).  The one thing that is common is this - the assignments for companionships, areas, and leadership change during Transfers.

Office staff - the function of the mission office is dependent on the president.  Typically, the office takes care of things such as missionary apartments (when rent is due, the contracts, etc.), transfers transportation (getting to different cities or countries some missions span countries), cars (if applicable), referrals, membership records, etc.  The office staff take care of the day-to-day grunt work, so that the other missionaries can focus on proselytizing.  Office staff is often made up of two to four companionships of either elders or senior couples (that is, a husband and wife couple).

Today marks one year and one day since I began blogging.  It's been an interesting experience.  I've fancied myself as a writer for quite some time, but knew that I'd never do much writing professionally.  After about 12 months of writing imagistic poetry in high school, I lost the knack (if I ever had it) of writing anything that a decent sized audience would find interesting.

12 months ago I was working on working for a software company a fair distance from here.  I was also in school working on finishing my degree.  The insane amount of snow that had fallen around Christmas and New Year's was finally melting allowing me to see the 25 saplings that I'd planted a few months earlier.

Today I'm working for a transportation services company headquartered in my own town.  I'm still schooling and hoping I don't burn out between now and a little after this time next year when I should be finished.  The sapling were uprooted (along with everything else in my yard) to lay the sod that now greets me each day as I return from work.  I'm reading Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and am planning to read Kenneth Pollack's The Persian Puzzle in the near future.

12 months from now, I'll likely still be working for Flying J and will likely still be in school (though nearing graduation).  My sod will probably be leveled out and have had a spring and summer of mowing.  I just might be an agile developer and write test harnesses before implementing design specs.  I'd like to get into TDD or XP, 2005 just might be the year.

Wow.  I upgraded my blog to dasBlog 1.7 last night.  All went rather smoothly.  It involved a bit more effort than previous drag and drop upgrades, but I think it was worth it.  Kudos to Scott, Omar, and whomever else was involved with the effort.

I think this is the first day that my blog has had more than 1,000 page hits in a single day.  I'm hoping that at least part of the reason is interesting content and not just a craze for penguin bashing.

I'd like to write and let everyone know how insanely popular my blog is, but, um, it isn't.  This isn't to say that it is particularly unpopular, but, well, I'm not Scoble.  Anyway, last month I posted an article, only a link really, about a particular animal's Olympics.  That article accounted for about 80% of my traffic last month (minus hits on my RSS feeds) and is continuing with that pace this month.  Insane?  I think so.

I'm not sure that I should have said I had stories to tell, but I do have some context to share about my earlier days of blogging.

Around the time that I started blogging, I was talking to a software company that I wanted to work for.  If I recall correctly, I had my first live (non email) contact a few days after I started the blog.  In a few days, that company appeared in my logs, so I knew at least one person there was reading me.

From that time on, well until I hooked up with Flying J and the other company and I cut our ties with respect to employment, I always had them in the back of my mind when posting.  It was kind of funny.  The perspective I had to take, which I also used at Flying J when I was contracting and not yet an employee, was that I didn't want them to have any surprises if they hired me.  I told my team at Flying J that they could expect me to be the same person I was when contracting - in humor, boisterousness, opinion, coding ability, etc.

That's a bit of context for my earlier days.  Now, I'm writing (when I actually post, that is) whatever I feel like writing without too much thought for how current or future employers might see it.

When I get some time, I've got some blog stories to tell.  For the time being, I thought I'd at least post an entry per month...a bit less than the “at least an entry per day” target I had when I started my blog.

Two of my friends were married and I neglected to give them shout outs.  Congrats to Jeremy and Lauren.  Also, congrats to John and Emma.

One of my classmates posted a link to a nifty tool - http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html  Among other things, it catalogs all the software on your machine.  For all my Microsoft software, it not only listed the Product IDs but even the installation keys.  Pretty slick.  I didn't know that the installation key was retrievable.

Yep, I'm still alive.  The FlyingJ experience has gone well.  Last week they invited me to upgrade from contract to employee status.  I'm in the processing stage now, so soon I'll be a normal employee again.  Wow, it's been a while.

I've got some unrelated items to post about, so here they are in no particular order -

If you are doing WinForms development and need borders on your custom controls, you might consider inheriting from System.Windows.Forms.Form rather than from UserControl.  You'll have to remember to set TopLevelControl to false and to set ControlBox to false, but otherwise, things will be very similar to deriving from UserControl (with the exception of a much richer set of properties and events).  Oh, one other thing, remember to explicitly set Visible to true, when you add your new control to the Controls collection of a form or control.

Two weeks ago, I dreamed that Robert Scoble stopped blogging.  He declared that he just didn't see the point of it any more and had better things to do with his time.  I guess my mind didn't see that as too strange considering some of the other things that have happened lately - Microsoft and AOL settled and stopped throwing mud, Microsoft and Sun settled and stopped throwing mud, W3C and many others came to Microsoft's aide in their fight against Eolas.  I don't know what in the tech world would surprise me at this point.  Perhaps Ellison could publicly call Bill a nice guy?  Hmm, some things are just too far fetched.

I picked up two new (but old) CDs - 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged and The Cranberries Unplugged (a compilation of several live/unplugged events).  With the 10,000 Maniacs purchase, my music collection is now fully legal.  I've had one dubbed tape, which I received about 10 years ago, that was holding me back.  Horrah!

I finally watched, for the first time, the movie AI.  Not sure what I think of it.  It was interesting and certainly far better than Anti-Trust, another movie from a similar time frame.

Last but not least, after fighting with the beta team on a previous Microsoft beta that same team invited me back...oddly enough, it seems the structure of the beta has changed somewhat and is now in line with what I suggested.  I doubt it was me that made the difference, but I'm glad to know that Microsoft learns even from folks who fight with them.

I've just upgraded to dasBlog 1.6.  The most noticeable change is the new monthly archive on the right menu.  Keep up the good work, Omar et al.

To enable archiving of my website, my hosting company moved it from a Windows 2000 Server to a Windows Server 2003 box.  As a result, permissions were and IIS settings were a bit off.  If you were visiting during the week (not that I was writing during the week), that's what was going on if you were getting page errors.

Hmmm...not sure what's up, but dasBlog decided to create several dozen (71 to be exact) bogus content files.  It then got mad that it couldn't open them (it didn't name them correctly to be opened), so it refused to display any content.  I've deleted those files, and now the content is being displayed again (you can see this right?).  I apologize for today's down time.

I took some pictures today (yes, of waterfalls), though I'm not sure exactly how I plan to post them.  I probably won't upload them for a few days (they're pretty big, so I'm thinking about how to deal with that), but I'm making progress.

I've recently accepted a job offer, so my blog posting frequency is likely to decrease a bit.  Currently, I work at home and set my own hours, so I can adjust my schedule to blog.  Starting Monday, I'm off to work in an office again.  Having a schedule is a bit rough, but I'm looking forward to calling 5 p.m. time to quit working though.  Happier times are ahead.

This blogger has been very busy, stressed, and sick lately.  I'm hopeful that tomorrow I'll have a clear head again and can return to regular programming - complaining about technology implementations, and thinking out loud on idealism.  If you can stomach one more quote of the day, I'll post it in a bit.

I've been thinking for the past few weeks about blogging, using the open source model of writing.  I'm throwing my thoughts, imagination, and ability to manipulate English onto my blog free of charge.  This sounds suspiciously like programmers pouring their talents into Mozilla, Linux, or other open source projects free of charge.  I suppose the one exception is that if anyone cites my blog, I don't claim any copyright control over their remaining blog content.

Those that know me, know that I'm an enemy of open source software in general and specifically of the GPL.  I think they are an economic abomination on the software industry.  My reasoning is simple - for every line of code that a programmer gives away, that is one line of code that another programmer wasn't paid to write.  Thus, GPL'ed software reduces the value of my skill set and the skill sets of all other programmers.  I don't consider this a good thing.

So, what am I doing with my blog?  Oh yeah, exactly that which I detest but in a different industry.  I think there is some distinction, however, between the two.  In no particular order - I don't use a viral (thanks for that term, Mr. Stallman) license like GPL for those who quote me; There is no company that can leach off of my efforts (a la IBM, HP, and Intel from the open source community) to increase its bottom line; This blog, in a few ways, can increase my bottom line (ads, notoriety, written communication skills, etc.)

I must admit this isn't an entirely thought out idea.  Then again, I'm under no obligation to write quality content unlike those writers who write for hire.  Maybe I have more in common with many open source folks than I had previously thought.

Thanks to Raymond Chen, I've created a huge URL for my blog.

http://www.hugeurl.com/?M2E0NmJiMmM1ZTM4NDY2YmI5OTE0MzY3YWE5
MTQyZWEmMTImVm0wd2QyUXlVWGxXYTJoV1YwZG9WVll3Wkc5alJsWjBUVlpP
V0Zac2JETlhhMUpUVmpGYWMySkVUbGhoTWsweFZqQmFTMk15U2tWVWJHaG9U
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V2JGaGpla1pxWWtad2VGVnRlSGRpUjBwV1YydHdWMDFxUmtoV1ZFWkxWakpP
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U2EzQjZWbGQ0VDJGV1RrWlRhM1JYVFc1b1dGZFdXbEpsUm1SellVWlNhRTFz
U25oV1Z6QjRUa2RHUjFaWVpHaFNWVFZVVlcxNGMwMHhXWGxsU0dScFVqQndT
Rll5Y0VkV01ERjFZVWhLVjJGcldreFdNVnBIWTJzeFYxcEdaRTVOUlhCS1Zt
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d1lWVXhjMU51Y0ZkTmFsWlVWa2Q0VDFOSFJrZFJiRnBvWVRGd1NWWkhkR0Zo
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a2RUYlVaVlZucFdkbFl3V25kU2JGcFpZVVprVjJKRmNEVldSM2hyWXpGVmQw
MUliR0ZsYTFwWVdXeG9RMVJHVWxaYVJWcHNVbTFTV2xscldsTmhSVEZ6VTI1
b1YxWXphR2hhUkVaYVpVWmtkVlZ0ZUZOWFJrcFpWa1phWVZsV1RrZFdiazVX
WW1zMVYxWnRlR0ZXYkZKV1ZXNUtVVlZVTURrPQ==

Here are the top ten search terms for the month (so far):

1. stupid words
2. the web page you are viewing is trying to close the window
3. asp.net deployment
4. wmtools
5. potato man
6. potato juice
7. outlook 2003 rules bug
8. c# illegal characters in path
9. infragistics.netadvantage.2004.vol.1
10. netadvantage 2004

Combing my referral logs revealed that someone found my blog by looking for “Kurt Cobain's height.”  Since I didn't remember mentioning his height (especially since I don't know it), in my post about him a few weeks ago, I investigated further.  It seems Yahoo! Search indexed my RSS feed (which includes embedded HTML) and associated the words “Kurt” and “Cobain” from my post text with “height” from an IMG tag.  It seems to me that Yahoo! needs to tweak its algorithm to learn what is content and what is not.

Too funny!  Almost as if Network Associates (or the admins who provide me with my IMAP account) read my previous blog entry, I just received this...

Network Associates WebShield SMTP V4.5 MR1a on <email server> detected virus W32/Bagle.j@MM
in attachment Message.pif from <email address> and it was Deleted

I've created a new category called “Software Review” and this is the maiden entry.  Since I talk about my experience with software quite often, I think I'll put all future entries that deal with quality or quirkiness into this category.

I wonder what should be the result of this formula...

Windows XP Pro Start Menu + Visual Studio .NET 2003 = ?

Apparently, it means the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Command Prompt jumps into my most recently used (MRU) apps list on the Start Menu even though I never use it.  Perhaps it was used during the install of VS so extensively that it demanded placement in the MRU list.  One of the oddest things, in my opinion, is that it gets a decent placement on the list (usually in the top 10 out of 20).

Paris Hilton, no matter how much you referral spam me, I'm not buying.  Perhaps you and Mr. Kerry's people should get together.  You both like talking to people.  I think you should talk to each other.  I'll talk to you if I'm interested, but don't hold your breath.

The vile referral spammer is at it again.  Remember our chat last week, Mr. Kerry?  This voter still does not appreciate your disrespect for his property.  He's appalled that a “man for the people” will continue to engage in such marketing techniques.

Since this is a personal blog, I quite naturally will talk about things that I've experienced and people that were involved in those experiences.  I've decided that if anything could be considered incriminating, I'll not post about it.  I won't name people unless they have web sites where they name themselves.  If they don't want to announce their existence to the Internet population, it's not my place to do so.  Finally, if people post using aliases, I won't reveal who they are or acknowledge that I know who they are.  Again, if they don't want to announce their existence to the Internet, it's not my place to do so.  I'm sure I'll slip up on this from time to time, but this is the standard I'm aiming for.

In case you missed it, I added search funtionality to the blog earlier this morning.  It currently does single keyword searches of content on this blog.  When dasBlog 1.6 is finished, I understand that search word highlighting (a la Google searching), among other things, will be added.

For those of you using dasBlog 1.5, adding search to your blog is very easy.  Here is the macro you need - <%newtelligence.search()%>.  Just add that to your .template file and, poof, you'll have search.  Since dasBlog's info seems to live in three different places, the hard part about adding search, was finding the name of the macro.

From a typical February month perspective (28 days), my blog has been up and running for a month.  Here are a few tidbits I've learned during that time.

Almost nobody has heard of RSS, or ATOM, or news aggregators in general.  There are bloggers, who don't even know what these things are.  One of the many things that we as an industry need to work on is simplifying the adoption path of new technologies.  I'm not sure I have great ideas on how to do that, but I'm convinced of the need.  One helpful item, I think, would be to reduce the ridiculous format competition (for most people, is there really a need for whatever goodness ATOM supposedly offers?).  We take something already complex for non tech people and make it more complex.  Bad move, I think.

The Internet is as unreliable as ever.  Referral hits don't always mean someone is linking to you.  Email notifications don't always arrive.  Stats tracking software falls asleep sometimes.  Google's ranking algorithm is more fickle than a 2 year old deciding what to eat (or not eat, or throw on the floor, etc.) for dinner.

Most importantly, blogs allow me to communicate with many people.  According to my logs, I'm regularly read by folks from at least 10 different countries and at least two major software companies.  It is interesting to think that my voice is heard by so many (though very few compared to many other bloggers).

The Kerry campaign doesn't want the truth to be known.  They've spammed me, and when I bring it to their attention, they give me and give me more spam.  When I drop the spam on their doorstep, by posting on their forum, they delete the threads.  I see the respect they have for other people's opinions.  My account - GrrGrrGrr - is now subject to moderation.  All of my threads have been deleted, and I can only create new threads if they allow it.  The funny part is that, since I linked to my previous entry in the threads I created, I've received several hits.  At least some of the Kerry entries in my referral log will be legit now.

Thanks to Mario, I've discovered there's a newer version of dasBlog.  I just upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5.  Everything seems to be working correctly to me.  Please let me know, if you have any problems.

Dreams.  Lately, my dreams have been intense.  I don't remember what they've been about, but I remember the feelings I have.  They are the type that one would experience in severe tests of character, or tests of endurance, or tests of ability.  It's as if, even in my sleep, I can't escape the obligations of my waking life.

Stress.  I decided almost a decade ago that I wouldn't have stress.  I was an all honors or AP student and was surrounded by grade mongering “I'm going to the Ivy League!” fellow all honors or AP students.  I decided that there was more to life than where I went to college, and there was far more to life than whatever grade I happened to get in economics.  It's final.  No stress for me.

That worked for a few months, perhaps even a few years, but life is different now.  There's a driving “you need to be more than you are now” feeling in me.  I need to be a better programmer.  I need to be a better financial planner.  I need to be better elder.  I need to be a better brother.  I need to be a better friend.  I need to finish my degree with a 4.0.  (Those are listed in no particular order, by the way.)

I haven't discovered a resolution strategy or even a mitigation strategy for this drive that satisfies.  The issue isn't stagnation.  I'm anything but stagnant.  I'm constantly improving my skills as a programmer.  I'm constantly seeking ways to improve my financial position.  I'm constantly seeking to improve my relationship with God.  I suppose it is best to leave judgment on where I stand on the friend and brother question to those to whom I am friend and brother.  As for the degree, it's a 4.0 now, and I don't see that diminishing.

A few years back, I produced one satisfying financial stress mitigation strategy - I was eating six months ago, I'm eating today, and I'll be eating six months from now.  Whether I own one house, two houses, or live in an apartment, I'll still be OK.  I'm in a state of OK'ness now, and in the future I'll be at least as OK as I am now.  Breathe.  OK, now, get back to work and stop worrying.

Distractions.  Distractions are probably my best mitigation strategy thus far.  For instance, I just wrote a somewhat difficult email to a close friend of mine.  Rather than fully grok the situation, which I'm not prepared to do right now, I blare some Russian pop music to provide a distraction and proceed to write as much as I can at present.

Another for instance is this blog.  Rather than consider how far away I am from the large number of people I consider close friends, I've created a distraction...my blog.  It enables me to feel, to some degree, that I'm keeping up my end of the friendship with respect to communication, and it gives my mind something to do other than think about the distance between me and my many friends scattered all over the world.

The blog, of course, has other advantages.  If I can manage to distract myself from introspection, I'll post about the technical issues I meet as a .NET developer.  Eventually, I expect to be drawn into the mix of the better known tech bloggers, thus increasing my ability to learn from them.  This will directly affect my “become a better programmer” and “become a better financial planner” stresses.

It's interesting that the introspective me, which is probably what I'd prefer to expose to my friends is in opposition to the technical me, which I'd probably prefer to expose to the Internet in general.  Thus, these two blog focuses are distractions to each other.  I expect that they will both aid me in succeeding in the other by not letting me focus on it too much.  Lol, that's quite a paradox.

OK, I feel like Doogie Houser.  He always wrote little cryptic explanations of whatever he learned on the show that week.  My last entry reminds me entirely too much of Doogie style blogging.  (I think Doogie predates even Dave Winer in the blogosphere.)

I thought I'd go a bit transparent with this blog.  It seems that my attempt at transparency obviously needs a bit more work.  No, that doesn't mean I plan to clarify my previous entry.  The entry is certainly true in it's own right, and I think I'll leave it at that.

Anyway, sorry about that Doogie moment.  I'm sure I'll have a few more, but I'll work on phasing them out.

When I wrote “Rules of Engagement” a few days ago, this is the type of thing I was looking for.  I think the only one with which I take issue is - Write Tight.  I, um, don't optimize my writing.  If I'm in the mood, I'll proof for grammar, punctuation, and spelling.  I typically don't go to the trouble of doing short and sweet.  I don't take issue with Relax, but I don't think it's too likely that I'll do it.  Speaking of relaxing, I need to write about stress.

I guess I don't miss it too much.  I can't even remember what it was called.  I think it was Musli, actually.  I'm sure Jake, errrr, Jack will correct me on that. 

Anyway, I miss it.  I just had a pleasant bowl of Cap'n Crunch, and it was OK, but I'd love to have the crunchy, chocolaty, so German but in the middle of Moscow Muesli.  (The thing that I'm trying to describe is like a granola cereal with chocolate chips.  It was very good and I ate it quite often toward the end of my mission.)  Mmmmm.

Cereal aside, I was thinking of posting about dreams, distractions, and stress in the near future.  Look forward to them in the next few days.

Pinging Weblogs.com failed: Thanks for the ping, however we can only accept one ping every half-hour. It's cool that you're updating so often, however, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice -- take a break, you'll enjoy life more.

You may not be so bold!  Besides, I was over half an hour by 13 seconds.

I've read several blogs in the last few days about posting using Word or OneNote.  I tried w.bloggar and Zempt last week.  In the end, I've decided to stick with the web based dasBlog entry editor.  At some point I'll probably check out Word or OneNote and do the email to blog.  My reservation with this is the typically horrid HTML that Word generates.

No offense, but I'm not looking to learn about scandals, pr0n sites, or how to free Cuba.  However, such sites are appearing in my referrer log.  Perhaps those who want to free Cuba also want to read my blog?  Yeah, I don't think so either.

So, here's the problem:  my referrer log is full of sites that don't have links to my blog.  How then, do those site appear in my log?  Is there some browser bug munging the referrerUrl in the HTTP request?  Is someone practicing some bizarre spoofing technique, so I won't discover where they are coming from?  Is there a DNS snafu somewhere?  I'm at a loss on this one.

Any ideas?

I am a bit surprised by this.  lparky.com came online in March.  I've been involved with other stuff, so I haven't done all too much with it.  Still, it managed to get visitors...and I don't mean friends of mine, whom I persuaded to check it out.

Here are the unique visitor stats from the last few months:

For the last few months, I some incredible growth (measured by percentages).  Most of January's numbers come from hits to the blog.  Wow.

While I'm thinking about it, is there anything specific that the readers would like to hear about?

This gave me a laugh.  In the first few days, I'd edit an entry several times.  Now though, I only do corrections for formatting or link errors.  I'm generally good about grammar and spelling too, but when blogging, it just doesn't seem as important.  Blogging is more of a stream of consciousness thing than a well thought out thesis.

A quick edit to the CSS and backgrounds now show up in the intraVnews generated Outlook posts.  The issue?

The CSS had this declaration before:

background-image: url(themes/candidblue/lestexture2.jpg);

now it has an abosolute path:

background-image: url(http://www.lparky.com/blog/themes/candidblue/lestexture2.jpg);

The world of blog views is curious.  By blog views, I refer to the different ways in which blogs can be viewed.  For many months, I've read stripped down feeds (mostly black text on white background with no borders, images, etc.) in SharpReader.  I played with RSS Bandit a bit and applied several XSLTs to the XML feeds.  Most recently, I've been reading via intraVnews in Outlook.  Oh, and I can't forget to mention the occasional view in a browser.

The interesting thing is that I designed my blog (OK, so only about 10% of the effort was mine) with the browser in mind.  I haven't tested the XHTML in the RSS feed.  I didn't design the site to appear well when scraped into an intraVnews generated Outlook message (it strips the gray background image).

Frankly, I'm not sure what to do about this.  I think I'll just hope that my words are interesting enough to keep people reading despite the possible bad aesthetics.  Oh, and that my pages are search engine friendly enough, so new readers can find me.

Google's love is fickle.  In the 24 hours since I posted my ranking for certain search terms, I fell dramatically.  From 2nd to 39th on one!  Ouch!

More than likely, Google spidered and found that content that used to be here wasn't here any more (older articles don't appear on the front page).  Such is life.  I'm not blogging to be googlicious anyway.  That was just a nice side benefit.

This blog is my first (if you don't count a little site I wrote after my mission that nobody read) attempt at Internet honesty.  By that I mean, whenever I posted anything on the net until now, I've done it hiding behind an alias or the name of some corporation (like my clients or my employer).

I came to a startling conclusion not too long ago.  It goes like this - it's nearly impossible for the common man to hide his identity on the Internet.  I'm not the most tech savvy guy around, but I've sniffed out more than one person myself.  I read referral logs.  I read user agent strings.  I check properties on the email and newsgroup posts I receive to see where they come from and, if possible, what email client and OS (even OS service pack) was used to create them.  I read WHOIS records.  I even do the occasional tracert.

I thought to myself, “How hard would it really be to follow this path?”  Look at my email address.  Hmm, that doesn't look like a corporate address, I wonder what it is.  Let's see what's at lparky.com.  Hmm, LEP.  I wonder if that stands for Louis E. Parks.  Let's check the WHOIS record.  Wow, good guess.  Perhaps we should give him a call or mail him a letter.  Perhaps we should check to see how much he paid in property taxes last year.  Yeah, no privacy.  All from a little email address.

With such an easy path, I figured that using my real name was almost as safe as posting with an alias.  So, there you go, security through obscurity doesn't provide much security.  Besides, it's quite a feeling to Google for myself and appear on the first page of results.    Currently, I'm 2nd and 3rd.  Yesterday, I was 4th and 5th.  Last week, I was 8th.  Potato Man isn't doing too badly either.

There's a little history here.  From September 1996 to September 1998, I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I served in the Russia Moscow Mission.  Since I was a native English speaker, I had to learn Russian.

It just so happens that the Russian word for park and the English word for park are cognates, that is, the sound the same in both languages.  In plural, they are slightly different.  In English, you pluralize park by adding an “s.”  In Russian, you pluralize by adding an “ee” (long e).  So, my last name translated into Russian is Parky (“ee”, “ey”, or “i” didn't suit me, so I opted to use “y” for the transliterated form).

Instead of calling me Elder Parks, I was often called Elder Parky or just Parky.  When I got home, the name just stuck.  When I registered my domain, lparky.com (Louis Parky) was the most logical choice (it was also available!).

Obviously, Louis Parks is Potato Man.  Where did the name come from?

Potato is a double-edged sword for me.  I wrote a parable back in '96 about potatoes.  Rather than accepting the status quo, the potato was trying to be the best he could be and rise above his surroundings.  I wrote it to a missionary, trying to explain my thoughts on life.  A few months later, I told it to my companion at the Missionary Training Center (MTC).  (I'll blog about being a missionary a bit more some day.)  Since he was about 6'2" and I'm 5'7", he used to call me spud.  It was very complimentary, meaning that in his eyes, I was trying to be the best friend to him and the best missionary I could be.

Potato also refers to a sarcastic comment I made a few months ago.  Jeremy Field and I were taking a class together at University of Phoenix.  He's a good friend of mine, so I spoke very candidly about an issue we were both having with the class.  I choose the first word that came to mind, potato, for an analogy I was making.  So, when I use potato referring to UoP, I'm covertly showing off my cockiness.

Using the two definitions together, I suppose Potato Man means that I'm a cocky guy, but that I'm always trying to do the right thing.

I've altered things a bit, most import was is the nifty gray background on the right side.  This is the same background used on the rest of the site.  Jon Hoffman, an aspiring artist friend of mine, made it for me last year.

One thing I'm stuck on is the location of the calendar.  It currently is aligned with the links under Navigation, Categories, and Blogroll.  I'm thinking it should stay there.  Still, I can make a case for left aligning it with the Navigation, Categories, and Blogroll headings.

If I have any readers, feel free to let me know what you think and what would make the site better.