the coolest nerd » Web

Google Adsense and Proposition 8

Justin Ong — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:57:24 +0000

I doubt anyone would assume otherwise, but despite what the ad on the right might say, I’m in no way affilitated with the yes on 8 campaign.

In fact, it kinda sucked to have it there.

Yes on 8 Google Ad

OMG Thirty Thousand Hits!

Justin Ong — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:08:41 +0000

I only started this site as an experiment — to see about building sites and fooling with advertising and to keep my skills sharp — since before this one, I hadn’t built a site since the bad old days of pure HTML done in a text editor. After launching this site in 2005 — I got around to using some of my other domains, and now I have a half dozen disparate sites running on as many different content management systems (drupal, wordpress, mediawiki, phpbb). I’ve learned a lot during this process and I intend to keep trudging along with them all.

In the coming days I’ll write about my experiences with all of the above.

I’m still curious though, how do people stumble upon this site if they don’t know who I am?

Renamed my blog, it’s a little more personal now.

Justin Ong — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:49:20 +0000

11:38:35 PM Me: oh yeah, i renamed my blog

11:38:45 PM Me: to something you said years ago

11:38:54 PM Ghetto D: haha let me see

11:39:01 PM Me: its in the title, not on the page

11:39:07 PM Ghetto D: the coolest nerd?

11:39:08 PM Ghetto D: hahah

11:39:10 PM Me: yea

11:39:36 PM Ghetto D: hehe, didn’t remember that

11:39:42 PM Me: it was hella years ago

11:39:47 PM Ghetto D:

11:39:48 PM Me: it stuck with me it was a nice complement

11:40:00 PM Ghetto D: haha you are more like the badass geek

11:40:13 PM Me: hmm that works too!

I’m a social networking whore.

Justin Ong — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:43:15 +0000

I did it. I finally gave in and and set up an account on Facebook. I now have an account on the big three sites, though I am officially retiring from Myspace, not that I ever used it that much. I don’t see how people could deal with how crappy it is. Pages that don’t load properly. Fake friend requests, constant notifications, gawd awful page designs with clashing colors and ridiculous amounts of automatically playing music. Of course, then there was the day when a million Windows users were infected with spyware just by visiting it. I’m surprised I lasted so long. Maybe logging in once every few months doesn’t count though.

I’ll leave my account there but don’t expect me to respond to messages or event invitations.

Interestingly, there is this this essay on the class separation that exists between the two sites. After only a week on Facebook, I’ll have to agree.

You guys should make sure your accounts don’t get hacked.. or this could happen to you! (Face/Off spoof)

Some Web Statistics — Interesting to me, boring to most.

Justin Ong — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 07:45:57 +0000

When I started this site, I didn’t really expect it to last long. Never mind over a year. I didn’t even intend for this site to be in blog format! At first, I was simply going to use this site to publish photos — and use it as a repository for bookmarks, so I could have access to the same ones no matter what computer I was at.

Working on this blog has motivated me to launch several other sites over the last year or two. I’ll touch on those sites in a future post, but needless to say I’ve learned a lot by working on them all. This isn’t my first site though — I did find a copy of my first homepage circa 1998. It is pretty embarrassing how poor the design was and sad how much of the things I wrote about myself hasn’t changed a whole lot since then. I’ll republish it one day.

I realize that my site is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, and I never intended for it to spread as far as it has. Over the past year, I’ve been averaging 543 unique visitors per month, with visits from every continent! I’m not sure exactly who is looking at the site, and I wonder how they’ve landed here if we haven’t met. Leave a comment and let me know how you found me! (Motivate me to update more often!)

A Google Map displaying the locations of the last 100 visitors. (Mostly concentrated in San Francisco)

I guess updating my site infrequently has dropped my visitor count.. (-_-)

Of Google Images and the No Cheese Club

Justin Ong — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 01:07:23 +0000

One of the things I like to do when I’m bored is to search Google Images with my name, to see if anything funny or interesting shows up. It’s also interesting to see what it picks up that is actually one of my photos, and not one of those impostors with my name. (^_^);; Currently, there are two. A photo of Stan playing patty-cake, and a photo on frappr of me with Jacinta, Young, and Stephanie. Try it with your name and see if anything comes up. It’s a good way to pass some time.

If you’ve known me for any length of time over say, one week. You’d know by now that cheese is my number one hated ingredient, seasoning, or food. I’ve gone so far as to start an unofficial no-cheese club. We currently have four members, should you feel this way too, you should join us in our cause. Down with cheese! — This is why I find it amusing that the top image found under my name is a cheesy dish. Gross! (-_-);;

Interestingly — my site is blocked. (^_^);;

Justin Ong — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:34:33 +0000

One of the things I never really liked implementing at work was a web filtering service. Our solution is provided by McAfee and powwered by Secure Computing. It has worked pretty well over the last few months and I’ve only had to whitelist a few sites that were blocked for strange reasons. (We only block porn, gambing, and spyware sites — this was mandated from above, not my idea or anyone else in my department).

Every morning I check to make sure my site is still online — and to my surprise, it’s blocked!

URL BLOCKED
Access to the requested URL has been denied.
URL: http://justinong.com/
Categorization: Pornography
If you require access to this URL and have a valid business case e-mail (me essentially)
See your system administrator for further information.
I am the system administrator! Who am I supposed to see?!
Copyright © 1993-2005 McAfee, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
http://www.mcafee.com

So of course, I had to investigate further. You can use this site to find out more details about how sites are categorized, and interestingly enough I’m listed as:

V4: Pornography, Text/Spoken Only
3.x Premier: Sex

I’m not sure if this was done as a joke, or I really made a comment on here that was offencive to someone. Either way it doesn’t bother me, I think it’s hilarious actually.

Let’s investigate this further: Pornography, Text/Spoken Only.. ? This entry, from a few days ago may be a bit crude, but in jest. Are comments from my viewers really enough to justify such a ranking? If it’s not that — then is quoting Homer Simpson enough to get flagged? If this process is automated, I hope simply having the word “Pornographer” displayed isn’t enough to get your site blacklisted.

Another site I work on — barotary is categorized properly, Non-Profit Organizations/Advocacy Groups. In order to be that specific, someone somewhere had to have visited it.

I am glad that my tiny sites are actually checked — our subscription money is obviously well spent and they’re doing their job. Whether justified or not, I will select Suggest Change and see if I get unblocked. I’ll keep you up all up to date.

huh? can anyone translate this? (._.?)

Justin Ong — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 01:59:37 +0000

I got this weird email the other day, I’m not sure if it’s legitimate or not but it isn’t formatted like spam. (believe me, I go through a lot of spam at work)

“Your Name: IR. DR. ISMAIL IBRAHIM

Message Subject: HELLO JUSTIN

Message: JUSTIN,
I AM ISMAIL, YOUR FRIEND FROM TEESSIDE…REMEMBER ME…ONE MALAYSIAN WHO THOUGHT YOU HOW TO MAKE CAPATI…CONTACT ME..PLS GO BACK TO SINGAPORE..LEE KUAN YEW MISSED YOU A LOT…HOW CAN YOU LEFT YOUR OLD FATHER STONE COLD!!!!BRAVO

REGARDS”

I did some checking, TEESSIDE is in the UK, at least according to the top hits on google. CAPATI looks to be a type of Indian bread. I don’t know what the IR. prefix means. Anyone?

Maybe I should just assume he’s confusing me with someone else.. but then again all the photos on the site would tip you off.. unless I have an evil twin. (>_<) If he thinks I'm the same Justin Ong that used to have this domain.. (another Justin Ong’s site circa 2001) there looks to be a big difference in both design and content.. a little obvious?