21 July 2009 @ 7:06PM >> Earlier today, my hosting provider, OpenHosting, notified me that Brain-Terminal.com had come under a denial-of-service attack and was knocked offline for several hours.

The source of the attack isn’t yet clear, but it has subsided and service has been restored for the time being.

I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if the attack resumed later. So, please forgive any site instability in the coming hours and days.

One bright spot out of all of this is that I discovered my hosting provider has stunningly good service. I’ve been with OpenHosting for a number of years, and the service has been remarkably stable. And today, OpenHosting’s support personnel responded very quickly, providing detailed technical assistance along the way.

I’ve used many hosting providers over the years, and I’ve been conditioned to expect a certain level of service (that level of service being “not very good”). My experiences with OpenHosting have been far better than with any other vendor.

Bad service is a pet peeve of mine, and I’m often quick to criticize businesses that treat customers poorly or don’t live up to their promises. It’s nice to know that, every once in a while, I run across a company whose service is worthy of praise.

9 June 2009 @ 12:21PM >> I’m often coming across interesting links online that I don’t get a chance to include in Brain Terminal posts. Recently, I’ve begun using a Twitter account to broadcast these links, so you can benefit from my obsessive online reading.

But you don’t have to use Twitter to see these links. Brain Terminal pages now include a left-hand sidebar that lists the links I’ve posted to Twitter.

I’ve also updated the RSS feeds on the site to incorporate the Twitter links. There are now four RSS feeds available:

• The full Brain Terminal feed includes posts to the site and all links posted to Twitter
• The Brain Terminal posts-only feed, which contains only Brain Terminal posts, no Twitter links
• The full Twitter feed, which contains my Twitter posts, but no posts to Brain Terminal
• The Twitter links-only feed, which contains only the links I post to Twitter, no posts to Brain Terminal

If you want the full Brain Terminal experience and you use RSS to keep up with this site, I recommend subscribing to the full Brain Terminal feed.

17 April 2009 @ 8:14AM >> After much prompting, I’ve finally created a Twitter feed for Brain-Terminal.com. If you’re on Twitter, you can keep up with postings on this site by following BrainTerminal.

(Oddly, it seems that the user name “EvanCoyneMaloney” is already taken, even though the name appears to be one character longer than Twitter allows.)

13 September 2008 @ 12:16PM >> Will be offline for a couple of weeks. See you at the end of September.

3 April 2008 @ 8:05AM >> Spam blogs, sometimes called “splogs,” are phony blogs set up to earn money by displaying ads. Splogs steal content from other sites so that they appear to the untrained eye as genuine blogs. When people conduct web searches, that stolen content drives traffic to the site, raising the revenue from advertising.

It’s a sleazy practice, and at times, I’ve seen posts from this site appear on splogs. Recently, I found a splog that copies text from this site, but it also does something new: it changes certain words in the post to modify the content slightly.

This page copied part of a post called Am I a Fair-Weather Friend of Free Speech?

I realize that by linking to the splog, I am helping them achieve their goal of increased traffic. Still, it’s an interesting development in the evolution of spam, and it seems worthy of note.

24 August 2006 @ 1:15PM >> Earlier this week, I shut down the discussion forum on Brain Terminal and replaced it with a new sister site called Free Speech Free-for-all.

In addition to providing a discussion forum much like the one that existed here, the new Free Speech Free-for-all site allows users to create their own blogs, post links to news stories, and conduct opinion polls.

Part of the reason behind spinning off a separate site is that I’m hoping Free Speech Free-for-all will develop into a community that does not lean heavily in one ideological direction or another.

Most online forums coalesce around a particular point of view. As a result, participants can very easily wall themselves off from information that challenges their assumptions. Groupthink develops over time, and the communities become echo chambers.

I think the value of online media is that everyone has ready access to information they might not otherwise see. The downside is that on the Internet, everyone can live within their own ideological cocoon.

In the past, non-partisan communities that discuss news and politics have had a very difficult time sustaining themselves online, because they usually end up devolving into endless flamewars. The people who contributed value to the community end up leaving, thinking that the conversation has become pointless.

Through smarter software, I hope to prevent that from happening.

It’s an experiment, and I’ll be tweaking the behavior of the site over time to try to strike the proper balance.

If you think this kind of experiment has merit, I hope you’ll join the free-for-all.

22 August 2006 >> Five years ago today, I launched this website with an essay on the Microsoft anti-trust case. Back then, I was a software developer, and I planned on using this site as a platform for discussing technology. (The word “terminal” in the name of the site originally referred the old “green screen” computer terminals, and is not an effort on my part to imply that I’m terminally brain dead, as a number of critics have kindly suggested.)

Less than three weeks after my first post, an event happened that changed the course of many lives. The attacks of September 11th ripped families apart and blasted a still-unfilled hole in lower Manhattan. The attacks also made it impossible to ignore radical Islam, a phenomenon that has been growing and threatening Western society since the 1970s.

Watching the towers burn from the rooftop of my office building re-connected me with my long-held passion for politics and world affairs, and the experience gave me a new purpose for this site.

About a year and a half later, I posted my first of a dozen short videos, and thanks to my run-in with Michael Moore, I stumbled into a career as a documentary filmmaker.

And now, this fall, my first feature-length documentary Indoctrinate U will be released.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Thanks to everyone who’s shared it with me, and to all of you who’ve written in with words of encouragement over the years.

14 July 2006 >> I mentioned a couple of days ago that my upcoming film Indoctrinate U is finally in shape for us to show to distributors. Luckily, that also means that for the first time since starting this project nearly three years ago, I can take an entire week off!

Although I understand that the urge is hard to overcome, I don’t plan on posting anything for the next week. But since I can’t bear the thought of you going without your regular dose of some guy’s opinion, here are just a few of my favorite sites:

• Instapundit, a frequently-updated site run by a robot that claims to be a law professor at the University of Tennessee.
• RealClearPolitics, the political junkie’s well-stocked dealer, providing a twice-daily comprehensive roundup of mainstream media opinion columnists.
• PressThink by NYU professor Jay Rosen, one of the most thorough and thoughtful commentators on the state of the news media, a straight-shooter.
• Mickey Kaus’s column at Slate, KausFiles, is the kind of site you look forward to checking, and then you get mad when it hasn’t been updated.
• James Taranto is another must-read, although he’s on vacation himself, until the 17th.

Let’s see...what else? Oh yeah:

• Anything by Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, or Jonah Goldberg.
• And, finally, some comic relief from Greg Gutfeld, Cox & Forkum, and Chris Muir’s Day by Day.

There. That should keep you nice & busy while I’m gone.

I know what you’re thinking; this time apart will be tough, but don’t worry. We’ll get through it. I’ll be back from the offline world soon.

You kids behave, now. I better not come home to find this place in shambles.

17 November 2005 >> The iTunes Music Store now features the video podcast for Brain Terminal. That means you can now access all the videos on this site without having to enter the podcast URL. If you have iTunes installed, this link will take you directly to the video podcast page. From there, you can download individual Brain Terminal videos for playback within iTunes or on your iPod. You can also find the podcast from within the iTunes Music Store by searching for “Evan Coyne Maloney.”

Once you find the video podcast page, you can click Subscribe to receive all future updates, or you can download individual videos by clicking Get Episode.

Assuming you have your iPod set to automatically copy all podcasts, the next time you sync your iPod, the videos that you’ve downloaded from the podcast will be copied to your iPod. Videos will appear in your iPod’s Video > Video Podcasts menu.

11 November 2005 @ 2:53PM >> Now you can watch all the Brain Terminal videos on your iPod! More >>

18 August 2005 @ 5:27PM >> Several people have asked for scanned copies of last weekend’s Daily Telegraph profile, the text of which I posted earlier this week. Now that I have a copy of the paper myself, I was able to do so:

“Meet the Right-wing Michael Moore” by Damian Thompson (The Daily Telegraph, London, 13 August 2005) [4.2MB, PDF file]

In the interest of symmetry, I also scanned the New York Sun profile that ran earlier this year:

“A Conservative Answer to Michael Moore” by Jacob Gershman (The New York Sun, 21 January 2005) [7.1MB, PDF file]

Note: You may need to zoom in when viewing the PDF files; the newspaper text appears very small unless zoomed.

13 August 2005 @ 6:18PM >> Today’s (Saturday) edition of the London Telegraph has a profile of me by Damian Thompson. Unfortunately, it is not available on their website, so I can’t link to it. I haven’t seen it yet, either, but I’ve been getting some encouraging e-mails. To the newfound visitors from the UK, welcome!

Update: Thanks to some helpful British readers, I now have the text of the Telegraph profile and have posted it online.

12 July 2005 @ 5:01PM >> It has just come to my attention that all e-mail sent to me at my Brain Terminal address since the middle of last week has disappeared into a void. Some e-mails addressed to me are bouncing, others just disappear without any notice to the sender. Unfortunately, I was not aware of this problem because my outgoing mail was working just fine.

The problem appears to be with my hosting provider, with whom I’m on the phone now. It may be a day or more before the problem clears up entirely. No word yet on whether the e-mails have been lost permanently.

Update: My e-mail is back up and running now, but a large portion of the e-mails sent to me over the past week have bounced. If you tried to e-mail me and have not heard back, please re-send your e-mail.

13 April 2005 @ 11:58AM >> Asked and answered.

5 April 2005 @ 8:24AM >> If you are using an RSS reader to browse Brain Terminal, please be aware that the URLs for the feeds have changed. For the new URLs, scroll down to the “Syndication Feeds” section in the right-hand sidebar on any content page.

Previously, the content pages of Brain Terminal were built by two separate software packages. I’ve been consolidating the two to better integrate the Journal with the rest of the site. Now that the integration is complete, the Journal is no more. As a result, I’ve been able to merge Brain Terminal’s two RSS feeds into one, which should make things easier for everyone who’s had to subscribe to both feeds in order to keep current with the site.

22 March 2005 >> Over the last week, Brain Terminal was inaccessible to large portions of the Internet, and much of the e-mail sent to me has been bouncing back to the sender. (If you sent me an e-mail that bounced, please re-send it.) The problem was related to GoDaddy.com’s domain name servers working intermittently and an apparent bug in their “Offsite DNS Manager.” After countless hours on the phone with their technical support representatives, it became clear to me that they were not going to be able to resolve the problem; I was never able to speak with anyone who had enough understanding of DNS to recognize the problem that I was describing. Their “solution” was to ask me to move my domain name registrations from Network Solutions to them. I explained that I would not be giving them more business when they were unable to provide proper service for what I had already purchased.

Recently, I moved Brain Terminal to a “virtual dedicated server” from GoDaddy. I am quite happy with that server—it is noticeably faster than the previous server—but their technical support staff was not able to resolve the problem with DNS. I have since moved away from using GoDaddy for DNS, and the problems began clearing up almost immediately. It may still take another 24 hours or so for the updates to propagate around the Internet, but it seems like the worst of the outages are behind me. I apologize for the problems and the recent lack of updates to the site. The time I would have spent posting was instead spent on the phone with technical support.

Although I’ve ditched GoDaddy’s DNS services, I will continue to use their virtual dedicated server; it is fast and allows me quite a bit of technical control over the environment. It would also require a huge effort to move my site yet again, and I have neither the time nor the patience. So, GoDaddy will continue to host this site, but I do not expect to be giving them any additional business.

The moral of the story? GoDaddy is a good service as long as everything works, but don’t expect much in the way of knowledgeable technical support. If you have any problems beyond the ordinary, you may be on your own.

17 March 2005 >> If you can see this message, it means you are viewing Brain Terminal on the new, faster server. (Hopefully the speed increase, particularly in the discussion forum and here in the Journal, will be apparent. It is to me, anyway!) The new location for the domain name has not yet finished propagating around the Internet, so there may continue to be intermittent problems accessing the site.

Also, it seems that some people are having trouble sending me e-mail. If you’ve tried e-mailing me but received a bounce message, you can contact me by posting to this discussion thread.

16 March 2005 @ 6:17PM >> I will be moving Brain Terminal to a faster server at a new hosting provider.

I’ll need to temporarily shut down the discussion forum in order to move the database to the new server. The shutdown will begin at midnight tonight ET, and will remain in effect until the domain name service (DNS) records propagate that point the “brain-terminal.com” name to the proper server.

Because DNS records propagate at different rates throughout the Internet, some of you will be reaching the old server while others reach the new server. There is no guarantee exactly when you’ll be hitting the new server, but the change should be complete within 24-48 hours. If, after midnight tonight, you see the discussion forum is open, you’ll know you’re hitting the new server. (You may also notice a speed increase with the dynamic portions of the site, such as the Journal and the discussion forum.)

Sorry for the inconvenience.

5 March 2005 >> After a long time of being dissatisfied with Radio UserLand, the software that—until today—powered Evan’s Journal (but not the rest of this site), I finally moved to WordPress 1.5, a terrific, easy-to-use yet extremely tweakable and, best of all, free open-source software package.

Eventually, I plan on moving the entire content portion of Brain Terminal over to WordPress, although it will take some time. (Currently, most of Brain Terminal is built using software I wrote before blogging packages became popular.) Until then, one downside is that the search mechanism for the main portion of this site is completely separate from that used for Evan’s Journal.

31 January 2005 @ 9:23PM >> Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution is now available on the Brain Terminal DVD.

Also included on the new DVD are three bonus tracks not available on the website.

24 January 2005 >> The New York Sun profiles Evan Coyne Maloney. More >>

6 January 2005 >> Google’s ad serving technology has a long way to go if it is going to be widely used on opinion sites that discuss current events and politics.

After not-quite-three days, it became clear that the mistargeted ads I wrote about earlier are considered a feature of AdSense and not a bug. After writing Google about the problem, I got this response:

We understand your concern with the types of ads that are being displayed on your site. Please note that at this time, AdSense only targets ads
based on overall site content, not keywords or categories. Our AdSense
crawlers automatically determine which ads to display after gathering
information about the content of your pages.

If you’d like to display ads related to specific topics on your website,
we recommend including more text-based content about these topics on your
site to assist our crawlers in gathering information about your pages and
determining relevant ads to display. Complete sentences and paragraphs are
helpful to our crawlers in determining the content of a page.
Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the results of any changes you make to
your pages.

Well, I can’t imagine this site getting much more text-heavy than it already is, so it’s obvious that the system is working as Google intends. That’s fine, but I don’t think that system is going to work for a vast majority of sites like mine.

I could live with the occasional mistargeted ad, but it seemed that a vast majority of the political ads were inappropriate for large segments of this site’s audience. I could even live with the many ads that highlighted positions different from mine, if some of them weren’t so downright insulting. One ad referred to Bush voters as “dumb,” while another sold t-shirts that labeled Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld “asses of evil.” Now, I may not be a wise Big Media professional, but even I know that insulting your audience is not a good way to encourage it to stick around.

I had planned on running the Google ad test indefinitely to see what kind of revenue it would generate. Frankly, I was encouraged by Google’s compensation on these relatively low-volume days (volume spikes when new articles are posted or when sites like Instapundit link), but I suspect I can do just as well—if not better—by a system that accounts for the preferences of this site’s audience. After all, isn’t that what advertisers are paying for, a distinct and well-defined audience?

I hope Google eventually allows sites to describe themselves better so that the ads can be more accurately targeted. It wouldn’t take much, just allow site owners to tick off a bunch of checkboxes that help categorize things, and allow advertisers to do the same. If online dating services can automate that sort of matching, why can’t Google?

Just about everything else about Google’s system was a pleasure to use. It’s simple, it’s easy to integrate, the reporting tools are great, and the compensation is decent. But this one big glaring omission is the deal-killer for me, and I suspect I’m not alone. If Google fixes this problem, I might be back.

28 December 2004 @ 3:25PM >> I have resisted putting ads on Brain Terminal, primarily because I find them to be quite ugly. On the other hand, there are a number of sites with similar traffic that are making decent money thanks to ads.

I don’t have any philosophical opposition to ads, and if I accepted ads on this site, it wouldn’t change my editorial stance in any way.

So, if I’m effectively giving up hundreds of dollars each month by foregoing ads, is that a wise decision? Is my aesthetic snobbishness reason enough to refuse what might be good money?

Do you, the visitors to my site, believe that ads would deface Brain Terminal in a way that would make the site less valuable or enjoyable for you? Are there other issues I need to consider?

And if you run a site that accepts ads, what’s your experience been? Do you use BlogAds, Google Ads, or both? Which one yields more revenue?

Please let me know your thoughts in the Discussion Forum. I operate Brain Terminal as much for you as I do for myself, so I will give serious consideration to your feelings on this.

20 December 2004 @ 4:26PM >> Sometime yesterday evening, Brain Terminal recorded its 6,000,000th hit for the year. 2004 will close with Brain Terminal getting about one million more hits than 2003!

A big thank you is in order for everyone who visits this site, watches the videos, sends me e-mails and adds comments to the discussion boards. Your participation is what makes all the effort worthwhile. And without you, of course, 2004 wouldn’t have been Brain Terminal’s first six million hit year.

All the best to you and yours for the holiday season, and have a great 2005!

25 July 2004 >> In the discussion forum, Dylan asked about the relative lack of recent Brain Terminal site updates. I’m re-posting my reply here, because it may be of general interest:

Dylan,

Yes, I am working on a new project: a feature-length documentary film. Although the film itself won’t be ready for around another year, I will be submitting an early version in short form to a couple of film festivals this fall. We (the members of the production company formed to make this film) recently made the decision to show some of our material at these festivals, and getting the footage ready in time is a monumental undertaking. Unfortunately, as I scramble to edit the footage, I’ve had very little time for anything else, which is why there have been relatively infrequent updates to this site lately.

The good news is that when the footage for our short film is ready, we will be posting it online. When we do, I will certainly let everyone here know where they can find it. We expect this to be sometime by October.

I can’t reveal much more about the project now, other than to say that—while it does involve politics—it does not focus on protesters, the 2004 election or Michael Moore. Still, the topic is one of vital importance to the future of our country, and I hope—perhaps naively—that this project will help change some institutions that have become strikingly corrupt in the last few decades.

In the meantime, I apologize if it appears that I am neglecting this site. When this project is complete, I believe it will make the recent drought seem worthwhile.

Take care,
Evan

24 December 2003 >> At the end of a year that recently saw Brain Terminal record its 5,000,000th hit, I realize that there are many things for which I should be grateful. One of them is the readership of this site. Judging from the e-mails I receive, you must be among the kindest and most informed people on the Internet. And that’s generally true whether you agree with me or not. More >>