So, I got word tonight that a comment I made at DSR inspired someone. Which just goes to show that one person's bad idea is another person's nifty web project. Search Engine Therapy -- now you can do more than search to see if that blind date has a scary home page, or is wanted in several states. You can get counseling once the date is through.

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**Note** In Passing dot org takes no responsibility for the quality of therapy provided by Google, a company that appears to be having some identity issues of its own.

It seemed to appear out of nowhere; one morning it was there, a mysterious button where an empty purple space had been before, and no one knew quite what to make it. Some wondered, some asked, still other brave souls tried to find out for themselves... if it had been in physical space instead of web space, they would have been gingerly approaching to poke it with sticks. And they found something cool.

So as you might have noticed by the button below the navigation links, In Passing will be participating in a nifty new project. Metacookie is the work of Kevin "Internet Superstar who's too busy to come to MCB lecture" Fox. (Not that my own attendance record for that class is stellar, though...)

Anyway.

Metacookie is in beta phase now, but eventually you will be able to visit metacookie.com, and see which of your favorite weblogs/news sites have been updated since you last visited. Of course, now there's no excuse for mindlessly surfing the same 10 sites for hours at a time hoping for an update, but that kind of behavior kind of kills productivity anyway.
Pretty cool, huh?

Happy Birthday In Passing!
Roughly one year ago today, I put the first entry on this site. The page had a jpg with an abstract purple design for background, there wasn't a passed by section, or an about page, much less polls and links. And the page got about 10 hits a week until September.
6 months and 1.75 million hits later, In Passing has changed quite a bit, and it even has its own community (or cult, depending on how you look at it.)
It's been a good trip so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes (Lance isn't the only one who can dream of world domination through web sites.) Many thanks to everybody who has visited and contributed so far!

The links section has been updated, to reflect changing tastes and new goodies I've found, and the fact that I needed to take my mind off homework, studying, paper writing, and an odd feeling of impending doom about tomorrow.

But then again, I could be just tired and uncharacteristically pessimistic. About the whole, "tomorrow's going to be a bad day," thing. We shall see.

Back on topic, I was disappointed to see that Megnut is no more, because it was long overdue to be added to my list of favorites. Best of luck to Meg, in whatever she works on next.

In Passing may be experiencing MySQL difficulties today; dreamhost is moving things around. So if you get here and see a page full of errors, worry not, they'll all go away soon.

Nevermind that if there is a MySQL error, you won't be able to see this message. :-)

From now on, polls will not be on the front page (they take up too much room.) There's a new poll up about features for the site, click the "Polls" link to get to it.

The site may be down periodically this weekend, which is unfortunately out of my hands. Dreamhost is going to be fidding with stuff on the machine that hosts In Passing.

And on a happier note... the Passed By section turned 1000 today -- that is, it broke the 1000 comments mark. Wow.

*whew*
Looks like things are working again.
I'm keeping the ads off until bla-bla can find a solution for their javascript banners not crashing netscape browsers, or until the termination of our contract.

In more intersting news...
The final results of the contest are up at last! Thanks to everybody who participated in giving me my new name.

And in still more news...
Kevin of Fury is starting a web ring for bloggers who are in Berkeley, and IP will be included. Check out his page (which you should do anyway,) and drop him a line if you'd like to participate.

Pardon the lack of updates, but IP's having technical problems.
There was an attempt to recompile the kernel on the machine the site is hosted on, which resulted in one bad drive being replaced with one that was worse. Finally the site's back up, but it's running on a machine with an old (compiled in 1999) kernel. For some reason, this means I can't post anything with the quote symbol, oddly enough.
At any rate, I'm going to bed. As much as I love this site, it's 2am on a Saturday and I'm tired of pulling my hair out trying to identify the problem.
I promise updates (and good ones, too) hopefully sometime tomorrow.
Goodnight. :-)

Every once in a while today the page has loaded strangely, with two banner ads up top and the links all messed up. I've examined it, and I suspect that Bla-bla is either having problems with their ad server, or they're trying something sneaky like implementing pop-ups without having to have the affiliates add the pop-up code.
Either way, I'm contacting them about it, and if the page appears strangely to you, hold shift and click refresh and it should hopefully come up better.