Asylum-ET™

So this post does not strike you as odd, I am the admin here and yes I am a Reverend as well so with that said today I was looking through the bible to prepare a reading for a wedding this weekend. While I read it made me think of some of the past posts I have made like the recent one about the state of the world today. I cannot help but to constantly wonder what causes a human to think they are doing God’s work by killing. Killing in the name of God they say so proudly. Now correct me if I am wrong but is pride not one of the greatest of sins? Anyway what I found was this little passage in the bible that makes my beliefs ever more prominent.

1 CORINTHIANS 13:4-8a

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.
Love never ends.

What this says to me is that God is the one who has shown and given us all love, it tells me that He is not a spiteful, arrogant or resentful God. We are men

Recently my uncle Kenny D. Shaw asked me to take a look at his upcoming children’s book and after sitting with one of my daughters and reading it from cover to cover we both decided it was surely a great book and looked forward to its upcoming release. It is now about a month later and the book is finally here as with an optional cd to accompany the book.

The idea for the book originated from a poem written by a Donald L. Slater. Donald came to my uncle Kenny and asked him to record the poem. The outcome of the recording was so uplifting to the two men that they decided they could play their part in making the world a better place by writing a children’s book with beautiful pictures of gods creations on display and the words from the poem. All of this and a cd to go along with it for families to use as a tool to instill love and togetherness into their children before mainstream music and media gets their claws into them.

You can find out more about the book titled It’s a brand new day and purchase it by visiting It’s a brand new day.net

Global Warming, Genocide, Terrorism, War. That is all I hear about anymore. I must say I myself am seriously sick of it. Is this all really called for? Are we really that ignorant a species to not realize we are only killing ourselves and not so much ourselves but our children? Just think they will have to spend 50 years of their life or better cleaning up our mistakes if they are actually still alive and able.

You know the thing that bothers me most about it all is this. Global Warming. They try to blame society for use of products such as hairspray. Although I am sure that is not very good for the environment I am sure the missile and bomb tests have a far greater effect than the whole of us and our damaging products yet they still go forth with them.

Now we see flash floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and tidal waves in places that it was unheard of. Who is to blame for all of that? Well all of us for not doing anything about our terrorist countries that we reside in. Yea that’s right I said it so shoot me, it will only further prove my point.

Of all things I hear the other day that the Russians are reinstating their air force and tactical training and boast about the money they have to drive another arms race, which brought them in range of our airspace. Is this necessary? It has been about 15 years since any such thing. Have they been attacked, harmed or otherwise ill-treated? Not that I am aware so why now. Ill tell you why. Greed! Greed for money, Greed for power and the strong urge to DIE! Other than that there is no reason outside of pure ignorance and disregard for our own kind.

Start a movement, bring the masses together and put an end to it once and for all and no I do not mean by bombing the shit out of the planet. I mean get together. Grab a neighbor. Enjoy the presence of life because we are borderline on not having it and our governments don’t give a rat’s ass. They will be all hidden away in their copper lined caves while everyone else sits out here and vaporizes. Do you have children? Imagine sitting at the table for morning coffee as your child plays in the back yard. Next thing you see a flash of light and your kid turn to ashes split seconds before you follow. Yea that’s what I am looking forward to aren’t you?

So to close I have one more thing to say. Smarten Up!

This post is in regards to online advertising methods and the websites/companies that provide services to website/blog owners for earning money to make posts and or other advertisements. I am growing more discouraged with these types of programs as time progresses.

It seems that the programs all have there TOS and it is very easy to violate it without even thinking much of it at all. After I have experimented with a number of these different programs I have decided that there should be some guidelines that website/blog owners should follow as a rule of thumb and it may just spur these advertising affiliates into better practice.

Think of your website/blog as a newspaper. If you open your local newspaper you will see advertising for at minimum 30 companies many even being competitors all on the same page. These newspapers on an average are read by a percentage of the town or cities population. The small little 2-inch by one-inch ads can cost upwards of a few hundred dollars a week to run.

The online advertising affiliate programs and such expect that you will provide them with a minimum of a 200-word post or article describing their service or goods. They expect that you will do this for them for $20.00 or less and leave the ad active for 30+ days. Not only do they expect you to do this for pennies but they also expect that their ad will not be on the same page or near any other advertisement.

Well first off I don’t know about anyone else but in my city there are 58’000 people and assuming every one of them read the newspaper my website still reaches double that amount in a month at least. Now that it is obvious that we have a greater reach than a newspaper why is it that we get paid chump change?

After thinking about all of this I have decided that I do not go looking for affiliates. They look for me. If they want a post, great they will get a post and a good one at that. If they want to have a full page ad so be it they can have that to but we are talking about real estate here so the more ad space the greater the cost. Unlike a newspaper though we do require some level of decency and proper business practice for the companies we advertise for. If we decide a company is not up to our standards we are not about to tell our viewers that they are reputable. We will also not run advertisements for any program or affiliate that requires us to not have more than one ad per page or anything even close to that kind of tactic so if you are one of these you might as well not bother or you may want to change your TOS before contacting us. Before I go the last thing I must state is that we refuse to run advertisements that require us to remove internal links from our posts. What this means is that if my site has a page named kwidget and in an advertisement the word kwidget is used, the website will make it a link to the kwidget page on my own site. Think about it. If you go to Wal-Mart or the like and go to the shampoo isle what do you see? Sum 18 different brands of shampoo. What do you think would happen if Suave decided to contact Wal-Mart and tell them they could not have their product in the same isle or on the same shelf as any others. Well Wal-Mart would likely tell them well pay us more or we stop carrying your product since it is an unrealistic request. Anyway that is just a few of my thoughts on the matter and what we are doing about it. Hopefully others will follow and show the advertising world that we are not a joke and you wont get our prime real estate for nothing.

OMG so maybe one more. This has got to be the absolute worst video I have seen in 30 years. You know how they say even bad publicity is good publicity. Well this video surely disproves that and then some.

Hello everyone. The weekend is coming soon and we will be taking a bit of a vacation. Before we go though I was browsing some videos of dj’s using samplers and so on. After reading a local dj businesses hits on dj’s who don’t use turntables and have other methods of mixing it up I decided it was about time I respond to that. So here is a video of a dj who by the way is just playing around. Boon Doc is his name and you have got to checkout his skillz for yourself now.

So we have been seeing a lot of new user registrations for our site. A few of the users have come from communities such as Spicypage and MyBlogLog and I must say I am happy to welcome you all to our site. Hopefully you have found everything you came for. We always like to see new faces and hear new comments and ideas for our site.

Before the start of the blog our site was well online since the 90′s but it would not have made a difference if it had gone down for a week because no one would have noticed. Now on the other hand if it goes down or something goes wrong we get calls and numerous messages related to the issue our outage.

Due to this and user feedback over the past few weeks we have decided that we are pushing the deadline ahead on the new site to better accommodate our viewers and users. We are hearing that the site is difficult to navigate which is opposite from what we heard upon the launch of the current site but with different users now and far more activity on the site than intended it has given us a good view of where problems may arise.

The main goal is to rid our selves of the wordpress nightmare. Don’t get me wrong it is fairly decent blog software but that is truly where it stops and aside from that nothing compares to good custom work so sit tight and look forward to the release of our new site. You can view our progress by visiting our dev site but be for warned that it could be in just about any state when you arrive. You may see oodles of errors, blank pages, server errors and just about anything else you can imagine but with any luck you will at least get a look at the new layout and some of the new ideas we have for features. Comments on the new site should be posted here if you see anything you like or think we should add.

After seeing that Spicypage was in need of a wordpress plugin to add their widget to a wordpress sidebar I decided that was something I could do since we have written other plugins like this for similar communities in the past so why not Spicypage. We have released it free for all to use and change as they see fit as we have with most of our software.

This plugin allows you to display your voters images and vote count in the sidebar without editing your theme files. You just upload and activate it and then add your spicypage code to the widgets configuration and you now have Spicypage in your sidebar

Spicypage has given us a direct link in their Get Widget page which is far more than we had expected. I figured they would at most write a post or article about it or give us positive feedback in our comments on their site but they went above and beyond so thank you Spicypage for the link and there is one right back at you
Enjoy Spicypage Sidebar Widget

In the future I would like to possibly add the ability to edit your widget as you would at spicypage right in your wordpress admin area by changing color values and settings like that but who knows this may work fine as it is. You can however easily alter your widget and add some css to it.

For about 6 months now we have been providing a unique type of web service to the new wave of Internet users. Our children. This is a very fast paced world out here on the Internet. A lot of things can go un noticed and with our children now using the internet for things such as gathering information for school, playing games, talking with friends and so on we have now end up with a playground of a whole new kind only it has no playground attendants or monitors. This is a very scary thing if you think about it.

Even though the Internet is such a useful day-to-day tool for us and provides us with so many great things there are very dark sides to it as well. You can think of all the scams you have come across online and possibly even a few of you have experienced threats and harassment online. Our children are subject to all of these things as well but on a far greater scale because of their undeveloped minds and their constant sense of security from not knowing.

What we been doing for the past 6 months has been running a beta of this service to see how it works out and so far results have been spectacular. We have very specific rules for the website and any others that are created like it. Each website is monitored on various levels. We call this Safe Monitored Online Youth Interaction (SMOYI) Playground.

What this means is that each site has at least one Adult monitor. This can be the site Authors parent or one can be hired and appointed to monitor the SMOYI Playground.

Each must have at least one Author or Editor. The author(s) or Editor(s) have slightly different rolls. An Editor has the ability to create and edit pages, blog posts, links and comments as well as approving comments. This is for more mature children. Authors can only write blog posts that must be processed by the playground monitor(s). All comments to posts are treated the same way. Page creation, categories and sidebar links are not allowed for an author.

There are ban word filters in effect for all content that is posted including the shout box posts. The shout box is a place where viewers can leave a real time publicly viewable note that is also filtered. No links are allowed in the shout box to prevent abuse. Words in the ban list are replaced with *** in the output for the entire site but are stored in their raw form in the database for investigation by the monitor(s)

All content that is added to any of these sites should always be monitored by an Adult to insure that there are no links to questionable content. Any content that is found that is of an adult nature or otherwise inappropriate should be removed as soon as it is found. If someone has found content matching this description it should be reported immediately to the monitor. This is a 0 tolerance playground.

What we have found in our test run is that the users of the test site have followed the guidelines that have been laid out completely. The Editor started out as an Author and progressed to an Editor over the past 6 months. The rules were explained. The reasons for the rules are the key to this as with communication. This has been an experiment really and the results have been phenomenal. The way this started was that my child had absolutely no responsibilities and any she had previously had (mice, hermit crabs, etc) did not work out very well. She had taken an interest in what I do for work but at her age surely cannot jump in that far so I decided to give her Author rights on one of my own sites, Asylum-ET. Very quickly I decided that the mash in content that would create was not so hot and so I gave her a sub domain and her own site on it. She took to the idea of being able to write and express her self very quickly.

Since then it has become an automatic thing that she comes home from school, does her homework, goes online to her website, checks comments, makes post(s) and so on. While she sits in a #php help channel on irc. I do not recommend the irc portion to anyone for their child unless they are monitoring it as I do. I am an operator in the help channel and she is restricted to only this channel. Not by anything other than her own conviction. I monitor all network traffic on my home network. Connections that are made from her laptop report to me live. That is all together another story though but it is more evidence that this playground works.

With this she has acquired a great deal of knowledge and has been given many skills that can only grow, she has the ability to be creative with the world to see. She has shown powerful concern for some serious issues as with basic html, she is reading, writing and even calculating. But most of all she is being responsible. All things we want for our children. The thing that is most amazing to me is that of the friends that have visited, they all have enjoyed their stay followed the rules and return. They also expressed some of the darnedest things that make you know that everything is going to be all right. The more time they spend in our playground is less time they spend in other places online.

Places like Myspace are scary. The way it is setup there is no possible way to have a safe and clean environment. The way this works is on a much more personal basis. I know the majority of the registered members parents in one way or another. As simple as a phone call to authorize their use, a note or whatever have you. Just an acknowledgement that the child can come to the playground is what I have decided is sufficient at this time since the users are all local.

Eventually we want to provide games in these playgrounds so we can start to eliminate some of the advertising we have had to run to levy some of the costs of providing this service. So far this has been 100% out of pocket expense that has to this point had absolutely no income whatsoever. We do need to have a form of income to continue to provide such a service and if it grows the cost will be greater so for lack of a better idea for that yet we have advertising

What may be an option here is as I mentioned before a paid monitor, volunteers would be great, game token purchase (rather not) or the latest idea I have is maybe a small monthly subscription to the playgrounds. That way everything is internal and we can eliminate advertising altogether.

This post was a paid post and all links have been removed from it due to an issue with the advertiser and restrictions that have been applied to posts and since we do not have time to make changes to our site to accommodate the advertiser unless they are paying for prime real estate (Obviously not a blog post) since it will have great effect on our revenues and costs more time and money than it is worth we have made this decision. Just the same we in fact do like the Police so I am leaving my post text in-tact.

The Police are back with a brand new compilation of past to present hits they have released over the years. This band has always been one of my favorites. I remember back in the 80′s the first song I ever heard them play was Message In A Bottle. That was such a great song. It is hard to really say which is my all time favorite because they are all really great but I am looking forward to go grab this police cd as soon as I get paid.

I have yet to hear a song I did not like by the Police so I have no doubt I will be very happy with this one. It is very good to see a band that has been around as long as the Police have and still manage to stay in the game. That is a sign of a true band and powerful performances.

The new police cd cover reminds me a lot of the original The Police album cover and I anticipate the tracks included are just as good if not better than the ones I remember from a past I had almost forgotten. If you are into the Police you should stop over to their website or maybe see about hitting them up at a concert since they are on the road once again.