I am not at my computer right now, but I trust the trained monkey I left at my desk to deliver this message to you:

Happy New Year, everyone.

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When I started my blog, I made a promise not to post any long winded rants, and I don't intend to break that promise today. I just want to share a few stories. Okay I might break it a little.

Just over a year ago I started an Excel sheet called "why i hate tim hortons.xls" where I documented every single screw up that Tim Hortons made while ordering food from any of their locations. Unfortunately, with most things I start, I never really dedicated myself to it and I stopped keeping track of their mistakes. My original plan was to send a copy of it to every nearby Tim Hortons location and one to the corporate offices, letting them know the frequency of screw-ups that they make, and point out that these are just my documented incidents. The number of unreported mistakes would probably be tenfold. I was reminded of this again today when I ordered a toasted chicken club sandwich, and the bun wasn't so much toasted as it was black as coal. It smelled like it was in a fire. It bugs me that somebody there saw it and was like "Yes, this is acceptable as food". I made the effort to return it to their manager informing them that I did not care to eat their bun. I didn't expect anything in return, I just wanted them to have their bun back.

As much as I love living in the 21st century, one of the things that bugs me the most (besides kids these days) is how completely indifferent people are towards mediocrity. It's almost become accepted. I long to live in a time when an establishment would go out of business if they consistently produced shabby products or services. I suppose it still happens with locally owned businesses, but it saddens me that places can create a name for themselves as being below average, yet still thrive. People just accept it.

I pride myself in boycotting places that are consistently poor in service or quality of products. I know it probably doesn't make a huge difference to most places, but at least I know my money isn't going into their managers' pockets. I stopped going to a particular Subway because the staff consistently took 20-30 minutes to make a sandwich when I was the only person in the restaurant. I stopped going to a particular Starbucks because their wonderful barista told me I should speak clearer next time they screw up my order.

Today also marks the day that I begin my campaign of sending one email a day to Microsoft, requesting that they include support for disc number tags in their Zune software. A feature so basic that it should have been included in version 1.0 of their software, but still isn't included in version 3.0. Instead they add a clock and game support. I guess I could play Sudoku while my albums play out of order.

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So I redesigned the home page a little bit to have a news feed much like Facebook. Right now it lists whenever I update my blog as well as whenever I share something using my Google Reader account. I took the Last.fm recently played songs list off for now, but I will probably tweak the design a little bit more and find somewhere for it.

One day the dream is to list other junk in there, maybe my Twitter activity (which is pretty non-existent right now).

The news feed on the home page now lists my Twitter activity, as well as my Last.fm loved tracks. You can also view the history all the way back to the beginning of my life of using online services such as Twitter and Last.fm. Amazing!

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Those who know me usually think I am "hip" and "with it" when it comes to web related stuff, which is why it surprises most people when I tell them that I don't use RSS feeds. It wasn't even until maybe six months ago that I started even bookmarking websites. I didn't think it was that odd, I just kept a mental note of those websites that I visited often and would check on them when the thought crossed my mind. You know those people who curse new things and refuse to accept changes in technology? I guess I am those people. But not anymore.

Today I decided to try out Google Reader, which lets you store and organize multiple feeds. It even has stats for nerds, like most read feeds or most viewed tags. I went through my list of (recently created) bookmarks and a few other sites I still type in manually, and I found out there are roughly 20 sites that I visit regularily. Some more often than others. They range from general news, music news, webcomics, friend blogs and other miscellaneous blogs.

One neat feature is a "shared" page. You can mark your favorite feed articles as "shared" which can then be viewed by anybody by visiting a public URL. Here are mine. I may replace the recently dugg articles on my homepage with the articles from Google Reader. That way I won't be limited to sharing strictly Digg articles.

Cool. COOL.

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In an attempt to justify all of the stupid domain names that I buy, I've forwarded two of my more recent purchases to my blog. So if you are really sick of typing iamthejeff.com, or you don't have it in your favorites by now, you can also visit my site by using jeffgordon.name, or if that isn't 1337 enough for you, j3ffg0rd0n.com. I only recently switched over the DNS entries, so if you are getting a parked page, just give it a few more hours.

In related news, I sometimes google my domain names after buying them to see if they appear anywhere on the web prior to me owning them. While doing so for jeffgordon.name, I came across an auction where somebody is trying to sell it with a buy-it-now price of $5000. I emailed GoDaddy about it, so now I am forced to play the waiting game. Update: GoDaddy has realized the mistake and closed the auction!

Also, I don't think anybody noticed, but since I switched to a new webhost, I had to transfer over Totallies as well. As a result, it was offline for a couple days. Everything is back online as of this morning, however. Thank goodness.

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My previous hosting company (1&1) was giving me grief, so I was forced to switch to a new one. My sites would go offline almost daily, for hours at a time, for no good reason. So, by recommendation, I switched to Media Temple, and so far everything is great. How does this affect you? Well, my site will (hopefully) have less downtime and it should be a heck of a lot faster.

My friend Ryan has a couple sites on 1&1 as well, and he has been having the exact same problems as me. I wrote 1&1 to inquire about the recent downtime, and they basically told me "Hey, it works on our end, check your ISP".

THANKS GUYS. -1 CUSTOMER. FOR YOU.

After looking around on google for any possibly reason why my ISP would be preventing me from viewing my own website, I came across a whole bunch of not-so-good customer reviews of 1&1's services.

I am not alone.

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That's right. I know I'm a little late on the blog bandwagon, but I am proud to say that I can now publish my inner most thoughts and feelings on the internet.

This is also kind of an experiment of my own to see just how long I can keep it going. I am going to try to keep things lighthearted and whimsical, and try not to regurgitate stuff I find on digg or spiral into ridiculous rants. That way, I won't find myself looking back a year from now and sneakily editing old posts so that I don't look like a huge jerk.

So try to check back every so often. I will be monitoring my traffic, and if it's really low I'll get sad.

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