It's the Sixth Edition of the URI! Domain! Coinciding with my move to Tallahassee, every section has been revitalized with new material. Although you may not see major updates in the coming months, I will try to use this space regularly to post news and messages. The Domain will remain at this web address for the forseeable future, and my FGM email will be the e-mail address I check frequently.

I originally wanted to include more opportunities for user feedback, like BlogVoices-style comments, message boards, and guestbooks, but until I have a direct connection or access to a server with PHP, I can't use anything from my CGI/PHP bag of tricks. In the meantime, send me your thoughts by clicking the mail icon in the upper right corner of this news box. Mail early and often!

This is the inaugural news update for the Tenth Edition of the URI! Zone. From its humble beginnings as the URI! Domain at buri.campus.vt.edu on August 30, 1996, the Zone has grown to epic proportions, now serving as a multinational hub for over seventeen million Internet visitors from eleven countries and twelve major continents.

If you are a regular visitor, you will discover several subtle changes in this new Edition:

Longer news stories: Not surprisingly, there was a time when my updates read like rejects from the haiku factory (these gems, for example ) but starting last month, I actually devoted some effort to making them worthwhile. This increase in mental stimulation resulted in an interestyng spyke in the number of visitors over the course of the month, as you can see in the graph to the right. My aim is to make this site a worthwhile daily visit for as long as possible in the future. If you don't think I'm doing a good job, you can always tell me how to improve!

New font: Nine Editions using Arial is quite enough. Say hello to Trebuchet MS. Yes, it's trendy. This is acceptable because I am a bandwagoneer.

Note: Permission is not granted to analyze my handwriting to see if I'm a serial killer, although you may use this sample to fight on my behalf in any court case involving nude pictures I posed for when I needed the money . We all had to start somewhere on our respective roads to stardom.

If you are a Zone-virgin (or a long-lost figment from the murky depths of my past), welcome! This site is a little bit blog and a little bit daily-column, where I rant and/or rave or just talk about the humdrum events of my life (the site has been thoroughly inspected and declared to be angst-free). A good starting place to begin reading might be the news from July 2005 -- deep thoughts from earlier than that are harder to find, buried in a million "what I did today" posts. The 2001 to 2003 posts are a travelogue of my time as a music grad student at Florida State, containing more pedantic musical musings than most non-music people will care about. The 2003 - early 2005 posts are a documentary of my life as a software engineer in the working world (nominated for an Oscar but spurned by the Academy). In addition, I post daily links to peculiar news stories and funny pictures from other sites.

Some eminent Internet scholars have likened my columns to the writings of the Washington Post's Bob Levey, except that I don't give a rat's ass about sending any kids to camp. You can find out more about me here and you can see things I've created, written, composed, or drawn by following the links in the upper menu bar.

I asked four Internet celebrities to coin an advertising slogan for the new site design and they did not fail me. Feel free to choose the one that speaks the most to you as a human being when describing the Zone to your friends and relatives.

What do you think of the new look? Anything you want to see in the coming months? Don't be afraid to leave a comment!

Thanks for visiting. Tell all your friends!

Man upset with $4 million price tag on his cardboard box
College mascots not on the list of approved traffic stop questions
GAYWEGO is legal, and not a type of yeti

tagged as website | permalink | 9 comments

Welcome back! I hope my extended hiatus didn't leave you bored at work and lacking in daily reading materials. My two weeks off were mostly restful, with the first week spent at the beach in a house named Salty Nuts floating in the pool and rereading books I'd already read, and the second week spent at home relaxing and preparing for the new year. I am dubbing August 1 as something of a new beginning for myself because, like large corporations and the Chinese, I find that it's more sensible to bookend eras at a point other than right after Christmas (probably a learned behaviour from nineteen years of "school years").

Since today is Fresh Start Day, it's only fitting that I launch the second part of what will be a trilogy to rival Lord of the Rings for ass cramps and yawns. The first ten years of my site, 1996 - 2006, served to introduce the principal characters (Booty) and supporting cast (me and Doobie), while providing enough back story and trivia on everyone involved to keep my readers empathizing with the protagonists. The second part, 2006 - 2016, will document my struggles and conflicts up to the ripe age of 36, although I haven't yet picked a suitable title yet since The Empire Strikes Back was already taken. Finally, 2016 - 2026 will tie up all the mysteries and drama from the first two parts with salty dialogue and a moving musical score. I don't want to spoil anything, but at least one person who's going to die in Part II will come back to life in Part III. Production has already started on Part II, but I've not yet gotten the green light to work on the final part, since we apparently have to survive the blossoming World War III in the Middle East first.

The middle section of trilogies is usually the darkest one, so I've represented this visually by making the background of the site a darker shade of blue -- an artistic technique that will no doubt shock you! Looking around, this is about the only change you'll find, because I really liked the way everything else about the site worked. You can never have too much blue though and the old blue always seemed too faded and washed out for a hip, rock-your-papa site such as this one. Besides this change, I'll try to take more pictures, have more interesting news updates, and do more funny graphics (which fell horribly by the wayside last year, since precision work in Photoshop is very hard to do when your wrists are in bad shape like mine).

There's not a lot of missed news that you need to be caught up on from the past two weeks. Normally I'd do a week-long OBX Travelogue documenting which holes were dug and which mussels were eaten, but in the spirit of going forward with the future rather than past to the back, I'll sum it all up quickly. After a fun week spent with stalwart Zone regulars, Anna, Kim, and Gabe (and nine others who don't get top billing because they never visit the URI! Zone, never leave comments, and/or smell like salty poop), I returned home three tones tanner and nine pounds lighter to find my cats happily staying with my mom and my downstairs bathroom remodeled with wonderful sinks and toilets. The latter was done by my dad, the Restless Retiree, simply because it was there. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Plinky continues to rank up in World of Warcraft (hitting Rank 222 last week), and Veronica Mars: Season One was a surprisingly good show. I didn't watch any new movies during my sabbatical, but I did pick up several noteworthy CDs which I'll probably review in the coming days, as well as a salty new toy for my car, the XM Roady XT. Here are my two favourite new songs from the past two weeks -- obvious proof that my musical tastes are evolving ever so subtly throughout the years.

Of course, no update would be complete without new pictures and movies featuring your favourite feline foils. The first movie shows off Amber's mellifluous voice, with a cameo at the end. The second movie is scientific proof that cats love to eat earwax.

Until tomorrow, this is your host, BU, saying "Have a swell day!" and "Thanks for your continued patronage! Please make checks payable to Brian Uri!."

Oh yeah, Anna is pregnant too. Here comes little Brian Ahlbin!

Welcome to the Twelfth Edition of the URI! Zone, guaranteed to be a smashing literary success, because everything is better with an elf in it. Of course, this maxim doesn't apply to the The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, which could have sported a more-tightly plotted pace by cutting out fourteen elves, thirteen shots of Frodo looking constipated, and at least one scruffy, white actor that looked like all the other scruffy, white actors. Middle Earth should have had more racial variety in its human inhabitants, maybe employing some FOB¹ Asians for the battle scenes. But, I digress.

Today's post marks the 1,500th time I've ever written a news post for this site. Granted, some updates were much less involved than others (see exhibit A on the right), but in an age where the average life span of a web site is only 44 to 75 days², surviving for eleven full years is surely worthy of a pat on the back (or a pat on the ass if you are now, or will someday be, a player on an American football team or a shamefully defrocked member of the clergy).

Here are some of the new features you will find in the Twelfth Edition:

• New news archive navigation! Pop-up menus are retarded, so you can now look at news archives using the monthly calendars on the left (each letter is the first letter of a month! WOW!)
• No Google-Images Allowed! The Google Images search engine has been denied entry, which means my overall site traffic will decrease, but which also means that those MySpace pissants that like to steal my images and bandwidth for their purple and orange corduroy Profiles will no longer be able to find me.

• New visual design! The new layout is much cleaner and more simplified than it was before. The animated llama head of Molly the Llama has (tragically) disappeared in the name of progress, but her visage has been immortalized in the sign at the top of the page (which will also take you back to this front page if you click on it from anywhere else in the site). If the layout seems very peculiar, or looks a lot like the old site, please make sure you have cleared your browser cache and history, since you may have a few leftover relics from the previous version laying around.
• No more Olio section! The Olio section was interesting for people bored at work, but most of it was unoriginal content reposted from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader (and by now, loyal readers should already have a complete library of Bathroom Readers in their homes). A few original features, like Allen Bachelder's Theory Quotes, were moved to the Words section, but the rest were trashed like a hotel room occupied by an 80s hair band.

• More Boobies! As a personal favour to Carlos Adolfo Dominguez³, there will be at least 1 more booby per month than before. Here is your first pair.
• Cleaned up Bloglog! Friendly Blogs in the left sidebar are occasionally reshuffled and organized by who has the most recent update, which means that the slackers towards the bottom of the list should start updating more frequently. If I removed your blog because it was inactive, but you have started writing again, please let me know and I'll be glad to give you a link!
• No more Links section! Other than the list of blogs, I hadn't visited any of my links in years, even www.fatchicksinpartyhats.com⁴. Rather than maintain an outdated list of links, I chose to destroy them like an Internet ninja.

I don't have any major plans for the 2007-2008 timeline other than to keep on truckin' with daily doses of music, reviews, absurdity, and interestyng news story links, but if you have anything you'd like to hear me talk about, feel free to let me know! For today, I will leave you with the following interestyng statistics about the URI! Zone and my news updates.

Number of Files: 7668 (185 megabytes of junk)
Pictures in my Photos section: 2545
Number of News Updates: 1500
Number of Times I Mentioned Booty: 332
Anna: 263
Alias: 256
Sex: 204
Amber: 136
Poker: 117
Warcraft: 103
Kelley: 59
boobies: 29
Doobie: 24
your mom: 11
the pretentious word, panoply: 6
the pretentious word, ineluctable: 2

Happy Birthday Gabe Ahlbin!

Footnotes
¹: Fresh Off the Bilbo
²: The Washington Post, May 15, 2007
³: Composer of the artful song, Boobies,
³: Fat Chicks in Party Hats, circa 1996,

New Edition Day

Congratulations to ME, for successfully keeping the URI! Zone (née The URI! Domain) alive for the past fifteen years! I have several taglines I might use to advertise this longevity, including:

• The URI! Zone: Slightly longer than Gosford Park but way more interesting.
• The URI! Zone: Older than Google and catching up to The Simpsons.
• The URI! Zone: Once hosted on Geocities, but always too good for Angelfire.
• The URI! Zone: Elucidating the need for a 22nd Amendment on blogs since 2004.

For the first five years, this website was a funhouse of crap, similar in nature to eBay without the concept of auctions. It has now been ten full years since I moved to Florida, pretending to be a musician, and converted it into a blog. I resisted branding it as a blog for many years though, because I thought (and still think) that "blog" is a mildly retarded word, like "pwn" or "dumpling".

It feels quite nice to look at the right sidebar of this site and see ten full years of daily updates (barring the occasional summer month in the early years where I only had dial-up access). Ten years is the magic number for blogs to reach syndication, so I'm hoping that you'll be able to watch a show where William Shatner reads my posts on TBS at 7 and 7:30 every evening.

To celebrate the 15th birthday of this literary gem, I am giving away a $15 Gift Certificate to Amazon.com to one lucky reader who is capable of following instructions. Simply leave a comment on this post that answers these questions:

• When was your first visit to the URI! Zone (even if it's today)?
• Where are you visiting from (geographically speaking)?
• How has the URI! Zone cataclysmically changed your life for the better?

I will pick the best response to win the gift certificate next Monday, August 8. If every response is an insipid lipid bubbling in mediocrity, I'll let a random number generator do the work. By entering this contest, you grant me permission to include your positive stories when I apply to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to get urizone.net designated as a historic site. I really want one of those white metal signs to hang in my living room.

New Edition Day

When it comes to websites, age is inexorable, barring any accidental domain expirations or federal indictments in New Zealand. The URI! Zone quietly turns 16 today (Olympics-eligible!), since I'm at the beach and too lazy to do anything special. Notable improvements include:

• A new background, featuring llamas, around the outer edges of content.
• A new viewport above the website, showing the road you might travel to reach the URI! Zone, which looks unusually like a Laurentian maple forest.
• The ability to go to the next and previous post from any single "permalink" post, and to see what those posts are titled.
• An easier-to-read font.
• More cheese.

Happy birthday to my website -- may it bring you many free Amazon gift certificates from easy contests in the coming year!

New Edition Day

The URI! Zone turns 17 today with my 3010th blog post, accompanied by 6943 reader comments and over 140,000 unique visits in the last decade alone. Originally hosted out of my dorm room in 1996, the first site was the wasabi of the Internet: a dollop of spicy, zesty, static HTML that might destroy you like an academic ninja if you were to overdose on it.

Had you been involved in any incidental banging back then, you might now be going broke, putting your 17-year-old lovechild through Harvard (because he's obviously as smart as you), while trying to convince him to attend one of our many fine in-state schools, like Virginia Tech, JMU, William and Mary, VCU, ODU, GMU, NOVA, Longwood, Mary Washington, or Christopher Newport.

The nice thing about aging is that you attain levels of achievement simply by hanging around with minimal effort, not unlike most video game achievements today. Simply by continuing to pay hosting and domain name fees, my website keeps a firm grip on the achievement of being older than Google, Netflix, Slashdot, PayPal, DVD players, Diablo 1, the PNG image format, and Jaden Smith. Additionally, the URI! Zone has outlasted both Geocities and "Jeeves" of AskJeeves. Looking into the future, I predict that the URI! Zone might earn more Oscars than Jaden Smith (but will definitely earn more Oscars than Shia TheBeef).

Here are some of the refinements you will find in this new edition:

• More responsive UI for Photos: Remember how nice Picasa was before Google rebranded it as Google+ Photos? This was the primary reason I wrote my own interface for the Picasa data stream of my photo albums. I've updated the UI to be more responsive to keyboard navigation (P and N for previous and next). This will allow you to stalk me at least 75% faster.


• Sidebar on the Left, Content on the Right: The sidebar was on the right for the last six years, but the asymmetry was no longer appealing. It resembled a British highway or Metro escalators during tourist season, and no one likes either one of those things.


• Play Augmented Fourth without Java: It always felt unnecessary to require a Java applet to play a text adventure game, and Java applets haven't been cool since the late 90s when every page had a rippling lake reflecting the title of the page in an applet. I don't even have a Java plugin installed in my browser anymore, and you shouldn't either. Instead, you can play Augmented Fourth with Parchment, using nothing but your web browser and your brain.


• More sketches and captions: Because art is funniest when taken out of context.


• Updated Bloglog: The date of a blog's last post is now listed next to the link, in order to shame authors into posting more (because online bullying is a legitimate mechanism for social change). Have a blog that I should be reading? Send me the link!

Thank you for your continued visits to this literary paradise over the last 17 years!

New Edition Day

The URI! Zone turns 18 today (IT'S LEGAL!), and this is the 3266th blog post I've written since I switched from the "homepage" format to the "blog" format thirteen years ago. For the teenagers in the audience who are obnoxiously reading this on their smartphones in a movie theatre, a "homepage" was a self-published website where you posted your resume and your collection of animated "Under Construction" GIFs. The best websites relied on a broad swath of "HyperText Markup Language", but mostly the FRAME and TABLE tags.

Turning 18 can be an awkward and unprecedented evolution, even for an amazing website like this one. I, myself, became of voting age in the crisp Fall of 1997, and the photo on right shows what I looked like back then (with a Paige Poythress cameo in the upper left).

Although to laymen it might seem as if I'm about to take my pants off, I'm actually kicking off a complex dance routine known as "The Burro" during marching band practice. My hands are not on the burro's reins because it was cold outside and they're in my pockets. This dance party was, obviously, for MEMBERS ONLY.

My readership has remained pretty steady over the years -- there have been over 150,000 unique visits and 7359 reader comments since I left grad school in 2003. Those ridiculous numbers exist in spite of the fact that the vast majority of my content consists of throwaway posts like This Game of Scrabble I Played Last Night and List Day: Letters that Start with the Letter A. Seriously, look at the number of months in the OLD POSTS menu on the left -- not all of that could have been Pulitzer-worthy prose.

The only lesson I can learn from this situation is that quantity trumps quality on the Internet. If you force yourself to write creatively every day, you'll keep people coming back, and might even craft a couple gems amidst the dross (see also, LOST). In other words, posting (like pooping) must be regular to ensure a blog's long-term health. And (unlike pooping), what you get out of it doesn't necessarily match up with what you put into it.

I don't anticipate making many website changes over the coming year, as the current design is the result of millions of dollars worth of painstaking UX research across every known shade of blue. I'll just continue meeting minimal expectations by posting daily on the inexorable journey towards the 20 year milestone. Not many websites can boast such longevity. If Yahoo! implodes in the coming year, the URI! Zone will have officially outlasted one Internet giant, and will set its sights on the next one in line (AOL.com, of course).

Though I could plan a big blog bash in August 2016 (with strippers and ocean sounds), I'll probably just celebrate 20 years by posting a bunch of time comparison trivia in the format of "The time between Y and Z is now greater than the time between X and Y. OMG!", or maybe give out some free Amazon gift certificates to anyone that's still alive. I hesitate to give out more gift certificates though, because the URI! Zone has awarded exactly $222 through contests so far (proof), and that's a pretty sweet number to stop on forever!

If there is anything you would like me to devote some blog time to this year, you can always leave a comment or send me an email. Thank you for your continued readership and friendship!

New Edition Day

The URI! Zone turns 20 years old this month, an epic yet ultimately pointless achievement not unlike driving a Prius for 8 hours without a pee break or watching the entire series of Everybody Loves Raymond. From its roots as a static HTML homepage through the evolution into a daily blog, this website has existed in some form for almost as long as Yahoo! (although obviously, the URI! Zone has retained its modern relevance and artistic appeal, while Yahoo! today is only known for its awful video player that refuses to work with ad blockers).

To mark TWO DECADES of existence, I have put together a one-minute movie history of the website, set to the tune of The Llama Fanfare which originally played in the background as a MIDI file in the very First Edition. Today, everyone hates websites that automatically play music and video, but back in the late 90s... well, everyone STILL hated it. I was a trendsetter in hate!

The URI! Zone: 20 Years of History in Under a Minute

By the numbers, here's what the URI! Zone looks like today:

• 7166 images, MP3s, and other files, totaling 295 megabytes
• over 162,430 unique visitors since 2003
• 3775 daily blog posts since 2001
• 8032 comments from 145 unique visitors since 2003
• over $2800 spent on web hosting since 2003
• exactly $222 in prizes given away in caption and name-that-tune contests
• $0 in income from ad revenue, because ads are retarded

Looking ahead into the next decade, this website will be around for quite some time to document my zany life for syndication (and not just because I purchased 3 years of reserved Amazon Web Services instances to run it). Having reached 20 years, I'm now allowed to coast a bit on the strength of popularity alone (see also, any recent comic from The Family Circus and Garfield). I'll be posting three times a week, usually on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which is still three times more than most bloggers post anymore. If there are any topics you'd like me to cover, let me know. Likewise, if you yourself have a regularly updated blog worth reading, send me a link!

Thank you for your continued friendship and readership! TEN MORE YEARS!

New Edition Day

The URI! Zone is 22 years old this month. If it were human, it would now face the depressing dearth of notable birthday values between 21 and 30, and probably decide go back to grad school for a master's degree. By the numbers, the URI! Zone has had 4091 blog posts, 8537 comments, and over 171,944 unique visits in recorded modern history.

Like Old Faithful, this site continues to have a persistent eruption of mediocre to decent content on a semi-regular basis. The inexorable journey to future fame will continue in year 23, with regular posts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Fan favourites like 12 of 12 will remain, and I'll make sure to post enough raw data about Maia's digestion to support any future science projects she does in elementary school.

Some of the more innovative features you can expect this year:

• Introducing the URI! Zone mobile app, which uses microtransactions so you can buy a hat for your comments avatar (proceeds go towards Maia's trade school fund because air conditioning repair will be in even higher high demand twenty years from now).


• Using convolutional neural networks and deep learning to figure out which types of posts are most likely to elicit discussion in the comments section, then never writing any of those posts again.


• Converting the website header graphic into a Virtual Reality landscape so you can actually drive down the road into the URI! Zone.


• Creating a companion web show documenting the life of our family in three minute video episodes (or is this too 2008?)


• More exclamation points!

Thank you for your continued visits over the ages!!

New Edition Day

The URI! Zone turns 26 years old this month, which means that I'll have to kick it off my health insurance and out of my basement soon. By the numbers, here's what the URI! Zone looks like today:

• over 190,500 unique visitors since 2003
• 4717 blog posts since 2001
• 9154 comments from 153 unique visitors since 2003
• 9340 images, MP3s, and other files, totaling 487 megabytes
• over $4500 spent on web hosting since 2003
• exactly $222 in prizes given away in caption and name-that-tune contests (this will become $232 if Asmodues ever collects his 2022 Census prize)
• $0 in income from ad revenue, because ads are awful

After nearly nine years without new features, there's a tiny new one to demarcate this 27th Edition: I added a "day in history" button under each post which will allow you to see everything I ever wrote on a particular month and day throughout the site's history. This will give you more content to rediscover while bored at work when I default to an "Easy Photos Day".

This site will continue to exist for years to come, even if the thrice-a-week updates aren't utterly scintillating. I do still enjoy blogging and have grandiose plans to someday return to long-form articles about real topics. However, those plans are on hold while I raise two kids under the age of 6. Stand back and stand by until Ian has reached kindergarten, and hopefully it'll be worth the wait!

Thank you for your continued friendship and readership!