How Many Marbles? 1 to 1,000,000

I wonder how many marbles are in this jar?

a jar full of marbles

Here’s a hint: More than one, less than a million.

All you need to do to enter is submit a comment here with your guess. Sometime in the next hour I will stop accepting new comments (entries) and will randomly choose someone’s guess. If they are correct, they win the grand prize! If they are wrong, I use their guess as one of the limits for the next entry. So if the guess was 750,000, which let’s say was too high, the next time the range will be from 1 to 750,000. Eventually (hopefully before Sunday at 9am Eastern) someone will get the correct number of marbles.

List of Prizes (to be given out in specific hours):

  • A one year new domain name registration (.com .net .org .us. .info .biz) ($10 value)
  • CD: Judy Pancoast, The House on Christmas Street) ($16.99)
  • CD: Touched by an Angel: The Christmas Album ($7.49)
  • CD: Silent Heart, by Ortansia (autographed) ($13.49)
  • CD: Soundtrack of 2004 New York Revival of Pretty Faces ($11.99)
  • DVD: David Young, Village of Dreams ($14.99)
  • Grand Prize: Your choice of:
    • 2 hours of consulting with me about your organization’s web site, a one year domain registration, basic web and email hosting for one year through PlanetMike.com, valued at $500. OR
    • An Apple iPod Shuffle (valued at $79) OR
    • A $100 donation to the charity of your choice, preferably one that is being supported during Blogathon.

Prizes were donated by my other businesses: Christmas Music 24/7, and ShowBizRadio.net.

Ok, the contest is open. Get guessing! Entries are now at 900 to 1,000,000.

CHARGE Movie status

I haven’t quite finished my CHARGE movie yet. Just now I turned on the hard drive that all of my work is on. And poof! Nothing! The drive didn’t mount on my iMac. Heart racing. Wouldn’t it figure that after a week of updating my computers, web sites, doing backups, making lists of things to write about, that in the first hour, a hard drive would crash? So I unplugged the drive, checked the cables, ran Disk Utility, plugged everything back up. And the drive came up. Whew! So later today I’ll release my movie (more a music video) dedicated to CHARGE families everywhere.

If you watch my webcam you’ll be able to see me in the background working on the iMac. You might even get to see Penny (gray cat) or Curious (orange cat) helping me on the iMac. When you see me right in front of the webcam, looking off to the side, that’s me working on my Powerbook. I have two monitors on that computer, and I do most of my work on the larger screen.

Using Crontabs

On the right side of my site I have a list of my ten most recent posts. I generate that list with a shell script on my server. Usually I run it by hand whenever I post something. But since today I’ll be posting a lot, I wanted to automate the update. I couldn’t remember how to set a crontab to do a process at more than one time. Google pointed me to: http://www.crontabrocks.org/. I simply added commas to the minutes, so the “Last 10 Blog Entries” will now update every 10 minutes.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.21

I’ve finally upgraded my WordPress to the newest version. There’s also a newer version of Akismet included, so hopefully when I deactivate some of my anti-spam comment features for the Blogathon on Saturday, I won’t get as much spam as I thought I might. If you see any problems with the blog, please let me know, especially with regards to submitting comments and when reading past posts.

It’s interesting that Akismet upgrades get so little notice from the community. Akismet doesn’t announce updates, they just slipstream updates into WordPress updates.

Tomorrow (today!) I’ll double check all of my other plugins to see if any of them should be updated.

Blogathon Blogroll Added

I’ve added to the right sidebar a blogroll. A blogroll shows a lot of the other bloggers who are taking part in the Blogathon. That list will change as more people join in. Check out some of them, there is a wide range of different charities being supported.

And you still have time to sponsor me. A dollar per hour would at worst only be $24. But that money will help out the CHARGE Syndrome Foundation a great deal.

Harry Potter #7 (minor spoilers included)

I drive by the local Borders bookstore last night around 11:15pm. The line for the next Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Bulging Moneybags) was more than halfway down the block, with even more people walking to get in line. went by Target, but the store was closed, with the sign saying the store would open at 8am. So at 7:50 this morning I got in line at Target with around 20 of my closest friends. At 8:01 I had the newest Harry Potter book (subtitled “Who’s going to croak this time?” (Trevor will is my guess, ha ha, boy I’m funny)) in my grubby little hands for only $17.99. I have never had to pre-order any of the HP books, I was always able to walk into a store and buy one off of the shelf. For #6 (Harry Potter and the Close Shave), I cut it very close, and got the last copy that Borders had.

I finished my errands, got home, and started reading. I’m on Chapter 7 or so, and I’m amazed at who has already died.

Isn’t it curious at how many people’s names start with “H”? Harry, Hagrid, Hermione, Hedwig. Anyone else?

(Oops, I forgot to say that it appears the the copy of hp7.pdf that I downloaded off the Internet earlier this week was a real copy of the seventh Harry Potter book (codenamed by J.K. Rowling as “Harry Potter Will Help Me Buy My Own Island”). Of course, reading the tilted, fuzzy photos of each page was frustrating. And it didn’t really matter, I was still going to buy a copy of the book. I’d love to have a version I could put onto my PalmPilot. Then I could more easily carry the tome around.)

Getting Ready for Blogathon

I am getting ready for blogathon, it’s just over a week away. The big things to do between now and then:

  • Update all the software on my computer.
  • Update WordPress on my blog.
  • Tweak my anti-spam comment system on the blog so people can easily comment on the day of the Blogathon.
  • Finish my CHARGE Syndrome movie that I’ll be releasing during Blogathon. I received permission from a musician and his recording label to include a “real” song in the movie. That is very exciting. (If someone guesses the artist or song I want to use, I think they’ll get a prize of some sort. Good luck!)
  • Tweak my list of topics to post about. A lot of the things on my list so far are Big Deals, so I don’t know if they’ll be ready or not.

I think that’s it. What else should I be doing?