I’m totally serious now, folks.

Who the heck stole my images folder? Who??

Steve? Joe? Justin? Scott? Someone tell me you’re just hiding it from me! If this is a joke, I will hug you and give you candy! (Except Justin: I’ll give you Insulin!)

My entire images folder! Gone. Vanished. No more images. (Except for the site logos.)

The last time I backed that crap up I was still in my first quarter-century! (Yeah, in other news I turned 26 and I’m slowly going the way of the Buffalo.)

I have prepared the following open letter addresed to whoever hacked me:
[See Figure 1 below.]

[See Figure 2 below.]

Since I’m back to rescuing this weblog from the clutches of Tw3ntY4-H0UR-POK3R and CH34P V14G4R4, I figured it’s time to explain the name of the site, something I’ve never really done.

“mathcaddy.com?” I have heard people say. “What’s a mathcaddy?” Some folks make attempts at guessing:

“Does it have something to do with “MathCAD“? No. (Engineers always ask this. Darn engineers!)

“Is it like a guy who carries books, chalk, and a slide rule for a math professor?” No. Well, not in this case, at least. Unless, of course, it’s a really cool slide rule with glitter paint. Then, yes.

“Are math caddies golfers who total their scores fairly and accurately?” No. However, “bad math” caddies are golfers who “forget” to count the back nine when adding up their golf score and come out with a nice even 70. Wait. That’s me. Which brings up another interesting image. I would like to see a mad bath caddy.

“Is a mathcaddy a type of cheese?” No. But actually, you’re on crack.

“So what does “mathcaddy” mean?”

I have no idea. Really.

I’m serious.

Go on. Go back to your life.

Okay, fine. I’ll tell you.

It was the summer of ’94. A group of friends and I were standing around talking. One of my friends was describing a conversation he had with a girl that left him appearing a little less than smooth. Trying to cleverly and ironically use some “throwback” lingo, I attempted to sarcastically say, “Way to go, mack daddy!”

But I failed.

In my tongue’s resistence to use the 80s phrase, a strange and startling phrase came out:

“Way to go, mathcaddy!”

The look on my friend’s face made the moment an instant classic. He was stunned, having never been called a word so bizarre. The experience stuck with me and I often called people “mathcaddy” at random, usually to the same response: dumb, blank, stares.

Several years later, in attempting to register a simple and easy to remember domain name, “mathcaddy” stood out to me as a solid possibility, So I typed it into the field marked “check domain availability.”

And the rest, as they say, was history. Or at least, that’s the end of the story.

By the way, no part of the word “mathcaddy” is ever capitalized – even if it begins a sentence. That’s just one of the little rules. (You can check me on this. It’s actually in your grammar handbook, page five hundred mumble mumble mumble.)

Let’s cut to the chase here, shall we? Comment spam is my blogging kryptonite.

Here are the top five posts from the past year, selected by a committee of… well, of one. But at least it’s an impartial committee!

#1: The (Bizzarely) Illustrated Ten Commandments

Funny as heck. I’m still laughing about this.

#2: American Media is Broken

Don’t get me started on something I’m passionate about. Because I won’t shut up. This post wins the filabuster award. But more than that, it was a disturbingly pleasurable return to writing with actual research involved.

#3: Mathcaddy Radio Session 5: All Time Favorites

Here’s a great example of why I have invited my cousin Steve to join Mathcaddy Radio as a co-host. He just makes the show more lively. This was also a great post because I still consider it to be the best Radio Session yet, content-wise. As one reader pointed out, however, how can you go wrong with all-time favorites?

#4: Adventures in Guitaring

This was a fun little history to try and make interesting. I enjoyed writing it.

#5: “Angel Pumping Gas”

Not so much a great post as it was an incredible demonstration of human nature. Plus the sheer weight of the comments is tilting the entire website.

Well, mostly.

I have had a crazy adventure since about May/June. This site almost died thanks to massive comment spam and my flat stupidity with Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist plugin for MovableTpe.

Everything was working fine until one day the old version of MT Blacklist went crazy on me. So I Upgraded MovableType and instead of running MT Blacklist, I decided to approve/disapprove every single comment… but when you’re averaging a hundred spammed comments a day, you get disillusioned pretty darn fast. So I decided to install MT Blacklist… and that’s where things went under the meat cleaver.

I won’t go into any more details, because I have no desire to relive that. Screwing around with this site was one of my primary hobbies for the past few years, but all the massive troubleshooting I’ve had to do pretty much killed my joy.

But I’m back now.

In fact, to prove it, I’m going to go ahead and write something else! Something way more interesting! And informative! And…!

Okay, it will probably suck.

UPDATE: Apparently, I imagineered most of my problems. It really was only temporarily fixed. I was just one of many who seem to be having problems with mt-comments.cgi overloading my server.

I’m going crazay! Yes! That’s right. I’m going so crazy that I included an extra “a”. What is the cause for this insanity?

As you probably guessed by the title, this site is having serious issues. Comments are broken. Most CGI is working poorly or not at all. And everything is pokey compared to what it was a few weeks ago.

I am probably going to do a complete rebuild of everything and hope that solves it. I have talked to support for my hosting and they say to talk to movabletype. I have talked to movabletype’s support and they say to talk to my hosting service provider.

Forget weblogs. I think I’m going to get a dog. Or maybe a pony. Perhaps both?

Just kidding. I’ll be back.

Today marks a transition in the course of mathcaddy.com.

Originally started as a way for me to connect with a few friends who were scattered around the country, it pretty much boiled down to nobody. There were a number of things I considered writing for the site, but felt that they might be too serious or too weird or something. I don’t know. For whatever reason, I found the “community” blog thing increasingly difficult, especially as there was, um, nobody else posting.

It’s not that I was expecting anyone else to post something… it’s just that I felt like I set the site up to be and do something that it wasn’t any longer.

Giving my quick-witted and maniacally creative cousin, Steve, his own hosting space and subdomain (steve.mathcaddy.com) took him off the roster of regular posters, which left me just feeling silly about calling it a community weblog.

Therefore, as of today, this site is no longer a community weblog. Eric, Steve, Dan, and everyone else who at one time contributed something, I thank you very much for sharing in this fun experiment.

Now on to other things!

You may have noticed that mathcaddy.com has been running a little “light” for the last couple of months.

This was, in fact, intentional.

By about the middle of June, I was starting to feel sick of feeling “expected” to write something on a regular basis. I don’t think anyone was actually expecting me to post regularly, but I sometimes felt like I should be posting regularly. I can’t explain it. It was like this nagging thought, like “Why haven’t I emptied the garbage in two weeks?” Or “If I haven’t fed the dog for a month, what’s the chance it survived?” Or “I haven’t seen my wife for a few days. I wonder if she’s alright.”

You know. Those sorts of nagging thoughts.

With the exception of a mid-summer Mathcaddy Radio session, I haven’t touched the site in almost three months.

Well, that’s not quite true. I did have to start de-spamming the comments on a constant basis as MTBlacklist broke. (It’s still broken and at this point I’m getting very angry and or desperate.) Not. Amusing. At. All.

But what is amusing is that people may have completely stopped checking for updates on this site over a month ago. There is actually a good chance that no one will ever read this post. Except spammers. Hi, Online Poker! Howdy, Ultimate Video On Demand Solutions!

But the summer proved to provide consistently interesting writing from everybody’s favorite part-time geek, lo-fi sketch artist, the Romeo of the DMV, Mr. 30-second shaving cross-country trackstar, the frosting connoisseur, himself, Steve! Well, I guess all those adjectives sort of make him everybody’s favorite by default. But he’s great nonetheless.

By the way, Steve has some great shirts for sale. One of his wonderful shirts insists that The Portal to Hell is the letter “Q”, but he’s totally innapropriate in making that statement and theologically incorrect. It’s actually the letter “C”. Pretty sneaky, huh? There it was all along, hiding under the “F” and the “D” on your qwerty, directly above the space bar.

So, uh, Adam… what did you do on your summer vacation?

Oh! I’m glad you asked.

After reading Steven Garrity’s intelligent review of the new blogger templates, I gave some thought to the current design of the site. I especially appreciated his comment that the design should not compete with content. Looking at my old site design, this was clearly happening.

The most interesting things were happening in the sidebars in comparison with the rather boring text in the center. Also, the text seemed like it was completely surrounded by clutter, with random pictures on the left and tons of text on the right. It was just too darn busy! I also came to dislike an idea I was originally excited about – filling the right column with pictures and albums that could be changed by each regular (or, ahem, irregular) contributors. The fact is, they got changed about three or four times in as many months, and that’s a little boring. I did not do away with the “Photo Mojo” section. You’ll notice it’s there, but much smaller in the upper right hand corner.

I did like including pictures from “the wall” in the old design, but in order to implement a fluid design (which was requested by a couple of mathcaddy regulars) I chose the easy route of ditching the header pic and just keeping the sidebar image. I think it still works.

I still feel like the site needs something else and I’m not totally pleased with the way the comments section looks right now, but I am overall happy with the design. But don’t be surprised to see some changes here and there.