These maps are from the end of August 2007 and indicate who’s visiting MountainRunner. (Daily updates are viewable from the right margin of the blog.)

It’s good to see hits from places not normally thought of as being connected.

A single shout out: hey Dude in Baku!

I’m always fascinated to see how global the audience of this blog. I think my discussions on robots brought more hits from India and China than usual (a topic I’ll be posting on again very soon). It seems I’m big in Asia (I was big there as an exchange student as well, but that is not only a bad joke but long ago).

Thanks for visiting.

As a reader of MountainRunner, you’ve no doubt noticed I don’t do ads or tip jars. Instead of overt links to other business that waste screen real estate or straight donations to my wallet, I rely on click-thru’s to Amazon.com to pay for this blog and ConflictWiki (to-be reincarnated soon with different and more user-friendly software that’s not Wiki-based… let that be a lesson in name choice).

Advantages of using Amazon to support MountainRunner:

• You buy stuff you would be buying already but a percentage gets kicked-back to me, with no change in cost to you
• They send me gift certificates to buy stuff at Amazon, which in turn feeds my habit of, er, killing trees. The cash offset pays for the website.

How to transparently support MountainRunner without any cost to you:

• Go to Amazon.com via any book review, reference to a book, or (as is often the case) a book author and buy that book or anything else Amazon sells.
• Buy text books for the coming academic year by going to Amazon through this link.

Neither the blog nor myself are affiliated or supported by any institution or organization, including my graduate degree program. Hopefully this will change when I complete my degree in December ’07…

Thank you in advance for your support.

So the upgrade to MovableType 4 wasn’t as easy as I hoped it would be. If you went to the site today you may have some of the neat “features” I temporarily implemented: redaction of major portions of the screen. I had forgotten how much I didn’t know about CSS. The site isn’t done yet as there are still some layout & format issues here and there, which I’ll get to later, in addition to some elements from the old version of the site that haven’t made their way over yet.

However, the new version is cool and it will be worth it when the system’s fully up and running. The coolest of the new bells that functioning now is the expanded list of authentication systems for commenters. No longer do you need a TypePad account, you can reg here on MountainRunner, use your AIM ID, LiveJournal, OpenID, or WordPress credentials.

If you see something wrong on the site, please let me know by posting a comment here or emailing me. Thanks in advance.

Tomorrow I’ll resume posting… tonight, I’m walking away from the computer.

A quick admin note on the blog. This blog was upgraded to Movable Type 4.0 last Friday. But the upgrade was incomplete and I was locked out until now. Posting will resume late tonight or early tomorrow (Tuesday).

Among the new feature available in the upgrade is more ways to authenticate commentors. More to come.

Tip: when you return from a trip in which you get at best 4hrs of sleep at night, don’t do a double-red blood cell donation. Maybe it’s me, but it knocked me on my ass for a day, throwing off my week.

The short of it is I’m here and online and the rhythm will return to the blog. I’ll be posting some of the results of the robot survey, which some have requested, and I’ll talk a little more about why I did it. I won’t reveal too much because I’m looking for a little funding to complete and polish the 6k word discussion the survey contributed to. My trip last week was to present a working copy of the document.

For those who read the blog only through RSS or email, there was activity on the one post made this week. Check it out.

Back to blogging…

On 5 August 2007, the About MountainRunner page moved to http://mountainrunner.us/about.html.  Please go to that page for more the who and why.
Continue reading “About MountainRunner (Updated)
“ →

Two blogs added to the blogroll to highlight. First up is Swedish Meatball Confidential. As Michael points out, this is quality blogging that might not be acceptable for workplace browsing. Read it for IO, STRATCOM, public diplomacy, and the scenery.

The other late addition (to MountainRunner, everybody else already had them) is the essential Kent’s Imperative.

In the spirit of Thomas Barnett, as adopted by SWJ, here are a few of the blogs linking to MountainRunner.

• Swedish Meatballs Confidential (who displays my feed’s headlines on his page)
• Hamon’s Pattern linked to my most recent post on private contractors.
• Olde Phart in Training linked to the suggestion to read Malcolm Nance and John Sullivan posts at the Small Wars Journal Blog (more on the Nance AQ argument forthcoming)
• Charlie Foxtrot (CF…greatly underused acronym for the post-9/11 strategy) notes I’m an “off the beaten path milblogger” when linking to my War of Images post.
• Danger Room linked to the post asking if Karen Hughes understands the do’s and don’ts of protocol.

Enjoy your Monday.

Ah shucks! Maybe I should change the blog’s logo to Bambi…

(h/t: ArmchairGeneralist)

and now back to work

I’m back from the camping trip, but as you’d expect, a few things have piled up and I need to attend to those before resuming posting. Maybe tomorrow, but more likely Wednesday (yes, Fourth of July), I’ll have some posts up.

By the way, the boy loves camping.  

I’ll be offline for a few days as the family (pregnant wife, 22 month old son, two dogs, and me) head off to the mountains for a little camping. Some may call it brave. Some may call it foolish. Either way it should be interesting, and after all, it was the wife’s idea. It’s the first camping trip for the boy. I expect he’ll enjoy it since one of his first sentences was “go trail now?” and he knows the difference between his Crocks and his “trail” shoes (Merrells that have most aggressive tread I could find in his size).

The picture is the last good camping picture. The real MountainRunner is crossing the stream carrying the dog food while my other dog, a 3-legged climber with a turbo for climbing hills (not so much going down them), watches with perhaps less eagerness for the mild crossing.

For the record, this trip has been on the calendar for a month.

I’ve noticed that sometimes the size of the browser window knocks the right column down to the bottom of the window instead of in the right column. In other words, some of you may see this

instead of this

This happens more on Internet Explorer than on other browsers (if you’re interested, 60% of MountainRunner’s readers use some version of IE, 30% use FireFox, and the remaining 10% includes Safari, Opera, Conqueror, Camino (?), and others). The problem must be with the resize code and is triggered only by a precise pixel width, but I’m not sure how to fix it. I’ve tried modifying the CSS, but what works in one browser doesn’t work in another, etc.

If you have any ideas, I’m all ears (or eyes). Give me your suggestions by commenting on this post or through email. Thanks and enjoy your weekend. I’ll be offline until Monday.   

Many of you don’t use RSS readers like Newsgator, instead preferring to read MountainRunner through the email delivery option (nightly delivery of the day’s posts) or one the feed aggregators like PageFlakes, NetVibes, etc.

Feedburner makes it easy for you to read MountainRunner using virtually any reading platform or technique you have. But there’s another option in town now.

MountainRunner is now available as a native iGoogle gadget. This gadget is created specifically for the Google personalized home page and allows me to give you a little more information, with a customized layout, than before.  

Check it out. Or, continue to use the the “old” version for your Google page, it’s not going anywhere. Choice is good.

Comments and suggestions are welcome. This is my first gadget after years of not programming. There will be enhancements down the road which will appear seamlessly on your desktop.

(By the way, the refresh rate on the gadget is one hour, meaning there may be a lag from the time a post appears on MountainRunner and when it appears on gadget, but I bet you’ll be okay with that.)

There’s a new feature on MountainRunner (h/t CARL, see below): a custom search engine (CSE). The MountainRunner CSE, available at the top right of the home page searches the entire Blogroll and all the Recommended Sites listed on the lower left of the home page.

There is even a gadget to add the MR Custom Search Engine to your iGoogle home page:

Suggestions for additional blogs and sites are welcome.

On CARL, the blog of the Combined Arms Research Library, US Army Command and General Staff College, or the CARL Book Blog for short, got creative with its Google searching:

We’ve created this custom search engine that targets 14 selected blogs relating to military and defense matters including: http://smallwarsjournal.com/, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/, http://www.captainsjournal.com/, http://counterterrorismblog.org/, http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/. Do you have a suggested site we should add to this custom search engine?

By the way, the CARL search engine includes MountainRunner. Thanks, CARL.

Responding publicly to inquiries, MountainRunner is available for consultation and contract work. I do spend a considerable amount of time analyzing and writing on the subjects posted on this blog for a variety of projects. Please email me here to discuss.

I’ve got lots of things to post, but too little time to do it right now. Tomorrow, look for some catch-up through the end of the week. Next week, I’ll be in DC (more on that tomorrow)… 

I’ll be offline for the weekend for some project work. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves…

Between hardware problems, travel, and deadlines, posting will be light to non-existent for the next several days.

This applies only to a couple dozen readers: when I changed from TypePad to MovableType a while back, I allowed the original feed path (http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/ezzp) to continue. This is a heads up that if you’re one of the few on this old RSS, you should see a note to convert to the primary, and soon only, RSS path the bulk of you are on: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mountainrunner. That’s it.