Imagine that a web server is a giant bed. Now imagine that all the websites are little orphan children sleeping together.

Well in this analogy Digg.com is basically a leather clad Archbishop, who stormed into the room bellowing “WHO’S YER DADDY?” And my website, in a panic, tumbled off the bed taking all of the covers with him. My site huddled on the floor, hiding under the blankets, leaving none for the other children.

Well my web host at first thought there was a denial of service attack happening. Once she found out that I had merely been Dugg, she sprung into action. She phoned my wife and asked if she could temporally suspend my site, pending some updates. This would allow her other customers to keep their sites up while the update occurred. Of course my wife agreed, and she got to work.

So, she reconfigured our site to balance our CPU and memory usage spike so that our site would continue serving and responding quickly without causing a problem for everyone else on the server. She was on the phone with my wife, and getting this sorted out, in spite of a 102 degree fever and barely able to speak. So if you want a really good web host, with outstanding customer service run by a woman who knows her stuff, check out Draknet.

A lot of people can tell you tales of how their site went down when they got Dugg. I’m not one of them. I have one of the few hosts that is able to survive The Digg Effect.

Because Draknet would never leave a pile of orphans to be menaced by a clergyman.

Pop quiz:

What do Macaulay Culkin, former Daily Show writer Chris Regan, and this web-site have in common?

Answer:
They almost worked together on a television show for FOX.

I will repeat this news, just in case. At one point, FOX, the TV network, was interested in making a television show based off of my material.

A little background. When the web-site went up for the first time, it was mainly due to the efforts of a friend of mine, Diana. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in the things I couldn’t do. She insisted that it needed a website. So, with my permission, she made one. She also pestered me several times to update it, and pretty much without her, nothing would have happened.

At some point a Producer in LA found my list, and thought “I bet this could make for a decent movie.” So he had an underling try to locate me. They tracked down my friend Diana, who was the original web-mistress. Diana got in touch with me, ironically enough while I was driving through Los Angles while I was moving back to Texas. She just told me “Some lady wants to make a Skippy’s List movie.”

Now a year or so before that, some college students and gotten a hold of me, pretty much wanting permission to make a short film featuring a few of their favorite items. I figured this was more of the same.

Nope. This was a bona fide Hollywood production company. And they wanted to know if I would be willing to sell the rights to make a movie. Well, of course I jumped at the chance. My family was overjoyed as finally someone with a Jewish last name could become associated with the entertainment industry.

We talked a few times, and I waited for something to happen…and I waited…and waited. And finally forgot about it, and just concentrated on my school work.

About a year later Mr. Hollywood Producer got back in touch. They wanted to make it a TV show now. They explained it to me as a cross between ‘Scrubs’ and ‘MASH’. Every episode would start with an item from the list, and then be a flashback explaining the circumstances of the order. Chris Regan from the Daily Show was going to write it, and Macaulay Culkin was set to star in it.

After a few weeks of that, they told me that FOX wanted it, and that it was time to sign an ‘Option’.

For those that have never gone through this process, it is quite interesting. It basically goes like this.

(Note details have been changed slightly to protect the innocent, and because it sounds funnier this way)

Producer: Okay we make your material into a show, we’ll give you a small amount of money sometime if we feel like it, we own all your stuff forever, and we’ll set rape your pets every Thursday.

Me: I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this…..

Producer: Okay, how about we only rape your pets every other Thursday.

We finally came to an agreement, in which I get some money up front, credit for creating the list, and the ability to make quite a bit if a TV series took off.

And I waited to get my check, and find out if I was gonna be on TV.

And I waited. And Waited. Eventually I was able to get a hold of the producer again. FOX didn’t want it for this season. But maybe they would want it later. I casually mentioned that I had not, in fact, gotten any money yet. He sounded shocked, and assured me that he would get right on that.

Nearly one year later, still no luck on the show, and still no check. So I felt it was time to flex my muscles with this guy. I was going to make sure he knew that he couldn’t just get away with “forgetting” to pay people for their intellectual property.

I sent him a very cross email. I gave him a week to fix things. After a week passed, I sent him a certified letter, telling him I now considered our contract to be void, due to non-payment.

That afternoon, and I am not making this up, I received the check.

And he apologized, acknowledged that the contract had been voided, and told me to keep the check anyway.

There’s nothing more annoying than being righteously pissed off at someone who goes and starts apologizing and acting reasonable.

So I got a neat story out of this, and I made a little money. And if anyone out there ever thinks “This would make a good TV show” remember, send those letters to FOX.

Several fans of my website saw this article.
Tom Ricks’s Inbox June 17 2007

Many of them took the time to write to Mr. Ricks to attempt to correct him. He was directed to my site, where it mentions the misconception that I am a woman. Mr. Ricks typically responded to people by saying that “Just because I make a web-site and claim I’m Santa Claus doesn’t mean people should believe it.” And at one point he told somone that the person who forwarded my list to him had stated that I was a woman.

So at this stage we have, incorrect information about me, my copyrighted material being reproduced without my persmision, and a member of the fourth estate publically challenging my copyright. All of this based on the airtight “Some guy on the internet told me” defense. Naturally I was annoyed at his arrogance and at his stubborn resistance to correction.

Now to be perfectly fair, I’m sure he didn’t intend any harm, and it’s even arguable whether or not any serious harm was done. His column wasn’t intended to be investigative journalism, it was just a lighthearted fluff piece. I was a tad concerned that at some point in the future I would hear “Well the Washington Post said a woman wrote it, so you’re a liar!”. Now from his point of view, I’m guessing that it is an official *BIG DEAL* to admit that you printed incorrect information. And to be fair, nearly anyone in the world could have emailed him claiming to be me. So I can understand his skepticism.
So I contacted Mr. Ricks myself, and explained why this relatively small piece of mis-information could cause me some issues down the road, and how reproducing copyrighted information without permission can be bad. I asked that he print a correction in a future column. His brief response was to demand proof that I actually wrote it.

I wrote him again, demonstrating evidence that I did in fact own the material, and that I was the only Specialist Schwarz enlisted during the correct time period, and that I even had witnesses to some of the events on the list transpiring. While I was writing this he responded. He told me my story checked out. This conjured to my mind an image of him using his military correspondent powers to track down Army personel I have served with and grilling them about me until he had enough details to know I was telling the truth. But in reality, he probably just made an underling look up my copyright in the Library of Congress database.

Since “My story checked out” he offered to run a correction in the very next column he wrote. Perfect. Win for the good guys, I get exactly what I asked for. (Granted he could have, I dunno, apologized or something but hey, who am I to correct his manners.)

Well he was true to his word as we can see here:

Tom Ricks’s Inbox June 24

And furthermore he wrote me back to say (Quoted directly from the email)

“I am glad it worked out for you. For accuracy’s sake, that wasn’t a correction, it was a clarification.
Best,
Tom Ricks”

Now I can understand not wanting to admit when you are wrong but this kind of silly semantics argument is really unbecoming on anyone who isn’t either a five year old or a politician. But hey, free publicity is free publicty.