As mentioned earlier, this site is running a bit slow because of a link from a major gaming site (that was later picked up by a pile of gaming forums — welcome to you all!). I’m in the process of moving this site to a meatier server (probably will make the move tonight or tomorrow night). That should speed things up quite a bit, and I’ll post more details about the server and such after everything gets moved properly.
Month: February 2005
Local Slideluck Potshow
Are you a photographer who likes free food? Or maybe free food is your main thing but you dig photography, too? Simone at Emerald Bay Photo is organizing a Slideluck Potshow. More information on the event (and what the heck a Slideluck Potshow is) over at her site (this time with the correct URL — sorry guys).
Tsunami Photos Recovered From Camera
The couple that took the photos died in the disaster (along with 230,000 other folks), but their camera was found and some haunting photos were recovered from it.
True Love With A Background Check
True.com is an online dating service that pledges to verify whether your dream date is a convicted felon or, worse yet, already married. While obviously not foolproof, can at least try to find your true love without worrying (as much) that he’s going to come and burn your house down in the future. Full Story.
Marshmallow Peep Research
Somebody has way too much time on their hands. These guys have subjected the poor little buggers to extreme cold, heat, low pressure environments, feat tactics, and more. Thanks RedB for the link.
What Happened To Classic Cereals?
I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one that remembers (and misses) the days of three colors of little round balls in a box of Trix.
Welcome Blues News Readers
A hearty welcome to those gamer freaks nice folks 😉 over at BluesNews.com. A video I posted a long while ago is their site’s “Media Of The Day” meaning my site’s getting pummeled with traffic (more than this lowly VPS can handle). If anybody’s willing to mirror the 800KB video, feel free to e-mail me. Meanwhile, click on a Google ad or two while you’re here, enjoy your stay, and I apologize for the slowness for everybody else. At least the server’s still serving requests, so it’s still hanging in there (hopefully I’ll be getting a new dedicated box at some point — anybody have one cheap?).
Meanwhile, blogging and links will be posted later once server load goes down a tad.
Speaking Of Google
I know, I just talked a bunch about Google, but I did have one other thing to say. I was trying to log-in and check my Adsense revenues (just to see if my running ads on the left side of this site is doing any good). I accidently typed the URL as “http://www.google.com/adsesne” (when it’s obviously “https://www.google.com/adsense/”). Having worked so much on Google, I almost naturally expected a “Did you mean: https://www.google.com/adsense/” error to pop up on their very generic 404 error page. Would’ve save me all of about .25 seconds of typing if I could just have clicked.
Why doesn’t Google implement some of their killer technology in other places on their site? It would just make sense, given their skills, to have at least a slightly intelligent 404 error page on their site. Heck, even mine‘s more useful.
I’m still waiting for a fully-integrated results page, Google. Since I wrote that rant a year ago, things have certainly improved, but all the fancy tools in the world are useless if there’s no easy way to use them all in one interface.
Google News And Notes
During the last few weeks when I’ve been too stupidly busy to blog as much as I’ve liked, I’ve noticed a bunch of news about Google that kept getting flagged in my feed reader, but it never gets blogged about. So to clear out some of those links, here’s a bit of some Google News and Gossip.
Google is obviously always trying to push what they’re doing, adding more tools and toys to their arsenal. They first hired Firefox’s lead developer, leading to even more speculation that they’ll be releasing a Google-branded browser (despite them saying they’re not going to). Really, though, the default search/start page, and default search engine in Firefox is Google, so why would they want to go through the effort of releasing their own?
Another random tool they launched was Google Video (which will undoubtedly be another long “beta”). Google Video allows users to search the text of recently-broadcast programs. The engine returns a still image taken from the video clip alongside the close-captioned text from the program segment. So far, not entirely useful, but it’s getting there. The Google Blog has some example queries that show what the system can do (as well as talking about the Google SMS service). But it is handy for finding such tidbits as the gayest movie ever made and the best Elvis movie ever made.
A while back, they introduced Google Maps, and folks have been having fun with it (I was, too). Like this Google Maps Walking Tour. You should know, too, that Google Maps now works for Safari.
Google, for some reason or another, is crawling and indexing calendars. Probably for a current event search of some kind?
The latest thing Google has done that has rankled some people, however, is update their insanely popular toolbar. The problem, as some folks see it, is with Google’s “AutoLink” feature. I’m not really against the tool (nor do Neil or Cory), as it requires specific user interaction to turn on (unlike the previous attempts at this, MS’s SmartTags), but I can see the problem some folks have with it, and I’m up in the air about it. I don’t use MSIE, so it’s not really a concern for me, but I’m still debating whether I’ll be implementing this JavaScript to turn it off (even though it’s easily bypassed on the client’s end with another JavaScript).
And while Google’s created some amazing tools over the years, they couldn’t have done it without a little help from the companies they bought out in the past.
On the local front, with Google’s stock rising, they’re looking to expand and add more branch offices, including an office in The Dalles, just a few hours from here (follow up story). I’m not quite sure what they’re going to be doing up there, but I might make the trip up there just to see if I can get a tour. I’ll wear my Google boxers just for the trip (yes, I have Google boxers — got them during Google’s early beta days by filling out a survey or something).
OK, I think that’s all the Google links I have — for now, anyway.
Blogrolling No More
On my horribly dated “To-Do” list, I said that when my Blogrolling.com membership expired, I was going to implement something else. Blogrolling.com’s service works, but when the service went down, it made this site take a while to load (anytime you have to pull data from another server, things are going to slow down a bit).
My membership for blogrolling.com expires this April, and I wasn’t really wanting to spend another $20 on a service I really don’t use all that much (as you can see by some of my dated links on there, it’s been a while since I’ve updated things). The “something else” solution above hadn’t been updated for a long while and the site was full of errors, so I didn’t really feel like installing it, either.
Then Arvind, the studly MovableType guy that I’ve linked to here several times, decided to create MT-Blogroll. With a bit of work, I had it import my Blogrolling.com OPML files, I created an index template using the plugin’s tags, and now the right-side links on this site are now being powered by that plugin and that PHP-included index template. The site appears to be loading a split second faster now because external lookups don’t have to be made, and now my site won’t go down because of an inaccessible blogroll (if it can’t access the blogroll now, it’s because you can’t access the site). Thanks, Arvind!