Category: Interesting

And what I wouldn’t give to have one of them. Link via Ars.

I do know that this site has sent traffic to my day job and here’s the way I justify it: Many of the folks in my office take smoke breaks — several of them a day. I don’t smoke, but I need a break. So I blog. But just in case, here’s a guide on how to avoid getting canned.

Porn sites hiding behind blogs. A very good read, and a good bit of detective work by Adam. Link from Waxy.

I don’t know about you, but the last thing I’d want to see is the employees at my local Wal-Mart nude. But apparently, there is enough decent looking Wal-Mart employees to make a Playboy Pictorial featuring them.

I know there are reasons why we have Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but they seem to be doing more problems than good. One problem is that the law, used to protect a patient’s medical information, has been keeping law enforcement from doing their jobs. From this story:

Police have been unable to cold-call hospitals, asking if a Leslie Rivera-Hager or Sheila Smith is a patient there, because of the new law protecting patient confidentiality. This can make a missing-persons search more difficult.

Before the law was passed, (New Sewickley police Chief John) Daley said: “We’d go through the phone book and call every hospital, asking if they had a patient by that name. Right now, we can’t do that.”

Police could get a search warrant if they had reason to believe that the person was in a certain hospital. But the uncertainties surrounding Rivera-Hager make that impossible.

Al ‘s Morning Meeting, who provided this link, also has talked about how family members, coaches, 911 dispatchers and journalists, among others, are getting screwed by all of this.

Most blogs are dull. Hell, mine is dull 99% of the time. But this one is, well, very interesting. Why? It’s the diary of a London call-girl. This blog shows what prostitutes are really thinking about, in graphic, but well written, terms.

That’s the rumor, anyway, as GoogleBots (of sorts) are starting to show up in IRC channels. Link via Waxy.org.

Where do all the search engines get all their content, news, etc… and who supplies content to others? Use this VERY handy Flash tool and see for yourself.

To quote Ars Technica, where I got this link:

What happens when sex obsessed engineers are presented with the complexity of the female orgasm? They invent the Orgasmatron! The small device, about the size of a walkman, attaches to a woman’s ankles and reportedly takes her to the very edge of orgasm through electrical current which proponents claim stimulates nerve centers attached to the pelvis.

I won’t touch this one — I’d probably say something sexist that will caused me to get smacked. But men, the last thing your significant others need is something else they can use to replace you in the sack. If you see these on sale, destroy them.

Man, before you know it, women will just bring stripping men with them wherever they go, sticking them in their pockets. Oh wait…they can already do that.

Not only is PageRank dead and messed up (despite discussions on Webmaster World about redoing the algorithm), but now if you search for “search engine” on Google, it comes in fourth-place behind AltaVista, Lycos, and Yahoo.

I do know the Google’s hitting older pages on my site more than newer sites, and my rankings haven’t been as good as they used to be. Call it whatever you want, but I call it the “Blog Penalty”. Before too long, I wouldn’t be suprised, because of all the pressure Google is under, if Google starts sending blogs down hard in the listings.