For those of you who can tear yourselves away from the ever exciting google searches...

I am going to be induced on Monday night, hopefully we will have a baby sometime on Tuesday :)  Dan will be calling with the news...  Wish us luck :)

It’s not that I want to keep posting these all the time, but they just keep pouring in... I’m #2 for:

Chief Elements of Krispy Kreme’s Strategy

Now THAT one I’m proud of  ( :

And interestingly, Belmont Club is #3, which is another blog that I frequent.

Go to this Launchcast support page and click on the "No" button, then type them a nice message like this:

This has to be some kind of joke, right?  Your software fails to work on all but 2 browsers on 2 operating systems?  So... your software doesn’t work at all for Linux users, it only works for Mac users if you use a browser that’s 3 years old, and it only works for Windows users if you use the most insecure program ever written as your web-browser.  Mozilla/Firefox is the most standards-compliant browser there is, it’s architecture is entirely open, and it runs on virtually every OS in existence; it can’t possibly be that hard to make Launchcast work with it...

As you may have noticed, I am immensely entertained by the Google queries I find in my website’s referrer logs.  Barring the technical stuff, the things people are searching for are rarely found on my site, but sometimes they are.  I recently discovered that I am #5 for mcconnells mill photos and #13 #2 for just mcconnells mill, because of these photos.  Given that McConnells Mill is a really nice and big state park, that’s (apparently) pretty well-known around Pittsburgh, it’s kind of amazing that I’m #13 #2 overall for just the name itself.

I’m #2 for knee deep in nietzsche’s lies which is pretty cool.

Then I’m #8 for why does my screen blink whenever I click on something.  Come on people, it’s Google, not a magic 8-ball.  Generally speaking, treating Google like a librarian is not a good way to find what you’re looking for.  It’s not a person.  You need to put a few seconds of thought into your search efforts.

You have to remember that Google is just taking the words you enter and finding webpages that contain those words.  It’s not looking for "answers" to your input.  The state of search at this point in time just isn’t that intelligent, so your goal is to think of what terms would appear on a page that discusses your problem.  And the real secret to searching effectively is using phrases instead of individual words whenever possible.  The other day when someone found my site by searching for nonsense poems about moldy bread, they didn’t find what they were looking for.  Based on his query we can assume he wasn’t interested in nonsense poems about just any bread; it had to be moldy bread.  But that isn’t what he asked Google to find; he asked Google for all pages containing all of those words, even if "moldy" and "bread" appeared in completely different places on the page, as they do on mine.  What he should have done is put quotes around the phrase "moldy bread" in his search, because that tells Google that the pages must contain that exact phrase, not just the two separate terms independent of each other.

Of course, Google is programmed to try to figure out what you might have meant, in a crude sort of way, and will sometimes assume that if you have two words in a row, you might have wanted them to be a phrase, even though you failed to use quotes.  So you’ll probably see that the first results do indeed have either "nonsense poems" or "moldy bread" as phrases.  But again, search just isn’t that smart yet, so my site -- which contains neither of the phrases "nonsense poems" or "moldy bread" -- was still #10.  (Well, now I’m #2, but only because I now have a post containing that exact sequence of words.)

But back to the fun stuff: I’m #1 for when is googlebot coming.  (And he is, you know.)  (Coming.)  (For you.)  (Soon.)

If you’re a white male, then your every action is potentially (nay, probably) motivated by some form of bigotry, bias, racism, sexism, or whatever the current -ism of the moment happens to be.  So goes the politically correct line of thought in America and much of the world today.  That’s why, for example, the only kind of person you’ll ever see being made fun of in a TV commercial is a white male.

Tonight I saw a commercial for Viactiv.  (It’s a calcium supplement for women.)  Guess what the last line in the commercial is?  "Because women should get exactly what they want."

Can you imagine what would happen if a commercial said, "because men should get exactly what they want"?  Every feminist on the planet would instantaneously simultaneously spontaneously combust, and the Earth would crash into the sun.

I am #10 on Google for:

nonsense poems about moldy bread

My life is now complete.

- Cox and Forkum

epifagus:/Users/fgpbackup/backups root# ps -lax|grep rsync
su: ps: command not found
su: /usr/bin/grep: Too many open files in system

Thanks, Mac OS X.