Slashdot is supposed to be "News for Nerds" but it’s about the user comments as much as, if not more than, the news itself.  And sometimes the news items were reported in the press weeks before they show up on slashdot, and then you get stuff like this:

I finally posted the photo sets from last weekend’s country and city excursions.  Go make fun of my sunglasses :)

I also fixed a design flaw whereby I was getting zero hits from google or any other search engine for about 18 months.  Before sometime in the spring of 2003, I was getting about 200 hits per day, mostly from google.  After that, it dropped off to about 30 hits per day within maybe a month.  At the time, there was talk about google modifying their pagerank algorithm so as to de-emphasize weblogs in their search results.  (Or so I thought; maybe I fabricated that entire concept without realizing it.)

I figured that was the reason I stopped getting so many hits from google searches.  But I recently discovered that I wasn’t getting any hits from search engines because their spiders were unable to crawl my site.  My visitor-log system tries to log visitors based on things like their IP address, their browser’s User-Agent string, their name (if they enter one), etc... but since IP addresses sometimes change, and sometimes even change with every page requested, it’s helpful to give each visitor a unique ID and store it in a cookie.  The problem is that the search engines’ web spiders don’t accept any cookies, and I inadvertently failed to make a provision for that fact.  So every page on my site was saying "here, have a cookie, and then I’ll redirect you to that page" but the spiders were saying "no way, Jose."  The spiders are stubborn and so was my code, so after 10 such exchanges, the spiders give up and move along.

Last week I fixed the code, and I see googlebot and msnbot slowly crawling my site again.  Now I’m a popular destination for these searches:

Can you still feel the butterflies? Elliott Ness "are these all yours" the dingo ate your babies Script for the lullaby Little Yeshua

I’m especially proud to be #1 on google for "Script for the lullaby Little Yeshua," mainly because I have no idea what that means, and because I’m sure it isn’t on my site.

Snow, snow, snow, yay  : )

We love the first snow of the season.

So the OQO has been out for over a month now, and it still costs $1900.  I was hoping by now the price would have dropped to $150 or so.  Oh well.

I have two new photo-sets that I want to post, one from NYC and another from a hike last weekend, but I want to finish some updates to my photo-webpage scripts before I post any more photos.  And the updates are taking some time.  (OK, by "updates" I mean writing from scratch a script to manage the creation/editing of captions, keywords, title/date/descriptions, etc, through the web-browser.)

In the meantime though, I put up a new header image for this fallsy theme.  The photo is from McConnells Mill about six weeks ago.  I had wanted to take some more fall photos this season, but it looks like it’ll be winter-photo season soon.

It’s a moot point now, but I just saw this today:

If John Kerry is the answer,
it must be a stupid question.

Cheap shot, I know, but that’s funny.  Also saw this the other day:

Unlike taxes, death doesn’t get worse every year.

Am I the only one who as NO idea what to get Dad and Jeannie for Christmas???  Has anyone heard what the wish list is this year???  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!!

In an article titled Debt-cut gift for Iraq, about how the world is going to forgive 80% of Iraq’s debt, guess what the first sentence is?

Baghdad exploded in violence today, even as German finance minister Mr Hans Eichel said in Berlin that he agreed with US Treasury secretary Mr John Snow on a proposal for the world’s key creditor nations to write off as much as 80 per cent of Iraq’s debt, capping a months-long US push for debt forgiveness in Iraq’s case.

No matter what happens in Iraq, no matter what newsworthy event has taken place, just remember: you have to say that Iraq "exploded into violence."  Sure, the nations of the world agreed to forgive nearly $40 billion worth of debt, but that isn’t news... violence in a nation that has just had its dictator removed, that’s news.

A junior at New Mexico State University died Friday after his 21st birthday celebration led to alcohol poisoning, according to the university. ... NMSU has begun an investigation...

Investigation into what?  When you consume absurd quantities of alcohol, you die.  This kid was a fool, and his "friends" who took him out are fools.

Instead of wasting taxpayer money on this "investigation," how about an investigation into why the majority of kids in this country are obsessed with alcohol?  At least he didn’t kill anyone else by his foolish actions -- drunk drivers kill 20,000 people per year in the US.  How about whenever a drunk driver kills someone, if the drunkard lives, we execute him on the spot?