7. April, 2003 - returning to normalcy?
- Things are somewhat back to normal around here. Yesterday was a day of napping through the NASCAR race, then watching TV through the evening, followed with a little web-surfing to end the day. Pretty much a normal Sunday for me. But today I’ve got to get back to work, and after basically taking a week off, getting back into the swing of things is pretty hard. I’ve got twenty-some emails backed up that I need to respond to. I’ve got to handle the hours for the folks who are working for me. And I’ve got to try and figure out what I was working on ten days ago. Oof. I’m expecting a fairly frantic Monday, and it doesn’t help that neighborhood association stuff has started heating up again, so I’ve got to think about that, too. Oh, and the OpenBSD CDs ship in a few weeks, so I need to start thinking about getting my server in shape for the upgrade, too. Much to think about. Nothing like enough time. And I need to make time to check in on Mom to see how she’s doing. Oh well, at least the snow they were threatening us with this morning seems to have missed me so far.
- jr conlin’s talking about More Google Gaming, specifically wondering about how google treats blogs:
Looks like if Google is using blogs for relevancy, they’re not really returning the favor.
What I’ve found is that the type of blog makes a big difference. If you have permalinks that look like static pages (i.e. they end in .html), it seems google’s more willing to show your pages in the search results. That makes some amount of sense, since dynamic pages can disappear (though they seldom do on blogs), and google wants to point to things that are going to stick around. The other thing I’ve found is that big site-reorganizations can be tricky. If suddenly all your content rearranges, it can take months for google to like you again. There are probably more tips & tricks that are rattling around in my brain, but those are the big ones that spring to mind at the moment.
- I’ve been watching Simon Schama’s History of Britain, and in the past couple of episodes have noticed that he’s mentioned the small and fictional town of Mucking-on-the-Wold. The interesting thing is that while this seemed to be a clear enough example of a fictional place, it doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere on the web, or at least nowhere that google has searched. No real point to this, I guess, just a chance to mention the name that I’d heard and couldn’t find when I searched, so the next person who looks for it will most likely end up finding this page.
- Hydra is a Mac OS X-only editor that lets multiple people work on the same document. Pair-programming made easy. You just need to be on the same local network, and Rendezvous makes the rest happen. I expect there will be multiple groups using Hydra at MacHack this year. [some guy]
- National Archives go online (partly). It’s far from everything, but it looks like it might be some useful information that’s now more easily available to those of us who are working on family histories. Of course the article doesn’t include a URL. The National Archives Research Room looks like it’s probably the best place to start. [fark!]
- Child Porn Law Creates Catch-22, since Pennsylvania requires ISPs to block websites, but won’t tell anyone which sites have to be blocked, since that would be spreading porn.
- I linked to Cursor.org just about a year ago, but I guess it’s time to do so again. Their manifesto is
to expose the absurdities and excesses of an increasingly corporatized, sanitized and celebrity-driven news media
and they’re based here in Minnesota. [some guy]
- RIAA Hits Students Where It Hurts, suing four students for running software which, unlike what the article says, isn’t
napster-like
, but rather software that indexes the files available on an existing network which can already be seen by anyone on the network.
- Copy protected CDs: artists can be the losers. See if record companies send out copy-protected CDs, at least some radio stations can’t play them, because they use PCs to hold all the music and quickly access it. Who loses? The band who isn’t getting heard at all. But remember, the RIAA is just there to protect the artists, right?
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Tue, 08 Apr 2003 07:31:54.