Just in case you’ve been living under a rock this should explain it. I’m not a fan of the EFF, but in this case I agree with them: this is some stupid shit.

Think about it this way: It’s a copyright protection act (ostendibly, anyhow. Since the US congress is behind it I’m far more willing to believe corporate tyranny is the true motivator), and I’m someone whose name is on copyright protected work. With me so far? Now, this is the part thst might be hard to follow, but here goes. Keeping in mind the aforesaid bits sbout me being a copyright holder, this bill being ostendibly about protecting copyright, and I’ve not only already called it “stupid shit”, but I’m also going to add to that that the people who though this thing up should stick their heads in a duck’s bottom or be drug into the street and shot — I’m not picky, though I imagine having a lobbyist or politician up its arse would be unsanitary … I mean that duck could catch any number of things. Probably should stick with the firing squads. I’m, before anyone gets confused here, not talking about or suggesting assassination … that has a habit of making martyrs. I’m suggesting bloody revolution, I am. get it right. I mean, there’s a huge difference. Or at least public execution, which is truer, but I’m not missing the opportunity to use that bloody revolution bit now I’ve thought it.

In any evnt there’re a few billion petitions out there, an hundred places to contact your congressmen about it, etc. If you haven’t yet you should use ome of them. I could go into a long list of reasons, but I won’t. It seems to me that a right thinking, literate person ought to be able to figure that one their own.

(crossposted from )

Well, the title says it all.

If you didn’t know I’ve got a professional type site as well as this rambling mess. Naturally I wanted it in search engines, thus I submitted the urls to Google and Bing.

Suffice to say, if you search with Bing, don’t. I’m no Google fan, and as an end user I must say several of their recent changes are a pain in the arse, but compared to Bing (Yahoo! For those not in the know is Bing now so it’s not worth mentioning) it’s fucking awesome.

See, seeing it from the webmaster backend confirmed something I’d long thought: lots of shit in Google what ain’t in Bing.

It works like this. In both cases you submit your url and are given a meta tag code, or a file that you add to your site to prove it’s yours. Now, theoretically this is all, but you can improve things a lot with a sitemap and telling the two search giants to use it for an idea what to crawl and when.

Well, there’s the first difference. Submit a sitemap to Google and you know if something went wrong in a few seconds. Bing can take weeks. No lie I’d had one sit there pending for over a month. There’s loads of discussions about it, apparently that’s just how Microsoft’s shitty code works. Are we really surprised?

Once the sitemaps are both there you’d think things would level out and all would become equal. Well, please note you already have been visible to folks using Google for hours, days, weeks or even months before Bing’s users ever knew a damned thing. For the users, please note you’ve been missing out on untold numbers of sites for that long. But that’s not all folks!

Bing also forgets shit! No fucking lie. I’ve a site I’ve had to sub,it the sitemap to several times. It’ll be there for awhile, then suddenly Bing’s forgotten it again. Another, the sitemap generating software I used was changed and the new software used a slightly different scheme, so I deleted the old sitemap reference and submitted the new one. Again, instant on Google (and indexed pages that hadn’t changed remained indexed I might add, Bing didn’t do this) and days for Bing. Well, every now and then Bing decides I have both sitemaps, or the old one and ot the new, or three references to the new but with different submitted page counts, and with some reporting errors … all with different submit dates.

Even when a site does get indexed and crawled, it’ll sometimes drop pages from the index (admitting this in the statistics you can view and with no damned reason given) and even when it seems to have everything properly indexed and crawled. Well, Janoke Greenbriar. It’s a search term that should find some references to Stolen Time since it seems fairly unique. You might also get some partial match sites too. On Bing you get exactly two results and neither are Janoke Greenbriar, they’re just partial matches, and neither are related to Universal Nexus in any way.

Again, I’m not really surprised, not exactly. No. But … there is a margin of disappointment. I mean the boys at Redmond might not be able to program Hello World (it’s a programmer thing, if you don’t understand just try to imagine someone who couldn’t write ‘See Spot run.’ correctly in less than six tries using a pen and paper and you’ve got just about e right idea) without it crashing or similar, but they could at least do a better job of making it look more like they’re actually trying.

Seriously. I try to stay out of e search engine wars ever since my favourite one, search.com, went defunct back in 2000, but I’m going to briefly violate my neutrality to say that at this moment the best, fastest, most thorough, most complete, and thus most useful search engine is Google. Others don’t count, they’re al either regurgitating Google or Bing results. The last one still independent was Yahoo and, as I said, it’s using Bing now. Ask is technically still working off of itself, but submitting stuff to it is weird, unreliable, and they’re crawl rates are so slow that they’re out of date at best … and I think they do rely, at least partially, on Google.

So, my puppy was using a shirt for a blanket, then decided to drape it over his head and explore the world around him from that perspective. And, yes, that’s as fucking adorable as it sounds and even cuter than it looks in that picture.

Cheers!

The stupid fucking shit-for-brains prick bastards

USDA found to be poisoning bird populations, causing mass die-offs involving millions of birds

via USDA found to be poisoning bird populations, causing mass die-offs involving millions of birds.

This? This is why I think that representative government is stupid.

I also think that most modern government is stupid.

Oh well, enjoy the further proof that America specifically, and the Western World in general are seriously OMFG fucked the hell UP.

I’m Under Arrest for What? Fifty Bizarre U.S. Laws – DivineCaroline.

Well, I’ve had a more eventful week than just the puppy.

First off:  I’m out of writing to do on Stolen Time and am now working solely on typing it after which will come a bit of polish and revision to fine-tune the narrative.  At the present rate it may very well be ready to publish by Halloween as I’d hoped.  But I’m not holding my breath.  I do still have 5 and a half chapters left to type, then print, then review.

Also I’ve got a new host for universal-nexus.com. The link over on the right for MacHighway is the new host. So far I’m impressed. I still recommend Helihost if you want free. They are without a doubt awesome, but I had 2 email addresses that I wanted to use IMAP with and that overwhelmed the number of running processes I was allowed if I tried to do anything more complex than serve the iWeb generated site. Like, say, some PHP based forum software. Needless to say I decided I’d reached a point where I would be better served by people I was paying and thus less limited in resources with.

I’ve used their tech support twice. Once to ask a stupid question and the other because of something retarded it turned out my ISP had somehow done. I’ve had them since Sunday. They reply THAT FAST. Even on something I marked low priority (you get to select low, medium, or high when you submit a ticket. If they reply this fast to medium and low I’m kind of scared to ever choose high. They might answer before I’ve asked and that’d weird me out just a teeny bit).

Anyway. Looking for a paid host? Hit up MacHighway. Their pricing scheme, uptime promises, customer support, and other things are impressive from what I’ve found shopping around at other services.

Don’t need much out of your host, but want something reasonably pro-grade? Go for Helio.

And I’m outta words except to say that I’m fucking loving OSX Lion and really wish my computer could use it. Then again, I’m also enamored with Shan’s MacBook Air and kind of wish I had one.

Ta.

This morning I found that my truck had birthed a small, 8wk old hound dog. Red headed, and by the look of him a true bred Coonhound (the only other possibility is a Bassett and he doesn’t look the right shape).

He has adopted Shan. He’s sweet. He’s smart, and not that idiotic trainable smart I mean he uses his brain for something besides cushioning the blows to his head (which he’s uncoordinated enough that it’s not an uncommon occurrence to have a few).

Downsides? The cats don’t much like him.
Jackie’s not frightened of him like we expected. No, that’s Tas. Tas who is … chop off Tas’ head, tail, and legs and he’s STILL bigger than the damned dog. Tas who is clearly part bob cat, and a tom (if a snipped one) at that, is afraid of the puppy. Jackie who once was fleeing in abject terror from a toy poodle just wants him to go away but she hasn’t tried to hurt him. The one time she swatted was with claws clearly in!

Other issues: He’s going to grow a bit big to keep in our cluttered disaster area of a house, and we don’t have a fully fenced back yard. Being a hound he’s liable to start drooling.

Still, he’s housebroken and loves people so there’re probably owners who’ll take him back if we ever find each other. Unless he was abandoned, which is possible. He was 8wks freaking old, no signs he’s ever worn a collar, and he was under my truck at 8:45am with no other human being in sight. Seems more than a tiny bit suspicious, suffice to say.

Still foster pup or new member of the family he’s a treat.

Pictures of course

So sometime in the past hour or so one of those rarest of people: A businessman I have respect for, died.

Steve Jobs. The man infamous, even among the people who liked him. The visionary who made Apple work and happen.

Fuck it. I’m too shocked to be poetic or wordy.
Steve you seemed like a really awesome person and I’m saddened that I shall never have the chance to meet you. You will be missed.