No, Jessica is not pregnant, but I feel sorry for the gal in this video: Nutri-grain Ad.
Kudos to James Johnson for the link.
Viewers of Olympic Swimming Confused by Acronym
Many viewers of Olympic swimming were confused by the Men’s IM 200 event. When announcers said, "Up next, the Men’s 200 IM event…" blank stares popped up all over the United States and Canada as men ran to their computers to load up AOL and begin instant messaging.
I wanted to support Team USA so I loaded up my AOL and looked for the first buddy who was online to IM for the Gold.
NBC reported that the second reason people stopped watching the Olympics last night, behind the first reason, poor commentators, was the switch to computers. One person interviewed, who wouldn’t give us their real name but did give us 'CybrGrrl034' said, “I can download MP3’s and keep track of the medals at the same time. OMG! [Oh, My God] I have to go, K-Slice just said Justin likes me.”
Search Engine Optimization and Standards
Eric Meyers wrote an article regarding Search Engine Optimization: SES San Jose Corrections that points to an example of using structural markup for search engine markup (which I can’t seem to get to) that doesn’t work. Since I can’t get to it I can’t rebut the report directly. However, let me say that I have top positions (or have had for some time – I don’t keep track too closely) for the phrases "Women of Walmart" and "Women of Home Depot". I was and am in no way trying to be a source of pornography or adult content, however, because I wrote articles against WOW and WOHD and because of the site structure of WordPress I rank highly for those terms.
As an example I offer these results from StatTraq for the month of July. The following table represents the top 5 search phrases from the top three search engines that were passed in referrer strings.
| # | Search | Term | Referrals |
|---|---|---|---|
| # | Search | Term | Referrals |
| 1 | Y|M | women of home depot | 500 |
| 2 | Y|M | women of walmart | 271 |
| 3 | Y|M | home depot playboy | 208 |
| 4 | Y|M | Banana phone | 147 |
| 5 | Y|M | playboy home depot | 136 |
Hurtling Towards Two
Abigail is going to be two in about 4 days, and today’s mostly over. The little girl that I love so much is surely amazing. In only two years she’ll be four and in seven times that number she’ll be sixteen (and proving my amazing math skills in ten times that number she’ll be twenty-two). What is so fun right now is that she’s getting pretty well potty trained (though tonight I got to handle a "secret stinker," or a potty done in private that was later revealed to us as an accident), she’s got a pretty good vocabulary, and in a couple weeks she’ll start the dance classes Jessica has her signed up for. Shortly after that she’ll start gymnastics and begin her Olympic training. When she’s fourteen (and looking about six or seven) she’ll appear in her first Olympics, if she’s lucky she’ll make it into one more at eighteen, and if God works miracles she could be in a third Olympics at the ripe old age of 22.
Of course at twenty-two she’ll have steel posts in her legs, a robotic elbow, more stitches than Betsy Ross’ sewing projects and a very narrow set of carreer choices. Of course that’s just conjecture, but I was totally right when I guessed that she would be born before the thirty-first of December 2002.
Evening at the Zoo
Last night we went to the Denver Zoo with the Kaes for what was billed to us as "A Picnic at the Zoo." The Denver Zoological Society apparently put it together and invited us, paying members, to pay a little more and see the animals in the evening. Yeah. Um, the animals were all on vacation, taking an evening rest before the night-time hunting began or were wearing cement camouflage. We enjoyed the time eating with the Kaes and walking with them around the zoo – the carousel was a blast – but the animal watching was pretty dull. We saw a seals, camels, flamingos, Giraffes through glass, zebras, buffallos, flamingos and lots of peafowls (peacocks to those who are gender indifferent) but no lions, tigers or bears. Oh, my.
The fun with the Kaes made up for the lack of critters, but I was sorely disappointed not to see the animals in full swing. Maybe the overcast weather put them in a foul mood and so the zoo keepers put them to rest for the evening early. Anyway, in the end we enjoyed a great time of fellowship.
After the zoo we had to go to my parents house because my Mom’s Windows ME machine (ME stands for Microsoft’s Empire) stopped displaying icons after I tried to show them Linux the night before. Doh! Turns out the Active Desktop (renamed to Inactive Desktop) was the problem. Once we turned that off the icons showed up and the (insert some derogetory word) E-Machine started showing the icons. *
In short the animals were missing and the icons were missing – but we made due.
* I should note that one of the funniest things Bryce Edwards ever said to me was that Active Desktop should have been named, “Horrible waste of system memory and machine killer.”
WordPress Rocks
As Matt recently posted, WordPress can handle comment spam. I currently have moderation turned on, mostly because I don’t get a lot of comments and I’m in front of my computer all the time. What I really like is the fact that I just got an email showing me the markup of the comment. That comment message had several links in it, including one to do a whois look-up on the IP address, one to accept and another to delete the comment. All from one email. I’m going to install one of the nifty comment plug-ins from the WordPress wiki shortly which should help reduce the already low amount of administration I do. We now return to our normal blog posts.
The Secret to Potty Training
We discovered the secret to potty training for Abigail: Sponge Bob. No, not on Television, not in sticker form (methods that sounded like they’d be effective) – we have Sponge Bob and Patrick on the toilet. Literally. We got a Sponge Bob Squarepants toilet seat and now Abby thinks it’s fun and cool to go to the potty. Moral of the story? Television is from the devil 🙂 If she’d never seen Sponge Bob (my fault) she’d have been just as bored as before with the old potty seet.
Olympics
I’m pleased with the Olympics this year because even though the commentary is just as bad as it was in the political arena, it’s much more palletable. The athletes are doing great over all as well. Abby or course adds a whole new flavor to the Olympics because each event is summed up to one action. Tonight during the men’s high bar event it was, “Swing, swing.” The swimmers are told to, “swim, swim.” And of course the Women’s Beach Volleyball athletes are told to “Put some clothes on!” – but that’s me saying that 🙂
Of course NBC is doing everything they can to make it hard to know when certain events are being aired. Witness the schedule.
8:00 PM OLYMPIC SUMMER GAMES 2004 Primetime
helps so much.
XFN 1.1 Released
The folks at Global Multimedia Protocols Group have released XFN 1.1. Eric Meyer writes about it on his blog: XFN 1.1 Released.
I don’t use XFN a whole lot, and I really should. It’s a nifty way to allow search engines and other data parsers to find out more about a link. If I were to put a link to your blog – what would your XFN relationship to me be?
Bush Blamed for Lack of US Olympic Medals
While it is a little early to tell how the United States Olympic teams will fair, their lack of Olympic Medals is causing some concern. Many Democrats are blaming Bush and the War on Terrorism. A John Kerry representative was quoted as saying:
“Obviously the teams are unable to employ good 'stratigery' due to the distraction of Iraq being so close geographically.”
President Bush or one of his administrative aides were not available for comment.
Olympic officials were glad to see athletes Dollars from other countries competing to show the United States that the sporting community is able to support top-dollar pharmaceutical companies in their search for performance enhancing drugs supplements.
Ticket sales at the Olympic events has been lower than people expected since according to television anchor Bob Costas, “Most of Greece is on a religious holiday and that’s why Olympic ticket sales are down.” Other authorities say ticket sales were down because 1) the Olympics aren’t that cool anymore when compared to the X-Games 2) Attendance was up at Bible Study meetings at hooters and 3) priceline.com was running specials to go see the “Elvis is Alive Museum” guided by William Shatner.