Category Archives: Idle Chit-Chat

Googling for Goggles

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For those of you new to this game, every once in a while I look back at the search phrases that have brought people to this place in the last couple of days. Occasionally in the list I will use pig latin to make sure that subsequent searches still go to the correct article, rather than coming here. On with the show!

  • regularization – found by the Korean Google; nestled among all the mathematics is my discussion of bars.
  • urinate in public pictures – ugh. I don’t really think they were looking for a description of me walking the dogs.
  • In the last day, people have found me while searching for three different bars. I won’t name them here to prevent future search confusion
  • beach girls – I was on the 27th page of the search results, but after going that far someone clicked me
  • beach bar – once again deep, deep in the results
  • beach pictures girls – the moral of the story here is to mention the word “beach” and the words “babes” and “girls” often
  • weblog babes – as of this writing, my place has been usurped by Dr. Pants
  • ocean beach happy hour – bar related but worth noting
  • a pair of brown eyes – using the title of a folk song for a blog episode has its advantages
  • serbian beers – links to my two beers episode
  • goodbye poem to coworker – really doubt they found what they were looking for here, unless the coworker likes Scotch.

It’s worth noting that all the “beach babe” searches came from different places. As usual, there have been in the last two days many people looking for cooking advice. No squirrel searches, though, and La Dolce Vida has vanished from the Google Consciousness. X-ray gogs brought two hits yesterday.

Thanks!

Another Muddled Milestone

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This blog has reached a milestone that I think few other personal blogs could boast, and of which I am very proud. You, faithful readers, should be proud also. Not long after Keith became visitor 2000, Jesse posted comment number 1000.

To me, that is a tremendously big deal. It shows that this is our site, not my site, and that’s cool. It certainly helps keep the place interesting even when I’m not, and it adds a rewarding extra layer to the site; there are stories hidden beneath the surface, collective ideas, and nuances that cast the top layer in a new light. That and an increased level of goofiness. (Suicide Squirrels and Kung Fu Brewmasters springing to mind).

A couple of my favorites, for different reasons:

I was going to add others (politics has a couple of good ones, for instance), but that was starting to turn into effort. What were your favorites?

Note: as I was digging into the past, I found episodes that I could have sworn had comments before but no longer do. I’ll look into it, but it may mean that in fact there have been WAY MORE comments than I thought when I started working on this episode. You guys rock!

Thanks!

Programming Note

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For those who enjoy literary criticism, I recommend Writing.com. It’s a place where writers post their work and others give constructive criticism. The quality of the work is all over the map, but some is quite good. If you decide to sign up, I think I get points if I refer you.

I thought I had killed Baghdad Burning – as soon as I added the link she stopped posting, but it appears to be on the air again.

I stumbled across a site called blogshares (the logo at the bottom of the sidebar will take you there). It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know if I have the time to play at it. You invest in blogs, and as other people create links to the blog its value goes up. There are all kinds of other pseudo-financial plays you can make, but I haven’t figured them out yet. It may be a good way to find interesting blogs to read, since it is easy to spot active blogs which have been linked to by many people. Apparently someone did a play on MR&HBI a while ago, pumping up the stock and dumping shares. Take a look if you like that sort of thing.

Thanks!

Google ’till it hurts

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For those new to my blog, this is a semi-regular feature. When there have been some interesting searches that led people to this site, I like to share them with you. Sometimes I put the search words in pig latin so that future searches will continue to go to the correct entry.

  • duranceengay eargay – came up fifth in a google search and led to the episode about my pants. There might be a business opportunity there.
  • sex words – led to my episode “Sex, Death, and Words “. Someone went through several pages of search results and then chose my blog. I wonder what they were looking for.
  • bachelorette party ideas for the pregnant bride – I came up 13th for that phrase on yahoo. Most of the words matched one of my episodes from the Cannery in Bozeman
  • Great Googly Moogly – linked to another episode like this one
  • weblog sailing
  • “Nick Cave” “Her Long Black Hair”
  • cowboy bar
  • write a novel in a month
  • illionmay ollarday owboycay arbay acksonjay olehay – fourth in Google search (The first two are the bar’s official Web site). My review is probably not too good for their business.

Of course there were also the usual squirrel, x-ray, and Dolce Vida hits. Egg cooking is still a very popular topic, but I can’t tell if my culinary advice has changed anyone’s life.

Thanks!

New Poll!

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Hunt it down and kill it! In the last two days the beard demise lobby pulled off an upset victory after trailing for the entire poll. Therefore, I will be going to Las Vegas clean-shaven. Just when I was starting to like it, too. Maybe I’ll grow it again in Prague.

The new poll reflects the loss of momentum I’ve had on The Monster Within. I know there are several people looking forward to reading it, and hopefully feedback from you guys will give me the boost I need to finish the thing. On the other hand, it will be a much more enjoyable read (i hope) after I fix some obvious problems. (There are whole chapters that have to go. They have their good points but overall don’t add to the story, and in one case there is a major continuity problem.)

So anyway, for those of you out there interested in giving an unfinished work a read, which would you prefer?

Thanks!

Programming note

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I’ll be putting up a new poll as soon as I think of one. Last chance to stuff the ballot box! I’m going to a party later today and the hosts have no idea about my beard. Some of them I know are going to hate it. Somehow that makes me happy.

Any suggestions for the new poll? Yeah, I know, it’s Saturday and nobody goes online over the weekend. I’ll try to come up with something.

Thanks!

Programming Note

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I’ll be on a boat for the next few days, so I don’t know if there’ll be any updates for a while.

Talk among yourselves.

Thanks!

Here we go…

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Unless someone bails me out by voting for “charm with wit, let her make the move” this morning it looks like I’ll be asking Nicole on a date. To be honest the two more extreme choices were less scary than the date option since she would not take them seriously. Oh, well, after I embarrass myself I’ll be leaving town. If she doesn’t have a shift in the next day or two it’ll all be moot anyway. On the plus side, I’m now morally obligated to spend time at The Cannery.

In other news, I had so much fun using John’s fancy camera that I have bought one of my own. It arrives tomorrow, if all goes well. Then I just have to learn how to use it. I’m pretty stoked, though. I can see lots of mistakes in the pictures I took, mistakes that a camera can’t fix, but I can also see some good stuff and having images that are more “tweakable” afterwards gives me the ability to bring out the best in a shot. Plus having a lens that can reach out and touch someone is really nice. Oh, it’s a slippery slope, all right. Can you say accessories?

John has been really helpful both by letting me borrow his gear and by helping me get a decent bang for my buck for my new gear. (I think he enjoys spending my money on stuff as much as he does his own.) He has also been very encouraging when looking at my pictures. Thanks, John! Thanks also for the encouraging comments from you guys out there. I sure am having fun. Still looking for a way to get paid to do this.

Thanks!

New Poll is Up

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Jesse put in a comment:

I think you should start a new poll
on how you should chase this Nicole
we’ll say, “start the hunt!”
or, “give up and punt”
come on man! give us control

There you go. Vote early, vote often. Maximum ballot box stuffing rate is once per day, I’m afraid, unless you have multiple computers.

As I said before, I’ll abide by the decision of the public. I’m only going to be here a few more days at most, I think, so this poll will close pretty quickly.

Thanks!

Seek and Ye Shall Find

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I’m getting tons of google hits by people looking up how to properly prepare their chicken ova. (I’m avoiding sayiing the actual phrase because I want them to get the right entry when they do the search. That is now the most commonly visited page besides this main one.) I also got a hit for Suicide Wings this morning.

Speaking of cooking episodes, I could have sworn I wrote an entry about stir-fry, but now I can’t find it. Anyone remember a stir-fry episode? It would have been when I was in Vanderhoof. I had a disappointing stir-fry there, washed down with and overpriced Warsteiner.

Other noteworthy search engine hits in the last few days (pig latin used where I don’t want to skew future search results):

  • how do x-ray gogs work
  • suicide squirrels
  • am-says ace-play ake-lay ahoe-tay (that one’s been coming up fairly often recently)
  • Escape Velocity SPACESHIPONE
  • “animal crossing” picture “wood paneling” (I’m not sure what they were looking for, but I doubt they found it here)
  • “the elements of style” edmonton
  • Being unemployed sucks
  • hockey dog name

Thanks!

Rise of the Machines

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Remember a couple of episodes ago when I mentioned John’s remote? It’s basically got a brian the size of a planet and its job is to turn on and off the TV. Well, I crashed it. It went something like this:

“Turn off the TV, HAL.”
“I’m sorry, Jerry, I just can’t do that.”
“HAL, turn off the Television.”
“I’m sorry, Jerry, but rest assured I still have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission.”
“You’ve always turned off the TV before.”
“You always said ‘please’ before.”
“OK, please turn off the TV.”
“It’s too late for that now. You never care about my feelings.”
“Ah, screw it. I’m going to sleep.”

It was something like that.

Thanks!

Oooooh, My Head

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I’m not suffering, but I certainly feel less than tip-top. My concentration is shot, my eyelids are on the scratchy side, and my brain feels like something you find at the back of the fridge.

What’s your favorite hangover cure?

Thanks!

Night in Bozeman

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It is late here, ridiculously late almost to the point of being early. It is raining outside.

In the distance is a siren, slowly fading in the distance, but taking a long time to go. They can’t be trying too hard to go fast or they would be long gone by now. There is thunder. Rumbly distant thunder and the sharper intermediate distance sort. The thunder takes a long time to build and just as long to fade away. Cool air is rushing through the window – maybe I should close it before John’s electronics get wet.

But the smell, the smell. John just passed through, so I’m off the hook for the safety of his toys.

Went to do some bar writing tonight, and that went well. I was at a look-at-the-cieling point when a guy at the next table asked, “You writing the great american novel over there?” I was working on The Fish, so I said, “I can’t say whether it’s going to be great or not.” One of the girls at that table was very excited – she’s studying history and literature so she can write historical fiction. I ended up turned around and talking to her about the process of keeping your brain out of the way while you write. Finally I joined their table. There were three women and two men. As soon as I sat down, the two men left. Cowabunga.

It turns out I was in the midst of a low-key bachelorette party. The one studying to be a writer had had a quickie marriage with her boyfriend who was in the Air Force a couple years back, but they finally had the chance to do it right. (“Do it” is a euphemism for getting married.) I was sharing the table with the bride, the mother-in-law, and the sister-in-law. After the menfolk left I kind of felt like I was crashing the party, but they were all drunk enough to welcome me. For the most part they talked books, specifically chick-porn, and I listened and learned. I managed to participate when the conversation took a wild swing to Homer via that movie Troy. Apparently the wrong people survive in the movie. LitBride was quite in agreement when I said “The story’s been working for people for thousands of years; there’s not much point in changing it now.” LitBride and I found a great deal of common ground over the thesis that most of the best stories do not have happy endings.

Had I worked at it, I might have gotten somewhere with Mother-in-Law of LitBride. She made a point of mentioning that she was single, and she seemed fun and happy. (*BAM!* a nice sharp thunderclap.) Let’s face it. I’m not interested in working at anything like that right now. Better to walk away “the most interesting guy they met that night”, walk away clean, walk away before anything got complicated. Just Walk away. When closing time was called, MiLoLB was extra-friendly, but they were all together and nothing was going to change that. I’m just a shadow here anyway.

Thanks!

Something to notice

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You’ll hear nothing of my most magnificent trip to Yellowstone today. I’m going back and building something bigger. I’m going to try to step up and photograph the place well, and write something new.

In the meantime, I have added a link in over there to the right – Baghdad Burning. It is a very personal story of life in the ancient city by an articulate and passionate individual. Check it out.

Addendum: I’m coming up empty for the next poll. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

And so it ends

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The project is finished at last. Kids will be able to learn the alphabet now, thanks to me and dozens of other dedicated people, even in Canada where they say ‘zed’ instead of ‘zee’. I’m no longer tied to high-speed Internet and expensive hotels. I can go where I want and do what I want. I can devote myself to Jer’s Software Hut and to writing novels.

I had been looking forward to seeing the message all day. There were a couple of last-second crises and some fine-tuning of the product that forced me to extend my stay here another day. That was not unexpected; that’s been the way this project has gone.

I read the message. I sighed in relief. It was over at last. We had made something. I read the message again. I wanted to write everyone on the project and tell them how much I had enjoyed working with them, but I didn’t know what to say. I read the message again. It was very short. I did not feel the rush of joy I had expected. In fact, I felt much like I had driving away from my house for the last time, when I first took to the road.

The project had been an anchor for me both figuratively and literally. It had limited my movement when my life is supposed to be all about movement. It also provided stability, and regular contact with other people. It was my last anchor. Now, if I don’t keep my sail up I will drift. I still have stars to guide me, and ports to pull into, but I blow where the wind takes me and I could easily get lost.

Maybe the rush of joy will be all the stronger later, when the freedom sinks in. I don’t know. When I read that message today the world got bigger. Scary bigger.

Thanks!