Monday 16 August 1999
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Pic of the day: "The road goes ever on and on" ... Tala is not the only one who loves road pictures. I tend to take a lot of them, preferably small country roads and preferably with lots of vegetation around. Luckily, this is a common sight around here. AltaVista hates me. How else would you explain that they now have booted me from their index for the second time in under a year? The world's leading search index is not content with avoiding me; they actively boot me off without a warning, a few months after I manually re-submitted my site. Of course I have no submitted again. But I am not by nature a very submissive person, and this time it is personal. Be warned! AltaVista distorts the virtual reality of the Web, based on un-published prejudices. Switch to HotBot, which has found my website by themselves and updated it faithfully without any intervention on my behalf. For good measure click on all their ads too, to show your support for a holistic search engine without personal grudges! OK, I guess I got carried away a little bit there. But I cannot start to guess why they would kick an active (quite active) site off their index, while retaining dead links and pages that are updated far less often. Unless they are manually removing offensive sites. So, am I seducing the innocent with violence, sex and addictive substances? I admit that my index page picture may look suspicious. But the handgun on the right side is actually just an airgun, painful but hardly lethal unless fired close up on your eyes or throat or some such. And the cuddly yellow butt in the upper left corner is mine, which sort of disqualifies it from any orgies in the foreseeable future. OK, the cow picture is from Daggerfall, which has been demonstrated to be addictive; but as far as I know, it is still legal in most civilized countries. And for some reason, my dedicated Daggerfall site is still indexed by AltaVista. (Though I have not been able to access it for a few days now. If dvMUD stays offline, I am going to assume they have folded and move my site yet another place. I hope not, since people probably have it bookmarked by now.) You'd think the Illustrated Guide to Daggerfall Nudity would be removed before my humble diary...
In vaguely related news, my short essay on the
Flynn effect
is pretty near the top when you search for "Flynn effect" on AltaVista.
Except the site belongs (or rather belonged) to some helpful guy who
decided to spread the word by copying my page verbatim. I guess it is
time to upgrade the old saying. The sincerest form of flattery is no
longer imitation, but cut and paste. My corresponding page, of course,
was nowhere to be found. :)
The inflammation under my right eye keeps it fragile hold. I am decided to not go for medical treatment as long as I don't have a fever, but I guess I should try to get some more than average sleep. Even if that means I can't hang out with the nice journal girls on IRC so much. Oh well. A couple of them use to show up before midnight. I have no idea why they find it easier to chat than to update - with me it's the other way around - but of course, they aren't me. Which is some of the charm, I guess. |
Song of the day: "One and One". I won't comment on it today.
One of the old PCs at work started making weird noises. We opened it and out came a cat's fur worth of collected dust. Choke. Splutter. It ran fine afterwards, though. |