Well it seems that someone at AOL, in the form of CTO Maureen Govern, has taken resposibility for the ‘special kinda stupid’ move of releasing customer search data.  I have a feeling she’s going to be ‘spending time with her family’ for awhile… a long while.

AOL chief technology officer resigns: sources – Yahoo! News

I’m generally very pesimistic about those search engine optimzation (SEO) ‘consultants’.  Frankly, I rate them somewhere between snake oil and used car salesmen.  My basic premise is that if your content doesn’t suck, people will link to you and then you will naturally rise in the search results.  Basic natural selection.

However, there are some basic hints that will improve the general ‘search engine friendliness’ of your blog.  The article below is a good collection of these hints and it includes code examples for Moveable Type and WordPress to implement the hints.  Good stuff.

Optimizing your blog for search engines

While not a new concept this is a particularlly interesting implementation of the ‘internet speed test’.

Speedtest.net

I work with someone who can only be described as a ‘colorful character’. She swears like a drunken sailor and speaks her mind without being hindered by social filters. If you really want to know how your hair looks, just ask her. 😉 She is a pure spirit, I wish more folks were as refreshingly open and honest as she.

She has a long history of working at radio stations, including a large group of stations based in Boston, that required her to travel to the other stations. She is a Boston girl, through and through, with an accent and manner to match. When she visited a station ‘down south’ they were so enamoured with her Yankee persona they just had to get her on tape. She offered to record a joke for them to play on the station. Unknown to her, they had a record delay in the headphone line so that what she heard was several seconds behind what she was saying.

That threw her off a bit. 😉 Continue reading Yankee on Delay →

In case you were wondering what to bring to feed the squirrels in Boston Common you can scratch grape lollipops off your list.

When offered an (unwrapped) ‘grape’ lollipop; ‘he’ came, he tasted and he ran away.

There you have it, one out of one squirrels do not like grape lollipops.^*

^* Margin of error +/- 100%

That’s “command line interface” for the non-geeks in the house; aka ‘cmd prompt’, aka ‘dos box’, aka ‘C prompt’…

I saw this bumper sticker the other day.

It will come as a surprize to no one that it was not attached to an American car.