Tag: Internet

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Journal News

I will be eliminating , my Russian journal. I will repost some of the stuff from there in .
In addition to badly floundering community, I just created . I’ll put my subway rants there. While there will be few subscribers, I will be crossposting in my own journal.

Unfortunately, there is no “plugging” mechanism in livejournal. I would love to get more readers, but there is no easy way to promote my journal and communities. I think I’ve seen a post about a feature like that in someone’s blog, but I can’t find the link. I need a good url manager. In any way, plugs are appreciated here, at Deadprogrammer Inc.

Also, here’s a beef I have with you, readers. Every time I ask for some interesting blog recommendations you are silent. What’s up with that? Don’t you know any good journals?

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Joko the Lawn Jockey

Immediately after landing in Manhattan, the delegation form Lawn Jockey planet demanded to see our leader.

Interesting, this ubiquitous lawn ornament seems to have an interesting history. It’s also interesting how almost all Jockos I’ve ever seen in New York (including in this stunning collection) were white. And I’ve seen a lot of them when I had a job delivering ad papers in many neighborhoods of Brooklyn. (Yes, I delivered paper spam).

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That’s a Paddlin’.


Writing about “interesting” spam … That’s a paddlin’.
Using pictures of the family cat as userpics … That’s a paddlin’.
Using a black background / white text or a crazy background image … That’s a paddlin’.
Reposting memepool or slashdot links … That’s a paddlin’.
Writing “I never post quizzes, but I am going to make an exception for this one” … Oh, you’d better believe that’s a paddlin’.

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Michael and Friends

The number of ljusers who added me to their friends list has reached 100. There are probably some more people who read me through “friends of friends” newsfeeds and non-lj aggregators (I think I saw a poll answer from and somewhere). And I bet there are some inactive ljusers who still have me added. Nevertheless, it’s a nice round number. Woohooo!

I think the number of friends would be much larger for me if I automatically added those, who added me. That is probably true in real life as well. I should know – I am down to only two close friends who keep in touch with me right now. One of them is my dentist ( a childhood friend). In fact, I am typing this on my laptop while in his waiting room. The rest don’t call me unless I call them, lost contact with me altogether or got married to people I can’t stand and became too much like them. None of my real life friends (except my wife) read my journal.

In any case, now that there are more people reading me, I am going to try to use them as information resource. I could do that on Usenet but posting to Usenet is a pain in the ass for a variety of reasons. Google answers costs money (although I think about trying that). So I in addition to wildly informative and awesome WML (What Michael Learned) type posts I am adding a mildly annoying WMW (What Michael Wants (to know)) category. Stay tuned.

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Studly Matters

Brooklyn College officials like to put their full titles into the from field of the email. For instance, I used to get emails from “Alice Newcomb-Doyle, Public Relations” [..@brooklyn.cuny.edu] because I am on some email list. Well, now the name has changed into something funny – “Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Stud,” [..@brooklyn.cuny.edu]. I guess there is a character limit.

This is doubly funny, because before checking email I was playing with a stud finder device that I recently purchased from Radio Shack.

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What’s wrong with PigeonRankTM?

Is it just me, or did Google start sucking?
The relevance of search results is not nearly what it used to be..

My grievances:

a) Google does not crawl livejournal and I think other blogs as well. And robots.txt does not have anything to do with it. I made sure that my robots.txt permits crawlers and even submitted the url to Google, but I am not in there (except for the about page). I guess this is because of “google bombing”, but I think that it does more harm than good. Livejournal contains a lot of useful information, but is unsearchable!

b)That stupid javascript that “focuses” on Google’s search bar when the page loads. This makes me want to remove Google from my start page. It just sucks.

c) Google does not respect quotes and has weird ideas about commonly used short words and punctuation. For instance if you search for “to-do”, resulting pages won’t even have “to-do” in them. Even if you use advanced search “with the exact phrase”.

Hrrrmpf. Stupid pigeons. I think it’s all because of those PHDs. Come on, 50 PHDs working in a company? That can’t be good.

I wonder, if I write Sergey, will he answer?