Saturday, April 24, 2004

I'm off to Amsterdam. Take care of the US while I'm gone!  

A fantastic mosaic of pictures of soldiers who died in Iraq form an aggregate picture of the 43rd President of the United States. 

I'll play too. From Let's Go France, 2004, page 23, sentence 5: "For a basic first-aid kit, pack: bandages, pain reliever, antibiotic cream, a thermometer, a Swiss Army knife, tweezers, moleskin, decongestent, motion sickness remedy, diarrhea or upset-stomach medication (Pepto Bismol or Immodium), an antihistimine, sunscreen, insect repellent, burn ointment, and a syringe for emergencies (get an explanatory letter from your doctor). 1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. 

I don't know I kind of like the lobster look.  

Gigablast is a fast search engine. It's not using the same ranking algorithm as Google. At first I thought it was, but some of my standard searches show radically different results. Overall I really like it. It's designed to make transitioning from Google as painless as possible. And it compares favorably to Google in clutter. Google is going down the same path that Altavista went down, adding lots of doo-dads and paid distractions that take you away from the search results, which is the reason we use a search engine.  

Search Engine Watch interview with Gigablast developer Matt Wells. 

RSS tutorial for ASP.Net developers. 

Shelley Powers on transitioning from Movable Type to WordPress. 

Steve Gillmor interviews Google's Sergey Brin. 

NY Times: "Google outflanked all of the Web portals and Internet providers by gaining loyalty from Web surfers who found it a very fast and impartial pointer to any information to be found on the Internet." 

A wire service story that has nothing to do with Google.  

Two Jewish guys and a Catholic church 

Two Jewish guys pass a Catholic church. A sign out front says "Convert to Catholicism and we'll pay you $250."

"I don't know," says one of the Jews to the other. "That's mighty tempting."

A few days later the sign offers a bounty of $500 to convert. "That's hard to pass up," he says.

When they pass the church the next day the price is up to $1000. "That's it. I'm going in." The other guy waits, a few hours pass, his friend comes out and he asks "Is it true, did they pay you $1000 to convert?" The other guy asks "Is that all you people ever think about?"