Month: June 2008

Pregnant wife bonus

One of the nice things about having a pregnant wife is that, when a recipe calls for white wine, she can’t help you finish the bottle. Just kidding. We have a bottle of white wine, a 2006 Primaterra pinot grigio. So, now we can calculate the Complaint Hub Wine Score.

  1. Alcohol Review gives it 3.25 stars. We’ll convert that to a 100 point scale, multiplying by 20 to get 65. They say it costs $7, and it was on sale at Whole Foods, so we’ll give it a PPD of 9.29. That’s a pretty decent score.
  2. It’s Italian, so no California Penalty.
  3. Again, no Australia or New Zealand Bonus.
  4. It’s got a pretty solid label. It’s a cheap wine, so I don’t expect much, and the label is different, but it’s not doofy. Plus 10.
  5. Multiply by Planck’s Constant.
  6. Planck’s Constant is really small. No one wants a wine score in scientific notation. So let’s open up Open Office Spreadsheet and do some formula magic. First, let’s take the arc cotangent, which gives us 1.57. You can quibble about significant digits in the comments.
  7. That’s still not a good number. So we divide one by the natural log of that, which gives us 2.21.
  8. I’m not a huge fan of white wine, so let’s multiply by 50 and subtract a 25 point White Wine Penalty.
    Then we round down, because the digits after the decimal were never really significant anyway. And we’re left with 63. So you see, this is clearly a good wine rating system, since it’s right in line with the score from another website! The wine tastes fine. Not too sweet, not too dry. It pairs well with a seitan picatta from Veggie Times. It probably has some flavor notes of something. Maybe fruit? White’s usually have fruit notes, right? In conclusion, it’s a nice value at $7.

Out of curiosity

For those of you who read the site via the actual front page, rather than the RSS feed (Which, if Google Analytics and Feedburner are accurate and I’m reading the numbers correctly, is about 1/3 of you), do you ever look at “What I’m reading” on the right side of the page? These are things I’ve come across on my RSS feed that I find interesting, but don’t really have anything to say about. I’m going to keep sharing things there regardless of who’s reading, because I know at the very least, Mike looks at them on his Google Reader, and sharing them takes virtually no effort on my part. But I was curious if anyone looks at them, or has maybe found a site they didn’t otherwise know about through them.

Looking for a present for me?

Gizmodo | Knight Rider GPS With KITT’s Voice!

Apparently, you will recognize his familiar voice as soon as you fire it up and hear “Hello Michael, where do you want to go today?”

The wife doesn’t think this is awesome, which would be grounds for divorce if she wasn’t so cool otherwise. But this is a GPS that gives you directions with KITT’s voice. There are two things that would be cooler. One, if you could get it to say your own name instead of “Michael”. Although it would be cool if it asked where Michael was now and then. And two, the whole turbo-boost, auto-drive, and bullet-proof-ness of KITT would be pretty awesome. But I guess that’s a little much to ask from a $300 device.

Hey, people like Drupal and SEO

A bunch of hits on the last post, especially for a Friday night. It looks like people are watching stuff tagged with “Drupal” or “SEO” or something like that. Anyway, at the advice of the commenters, I’ve replaced trackback with pingback, which requires less (no) effort and still accomplishes that two-way link between me and anyone who happens to link to me. I also tweaked my robots.txt file. So, we’ll see what happens. Now I just have to keep writing things that people find interesting. Or, you know, start.

Drupal, SEO, and you

I’ve been getting annoyed by a few things about this blog. First, in the last sixty days, exactly 28% of the pageviews on the site are one page – the community bitch page about Vector Security. The percentage is even higher if you include some other random pages that come up on a Google search for “vector security” and related terms. Which brings me to the second point – Drupal’s default “Clean URLs” are crap for search engine indexing. If none of this makes sense to you, stop reading now. Go read something else, like Bad Astronomy Blog or Whatever or any of the other millions of blogs out there. Some of them are certainly talking about something that interests you. But if you’re interested in what I’m doing to help people find me, read on. I want people to find me based on stuff I write about a lot – complaining, sports, probably some politics when we get closer to November. I appreciate the people who come here looking for Vector Security, but that’s not really my focus here. So I took some steps to become more search-engine-friendly. SEO, if you will. First, I installed multiping. By default, Drupal isn’t that good at pinging Technorati and whatnot. I think you can set it up with cron, but I don’t understand cron, and don’t feel like learning. Multiping takes the cron out of pinging. Now, Technorati gets updates whenever I post, and they can share my posts with the world. Then I added trackbacks. Trackbacks are one of those things, like the Metric system, that sound like a really good idea, but depend on widespread adoption to really succeed. But I figure it can’t hurt to be trackback-enabled. And I added pathauto. Now, the link for this post (As opposed to the link to the front page) is complainthub.com/blog/drupal-seo-and-you instead of complainthub.com/node/943. This is much more informative, and I think it’s much better for search engine indexing. So we’ll see how it goes. Either it will be awesome, and my traffic will go through the roof, or it will be exactly the same. Or somewhere in between. I’m betting on somewhere in between.

So we meet again

ShysterBall | Cito Gaston’s Second Coming

Gibbons is out in Toronto. Cito is back!

I hate Cito Gaston. Ever since the 1993 All Star Game, when he picked half the Blue Jays team and didn’t put hometown hero (Well, before he jumped ship to the Yankees) Mike Mussina into the game, I’ve hoped that bad things would happen to him. Not bad like losing a limb or a child or anything like that, but bad like losing an inordinate amount of socks in the dryer, or living next door to a really bad teenage garage band. And now he’s back as the manager of the Blue Jays. He was reasonably successful ten to fifteen years ago, but that’s a long time ago. Anyway, I wish him the worst possible luck in his continued management career. But, you know, nothing really bad.

Email Etiquette

We have a user email list at work that people can send mail to and have it distributed based on some permission algorithm that I don’t understand. It’s convenient for system status updates and whatnot. Today, someone with a higher admin level than I would have expected him to have sent an email FROM that email address to about 60 people. Within thirty seconds, I had fourteen autoreply emails from people on the list who were out of the office. Within ten minutes, the number had jumped to 29. First of all, why in the world are 50% of the people in that organization (The State Department) who use our tool out of the office? Second of all, who sends an email FROM a group address? It just means that any replies go to all, even if the replier doesn’t hit “reply all”. Third of all, it’s 3pm on Friday. I should totally not be thinking about work anymore.

More spam poetry

A 21-YEAR-OLD man has gone missing after a night out in a city centre. Police are searching for Jonathan Jenkins who was last seen in Wind Street in the centre of Swansea last Sunday evening. Mr Jenkins, of Townhill, Swansea, was reported missing some time after he left a city centre pub to have a cigarette. A spokesman for Swansea Police said, ?He was in So Bar, in Wind Street, when he went for a cigarette outside at about 9.30pm, and he has not been seen since.¦ There is safe variant to have cigarettes from here:

This is the text of a spam comment I got on one of my older posts. It also included some links to buy cheap cigarettes online, which I won’t include here. It’s interesting that the spammers are starting to tell little stories about what they’re trying to sell you. This one is topical (More and more states, counties, and countries are banning smoking inside), pertinent (It talks about cigarettes, and then tries to sell them to me!), and slightly incoherent. I’ve never understood why they don’t edit these things. If they had posted this with no grammatical mistakes and only one link, it probably would have gotten through my spam filter. Anyway, just thought I’d share the comment before I deleted it. Here’s another.

Wednesday, 9am – A discarded cigarette caused a car to catch fire in Great Ponton, near Grantham, last night. The owner of the BMW Z3 extinguished the fire with a powder extinguisher by the time firefighters from Grantham arrived on the scene at around 6.15pm. The engine compartment was damaged in the fire. Be careful while smoking! Follow the smoking instruction here:

My scale goes to 10,000

Vinotrip | The Search For A Wine Rating System That Makes Sense

No longer must two wines be tied at 90, leaving intrepid point chasers scratching their heads while they decide which wine will impress their friends more. The tie can be broken, with one wine receiving a 904.5 and the other falling short at 901.9. Finally, the question can be answered: which wine is better?

I like my wine to be scored. That way, I can make an entirely mathematical decision on my purchase.

  1. Calculate the Points Per Dollar value (PPD): If the score is 92 and the wine costs $12.99, the DPP is 7.08.
  2. Subtract the California Penalty: My first introduction to California wines was Beringer and the like, and I’ve never quite forgiven the state, even though it does produce some great wines
  3. Add the Australia Bonus and the lesser New Zealand bonus : We went to Australia and New Zealand on our honeymoon and took a wine tour in Australia’s Barossa Valley, so I’m always partial to their wine. As an aside, “Zealand” is not in Firefox’s default dictionary. Weird.
  4. Add the label adjustment: The label should be interesting, but not too cutesy. If you have a cool label, you get a bonus. If you made a label you want me to think is cool, or if you phoned it in, you get demerits.
  5. Multiply by Planck’s Constant.
  6. Realize the wife, who can’t drink the wine until the baby is born, is getting antsy.
  7. Buy the bottle of Rosemount Shiraz on sale for $8.99.
    Actually, I should probably just keep heading over to Vinotrip for scores.

Hooray for placenta migration!

Just got back from our final sonogram appointment. The wife’s placenta, which was too close to the cervix at the last appointment, has migrated into a perfectly normal spot. Had it not moved, we would have had to schedule a C-section, which we really didn’t want. I mean, sure, if it’s the choice between C-section and serious danger to mother or child, we’ll take the C-section. Anyway, we’re both quite pleased. Her more than me, I imagine, since she’s the one who would have had her stomach cut open.