Disney 'Fight Club'

There seems to be a disturbance in the "Disney" force and all is not right with the world. Characters are taking to the streets attacking young children and brutally fighting amongst themselves. Thankfully we have aggressive mothers positioned at key Disney locations around the globe ready to thwart these villains as they wreak havoc and wield their mayhem on the unsuspecting public at large.

The Precor Challenge

I never thought I would be investing in gym equipment but I guess you never really know what your future will hold. My wife and I are really getting into the gym thing and as such are purchasing some Precor strength and cardio equipment. As I will be commuting to NYC now, I had the choice of working out at 4:00AM, at lunch, or at 8:00PM. I don't think I could handle 4:00AM workouts and chewing up an hour and a half at lunch just starting a new job was not an ideal situation either, so I came up with a solution - buy some equipment.

The plan is to get in a cardio every morning and strength training three to four times a week. Two at work and two at home. To this end we purchased a Precor EFX elliptical trainer and a Precor home gym, both of which will be delivered this Saturday just in time for me to go back to work.

I have to say I haven't been this excited about working out - ever. But I think that my wife and I have made great strides over the past few months and I want to keep the momentum going.

Google History

With all the media hype surrounding Google at the moment, I thought people might like to see where this all started and dig up a little dirt on Sergey Brin.

PC EZ-Bake Oven

When I saw the PC EZ-Bake Oven I knew I had to have one. I know there are a lot of people in cube-land who have been dreaming of such an invention to come along and save them from the 2:00 PM hunger pangs of Corporate mediocrity.

Someone I used to work with often stated that she was going to bring in her Easy Bake oven and whip up some sheet cakes for the team. Actually, I think she was trying to compete with the burning popcorn stench that always accompanied the closing hours of the day.

At any rate, as I'm sure you have all gathered, this is not an actual PC mod but a terrific April Fools day hoax. A great one in a long line of fakes:

• Gastron® - Remote Controlled Hunger Eliminator
• PC HabiCase - Small Furry Animal Paradise
• Pet Computer Viruses - Starter Collection
• CaffeDerm Patch - Wean Yourself Off Caffeine At Your Own Pace

Google has a few too:

• PigeonRank (last year's offering)
• Google's Lunar Job
• an IPO
• and, GMail (oh wait, that's no joke, or is it???)

I would venture that there will be more to come. Check out this partial list from Gizmodo.

Ah, I love this time of year.

Google Page Rank Lunacy

Mike Grehan has posted a very telling article entitled - Google PageRank Lunacy over at SearchEngineWatch.com that speaks volumes to the comment spam craze and the need for restraint when seeking Google PageRank.

I myself have been struck with an urge to increase my PageRank (why I have no idea), but have not been so inclined, as many obviously are, to program a spam bot to post comments to guest books and web logs containing links back to my web site.

As explained in Grehan's article, Google no longer values these links as much as before.

I have a friend in the business who said that she could help me raise my PageRank with Google, but questioned me as to why? I had not given it much thought until now and it seems that it is a definite ego thing.

More green bar, must see more green bar... PageRank 1/10, am I really that irrelevant. I think not.

UPDATE: March 21, 2004 - My Google PageRank has once again returned to 4/10. I also have some 120 pages indexed. It appears that my link strategy has paid off. Either that, or it just took a while for the GoogleBot to settle down and dive in for the deep crawl. At any rate, my ego is a little less bruised.

He's Dead? (grateful)

All this time Saddam was hiding out on Dead Tour...not in a spider hole as the media pundits would have you believe.

I knew I saw him out in Alpine for the reunion...did anyone else?

Fax machine SPAM

Well I finally got around to replacing the ink cartridges in my Canon MultiPass fax/scanner/printer/multi thingy (it had been about 6 months) and no sooner had I set the cover in place it started ripping off faxes. Stored in memory I guess, but about 15 faxes came out before I finally unplugged the thing...

All of it Fax SPAM...

Everything from mortgage offers to health coverage to get rich quick stock analyzer recommendations. The best one was an offer for ink jet cartridges, like the spammers knew I needed it or something.

Luckily at the end of every fax there was a handy 800 number to call and be removed from the database. On the first call I was greeted with a calm female voice instructing me, "If you would like to be removed, Press 1". Simple enough, right, enter my fax number, punch the # sign and I was removed from their database (in approximately 7 days). Now only 14 more 800 numbers to call...

On to call number two... A familiar female voice greeted me when my call was connected, "If you would like to be removed, Press 1". Hey wait a minute, I know you. Why can't you remove me from all of your fax spam databases...

Then it hit me, why isn't there an email address you can send your email address to and be removed from all email spammer databases like an Internet Do Not Call database. What a brilliant and original idea I thought, and then I remembered.... SPAMMERS ARE SCUM.