Search Bombs

A typical morning often finds me getting online and checking the news and reading some blogs before I head to work. This past week, I read an blog written by Jeremy Zawodny titled "You're welcome to google on Yahoo." The entry was in response to Google's attempt to get people to not overly generalize the word "google" which got a lot of attention this week because Google blogged about it on their official site (even though the news itself is actually pretty old).
As I was listening to the radio on the way to work, the reporter started to talk about "google bombs". My first thought was that people might be trying to hack Google, but then I realize that they were talking about search engines being tricked by political campaigns to return negative attacks on opposition candidates. The tactic is that if you are X running against Y then you put up a lot of pages that speaks negatively about Y so that when users search for "Y" they would find bad things written by X. This really didn't have anything to do with Google and has a distinctly negative connotation.

It is this type of usage that I believe Google is trying to prevent against. Imagine what other companies might do if their names were being used completely out-of-context in a negative way... Although I often find that people give Google a little too much credit, in this case I actually admire that they attempted to explain their action to the public in a way to help people understand. Too often, the languages use by company when they try to justify their actions are either too full of legal speak or they just don't say anything to the public at all.

Lost Season 3

I just watched the season 3 premier of Lost and while it was a pretty good episode, I can't help but keep thinking... "Why is Jack being such a cry baby...?"

Volkswagon commercials

Those new Volkswagon commercial really annoy me.  It seems to be a scare tactic because the commercial doesn't really give information on what might make their cars safer then others.  In fact, can't I interpret their commercial to mean that if I own an Volkswagon then I'm more likely to get into a car accident?

Updated Homepage

After nearly 5 years, I finally made a major update to the homepage. Some might be wondering what the heck I'm smoking since the page looks nearly identical to the previous version and that was the intention. The changes were mostly under the covers as I dragged myself into the modern web layout world by going with a CSS table-less layout. Besides learning more about CSS layout, there are other benefits.

• The code layout is better as the content and presentation is better seperated and there are no more inline CSS styles.


• The size of the download has been reduced by nearly 50% although I did include some YUI CSS libraries to help clean up the fonts. This brought the initial size to about the original but once the page is loaded the first time those libraries won't be downloaded again.


• The page should look consistent between IE and Mozilla. By applying a different stylesheet, the page should also render in other devices.

It was more difficult to code, however, but that could be that the original was such as simple table design.

It's good to give myself a refresher on CSS and layout. I've been looking at more advanced JavaScript such as OOP Javascript and DOM manipulation, so hopefully I'll be able to find some time to experiment some on the site soon.