Chris Meller

I read a blog the other day that asked the question “Since when was Good Friday a f***ing holiday?!”. While I am happy to have gotten the day off to laze around and do nothing more productive than go to el eye doctor, I have to agree. There was a time I remember that no one got Good Friday off except banks and the government (which gets every other week off for one holiday or another). In recent years, however, it seems that more and more corporations have begun to adopt Good Friday as a standard holiday. What? Are there actually executives sitting around saying to themselves “Well, we’ve got to give them Good Friday off, or they’ll just all take it off anyway”? I was astounded at the number of empty parking lots (including our own) that I saw while trying to run a few errands on Friday. What’s going on here? Have we lost sight of the separation of church and state (and to a lesser degree, business)?

So I ask you, why is this a holiday?

Basically, Good Friday represents the day in which Jesus was led away to be crucified, following Pilate’s sentence of death. Now, the entire Easter “holiday” has always amazed me. Whereas Christmas generally represents the birth of Jesus Christ, on Easter we chose to celebrate something wholly depressing as we slowly make our way into Spring. As the colors around us are changing, becoming ever brighter, and as we slowly peek our heads back outside after being cramped up indoors all winter, we choose not to celebrate the environment that’s coming to life around us, but rather to dwell upon the death of someone that [we] worshiped.

If anyone can point out the logic to this, please enlighten me. I’m sorry, but as I’m just coming out of a long dark winter, in which many people become overly depressed, I don’t particularly care to focus on something else depressing as I’m just starting to feel my head come back above water.

Even if I were a “believer”, I don’t know that I’d want to “celebrate” something that didn’t really deserve celebration, nor that I would give my employees an extra day off of work for such a celebration, which brings me back to my actual point. With all the horror going on around us on a daily basis, you only hear about the bad news the majority of the time. We’re constantly flooded with the fact that the entire human race is going downhill and becoming more and more evil, yet somehow we seem to have developed more Christians despite it, thus causing this non-holiday to become an actual holiday which we get off work.

If anyone can explain to me why it seems that our entire city is getting this day off work, please, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment to this post!

As you’ve no doubt noticed, I have a new blog. Even before I was finished writing my previous entry about how Blogger Sucks, I was already moving to a new blog management system. After doing a little research, a couple of searches (with my new favorite search engine, Yahoo! of course!), and checking to see what some of the blogs I frequent use, I have decided upon WordPress.

Not only was it incredibly simple to setup and begin using (even simpler than Blogger was, arg!), but it was also very well written and a very had an overall very attractive default skin, which I had no real desire to change. Unlike other CMSs (Content Management Systems), I didn’t think the default skin and template were ugly as balls (*cough* PHPNuke *cough cough*). This may change in the future, so don’t be surprised if everything randomly changes a couple of times in the next few days to weeks.

One of the primary benefits of switching to WordPress is the built in RSS feed generator. With this new feed, all 2 readers of my blog should find it much easier to keep up with new entries.

As usual, if you have any suggestions, drop me an email, or feel free to leave a comment on any one of my posts.

Daily Rating: 6

Yeah, you heard me right. Blogger sucks. I’ve been reading up on blogs, and catching up on the whole blog movement lately. I figured that since I was now writing one of my own boring blogs nearly daily now, that I should probably get myself out there and see what other people are blogging about, and what kind of style they use when doing it.

Well, amid my quest, I decided that I’d actually check out Blogger. Not only do several of the blogs I’m now regularly keeping up with use Blogger to publish their content, but Blogger is also a service designed specifically for that task, providing RSS feeds and everything. Rather than continuing to write my own code to maintain my blog, and rather than figuring out how to write an RSS feed for it, I decided I’d try and adopt one of these free services to do it for me.

So off I went to Blogger’s website [blogger.com], and started trying to create my new user account. It was after meeting an error that I realized I already had a user account at Blogger, which I created oh so long ago, in its infancy. So I go back and log in to my existing account and start poking around. I soon realize that Blogger is not the paradise I’d come to expect it to be; far from it, in fact.

Not only are many of the things offered confusing, even to me, a hardened IT “professional”, but I don’t know how on earth any normal laymen would be able to setup this service. I expected to spend 30 seconds setting up my new blog, and after 5 minutes, I gave up. Where I expected to be able to select a simple pre-packaged template I liked at first and edit it later, there was no apparent method of doing so. I know I must have missed something, but nowhere could I find a set of templates available for public use. Before you start whining about not reading the help or being patient enough, no, I didn’t read the help, and the entire idea behind going to Blogger was the fact that I didn’t have to be patient. I could get my ideas and my insanity online instantly. I’m all about instant gratification…

So yes, my official opinion of Blogger is this: Blogger SUCKS!

So now that we’ve established how badly Blogger sucks, and how I’ll sit back and use my own code from now on without remorse, let’s talk about my Easter, shall we? Good, that’s what I thought…

So you’re probably wondering what I did on Easter… Well, allow me to inform you. I slept until noon, after being up until 2:00 this morning watching Wimbledon, which was actually a very good movie (more on that coming at a later date most likely). After which, I woke up and drowned myself in some leftover coffee from this morning when my mom got up to go to the sunrise service at church. Which brings me to my first point. What’s with going to a sunrise service on Easter Sunday? I’m not seeing how this is supposedly significant. What does sunrise have to do with anything? If you happen to have the inside insight into the religious significance of this early-morning venture, please, let me know!

Well, whatever the reason, we’ll move along from this one… After drowning myself in coffee, I took a shower, and took my brother down to our grandparents’ house, where the entire family gathers on virtually every holiday. And this brings us to my next point. I’ve started trying my hardest to avoid family reunions of this sort, because every time I go to one, I either get asked to help fix some kind of computer problem, or someone asks me to give them an old computer. I’m so sick of having to turn people down nicely, because they all seem to think that I have nothing to do EVER, and that I’ve got so many computers I can’t possibly be using all of them.

This common opinion represents two widely-spread misconceptions. First off, I’m a very busy person. There are not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I need to accomplish. Simply because I sit at work all day in front of a computer and then come home and sit down in front of one somewhere in the house doesn’t mean I’m wasting my time doing nothing of importance. Just because the public at large cannot tell what I’m working on all that time doesn’t mean it’s not of value. Not only am I constantly working on PHP code for my own websites, but I’m also constantly designing small pieces of code and other assorted items for a few clients I have. I also administer a server that several clients use, and a few public-service type services for a larger community of friends. All of these things take very little time in and of themselves (most of the time anyway), but when you start combining them, they grow into what could almost certainly become a full time job, in addition to my existing full time job and going to school full time in the evenings.

The second common misconception is that with all of the computer equipment I own and operate, I can’t possibly be using it all. This is also very false. Allow me to outline the pieces of equipment I own: (1) IPCop firewall, (2) Fedora development web / database server, (3) Linux test server (4) Windows 2000 file server, (5) Fedora desktop machine, (6) Windows XP desktop machine, (7) Mac OS X iBook laptop, (8) Fedora / Windows XP laptop [coming tomorrow]. Now, as you can see, al of these machines are slightly different. Most of them (such as the firewall and test and development servers) are very old, very slow boxes that perform the tasks they’re currently assigned very well, but would be unsuited to anything more stressful. The few machines I have that would be suitable as actual desktop machines for a regular web browser and email swapper (such as the file server and my two desktops) are much more valuable to me in their current capacities, so that I may continue to perform my daily tasks as required, than they would be to someone who turned them on once a month only to send an email and gripe about how long it took for it to come up.

I’m serious, I’m sick of people at work asking me to come fix their computers, then not willing to be flexible around my schedule. Look, I’m not terribly thrilled about fixing it to begin with, and I’m doing this purely out of guilt and a sense of obligation. The least you could do is beg me for help. After all, if I don’t do it (most of the time for free, as people assume I don’t have anything better to do), you’ll either not get it done, or you’ll take it somewhere and have them charge you a fortune to do it. Either way, you’re coming out much better by taking advantage of me, and it wouldn’t hurt for you to show a little appreciation for my time spent.

OK, OK, I’ll get off my bitching soap box before I really start to preach. Suffice it to say that I’m now trying to consciously avoid social encounters with virtually everyone for yet another reason. Arg, as if I weren’t enough of a social hermit already, now I really have a reason to stay away from people…

Date Written: March 26, 2005

Daily Rating: 8

I guess there really wasn’t anything that “good” about my day, particularly since there was still no laptop in my life. After taking that antihistamine last night to try and clear up some congestion, I didn’t really expect too much. I take a different type of antihistamine every night just to help me sleep, and it hadn’t done any good, so I wasn’t very hopeful.

Well, even if it didn’t help with the congestion as much as I’d have liked, it certainly helped me get a good night’s sleep. I took it at about 8:00 last night, and by 9:00 I could barely see straight I was so tired. I went to bed and literally as soon as my head hit the pillow, I was out. I didn’t wake up until about noon today, and even then it took a cup of coffee and until almost 2:00 for my head to really clear.

After I really woke up, I headed out to get some food and coffee. I ran by Liquid Highway, then by Quiznos to get one of their wonderful Turkey, Ranch and Swiss subs. I ran by work to cry over my beautiful MX1000 (my $80 impulse buy the other day) and ate my sandwich while I did some maintenance on a couple of the servers at work. Ok, so I also compulsively checked the tracking info on my laptop over and over and over again while I was there, but that’s to be expected.

After eating, I headed home, and that was about it. Thanks for tuning in yet again for another ramble from the rambler of all ramblers!

I guess the biggest thing I found of interest today was catching up on Mark Jen’s blog. Remember him? He’s the guy that started blogging about working for Google, and then got fired for it, but kept blogging about all sorts of random other topics.

Well, I haven’t really thought about him, nor his blog, until today. I really figured he’d lose his job and not have anything to write about, and fizzle out rather quickly. I was, however, pleased to find that he hadn’t. One article form some time in February (I’m greatly disappointed that Blogger doesn’t put dates on any posts), discussed his recent change in default search engines. Mark performed his “me test”. Basically, he put his name into all of the “Big 3” search engines (those being Google [google.com], Yahoo! [search.yahoo.com] and MSN [search.msn.com] if you couldn’t guess). Each search engine was rated based on the number of results, and the number therein which were relevant. Mark found that his own blog only ranked number 2 on his long-running favorite, Google, and that he was number 1 on Yahoo! (MSN failed to include him at all).

I, of course, had to perform the “me test” for myself to verify his results. Here are my results (not that the “Results” indicate the numbers out of the first 10 results that I currently hold):

• Google
  • Results: 9 and 10
  • Comments: Both results were for old and long since abandoned pages. Upon further investigation, the first real result arrives in the 11th slot, representing the now defunct Reign Tools. Nothing else is found in the 3 pages of results, aside from an old mailing list post for the IPCop firewall.
  • Features: Spelling Corrections, Defintions, Cached pages, Similar pages
• Yahoo!
  • Results: 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10
  • Comments: Dacnomm Network Services, Incoherent Babble, Lyrics at Dacnomm, and DacnommNET IRC are all represented in the results.
  • Features: Definitions, Cached pages, Similar pages (“More from this site”)
• MSN
  • Results: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
  • Comments: DacnommNET IRC, Dacnomm Network Services, Journals at Dacnomm, Lyrics at Dacnomm and the Re!gn Spy Center (now defunct) are all represented in these results.
  • Features: Cached pages

As you can see, Yahoo! and MSN both have much broader coverage than Google for my results. While I’ve used Google for many years as my primary and only search engine, I simply can’t ignore the lack of relevant results found when searching even simply for myself. Even though MSN technically has the best results, I simply can’t bring myself to think of them as a legitimate alternative. Not only are they lacking in extra features, but they also have an ad-infested homepage, but they also seem to be constantly playing “catch-up” to Google and Yahoo! alike. Perhaps when they learn to clean up their homepage (granted, they have a rather clean search-only page), add some missing features, and learn to be proactively innovative I’ll reevaluate my stance towards their search results.

Until then, Yahoo! is clearly the reigning champion. Congrats to the developers at Yahoo!. You guys have won over another dedicated user. Although I have one of the same complaints against your homepage as I do against MSN’s: Clutter. While not anywhere near the same hellacious MSN level, your site is definitely more cluttered than that of your Googleite counterparts. Still, you have a clear win in my tests.

Back to Mark’s blog now that we’ve established the same results. I have to agree that while Yahoo!’s results are superior, they still lack the “wow!” bits. I too have often wanted to get some detailed information about a webpage, such as the number of times it has come up in user searches, how relevant it is on average, how many websites link to it, etc. It would also be incredibly nice if they would work in a web-based bookmarks service. Simply check a box and click “Bookmark”, and it adds it to your user account. I know if either Yahoo! or Google did such, it would prove a very large bonus in my opinion.

All-in-all, I’m a bit disappointed that Google has fallen behind in the running, as I do prefer their simple, elegant layout, and their historically laid-back public-serving attitude. However, their services don’t integrate well, and given recent changes in their tactics, such as the controversial Google toolbar beta which supports an “autolink” feature that basically hijacks your current webpage to display relevant search results, I’m beginning to feel a tad more leery towards the future of this wonderful company. Could Yahoo! be making a comeback? Looks like it to me.