Bank Robbery? Me?

Here’s something that doesn’t happen to you every day…

This morning on my way to work I passed an Alcoal police officer who quickly turned around and pulled me over.  I wasn’t speeding or doing anything else wrong, but oh well.  I rolled my window down and he motioned me out of the car.  He told me it was actually nothing, that there had been a bank robbery and that it obviously wasn’t me.  My plates and vehicle description were close to that of the suspect.

I told a co-worker about it as soon as I got in, and he forwarded a news email he’d received from WNOX‘s Dave Foulk.  The suspect was a female (obviously not me).  She was driving a silver VW Jetta (I drive a silver VW Golf), and the robbery happened at Northshore and Pellissippi (I’d driven by there moments before). 

Good job by the Alcoa police for a well-executed stop.  I think the officer was smart to pull me over.  Volkswagens look pretty much the same from the front, so a silver VW was a good reason for him to turn around and check it out.   The possibility also existed that a witness had seen a Golf, but thought it was a Jetta.  Additionally, the two of the last three digits of my plates matched that of the suspect.

Most importantly, he quickly realized I’d done nothing wrong, explained the situation, and told me to have a good day.  I wish all traffic stops were handled that well.

***UPDATE***

The KNS has more.

The Most Disappointing Movies of the 80s

I was born in the early 70s, and like a lot of my contemporaries, I spent a lot of time during my middle school years at the mall/movies. One of the worst memories I have from my childhood is being all amped up to see a movie, only for it to be a complete waste of time and money. Looking back as an adult and admitted movie snob, it’s pretty obvious that most of these films never had a chance at being worth $4 to see. At the time, however, I was excited about all of them.

With a couple of exceptions, these aren’t the worst movies of the 80s, just the most disappointing.

Star Wars Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983)

Why I couldn’t wait to see it: Wasn’t everybody excited about this movie? I was too young to really understand the first Star Warsmovie, but I thought it was really “neat”, had the lunchbox, the action figures, and was Darth Vader for Halloween. With The Empire Strikes Back, I understood a lot more about what was happening and was sucked in by the story. I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen next.

Why I was disappointed:Just as I was starting to like the Star Wars series for the story, not just because things were getting blown up in space, someone got wise to the fact that they could make more money on merchandise than box office. Consequently, we got cuddly little teddy bears that kids would love–Ewoks. This wasn’t a bad movie at all, but it wasn’t as good as it could have and should have been. I can’t help but think that some of the story was traded in for merchandising efforts.

Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Why I couldn’t wait to see it:Unless you were living on another planet in 1985, you knew all about Madonna. Now, imagine you’re a 13 year old boy. You see my point.

Why I was disappointed:I was expecting to see basically an hour and a half of Madonna’s videos. Yeah, she looked hot in this movie, but this was our first clue that she can’t act. Remarkably, this didn’t stop her from starring in several movies later in her career. They were all pretty disappointing too.

Quicksilver (1986)

Why I Couldn’t Wait to See It: Badass BMX tricks–on TEN SPEEDS!!!

Why I was Disappointed:This one actually is one of the worst movies ever. Probably the only thing that keeps this from being the absolute worst I’ve ever seen is that my cousin and I were asked to leave before the end of the movie. From what I remember, we got bored watching Kevin Bacon working as a bicycle messenger and started throwing popcorn at people. Look, there were plenty of movies in the 80s that featured bad acting, no plot, and horrible writing. However, they delivered cool stuff like tons of skateboarding and breakdancing, so we were all okay with it. This movie had nothing.

The All Nighter (1987)

Why I Couldn’t Wait to See It:  Susanna Hoffs.  The previews for this movie made it look like it was going to be nothing but her and her hottie friends having a tickle fight that lasted into the wee hours of the morning and culminated in all of them going out the next day and looking for a redneck eighth grader (me) to hook up with.

Why I was Disappointed:  Maybe they should have hired the guys who edited and marketed the trailer to do the whole movie, because I bought it hook, line, and sinker.  All they did in this movie was talk!  Maybe if I’d known anything about girls at the time I would have paid enough attention to somehow gain some knowledge in picking up some chicks on my own.  Instead, I sat there and watched them talk about who knows what for the whole movie.  I honestly don’t remember anything about it except that there was no tickling.  Pam Grier was in it, but I didn’t know at the time how cool she is.

Light of Day (1987)

Why I Couldn’t Wait to See It:  Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett.  I love rock ‘n’ roll, and Teen Wolf and Back to the Future were cool too.  This seemed like it would be cool because Michael J. Fox actually was into playing guitar, and the idea of Joan Jett playing his sister and rocking out for an hour and a half was AWESOME.

Why I was Disappointed:  That’s not at all what this movie was about.  I was expecting something like what we see on Behind the Music…rock and roll craziness, drinking, drugs, boobs.  Instead it was about stuff like relationships, personal struggles, etc.  Instead of the cookie-cutter 80s rocker movie, this one had a real plot and was a unique story.  Sounds like something I’d really like now.  Now that I think about it, I should probably rent it and see if it’s really any good.

McCain Vows to Impede Socialism

McCain’s big concern is the rise in socialism in Latin America.

As president, McCain said he would work on political, diplomatic and economic fronts to counter the rise of socialism, including efforts to spread free trade. Yet the United States must also stress the advantages of capitalism and democracy to win “a war of ideas” in the region, he said.

I have a great idea for a starting place for the crusade against socialism–Washington D.C.

Professional Wrestlers Linked to Steroids?

Huh?! What?!

The hell you say!

Randy Orton, Ray Mysterio Jr., Edge, and Kurt Angle (Olympic gold medal in real wrestling) are all named.

Okay, taking steroids without a doctor’s prescription is illegal. Oh wait, the article says they had a prescription.

Either way, the gov’ment should do something about doctors prescribing dangerous steroids to people who don’t really need them. Maybe. But if they are going to go after them, I’d prefer they start with the “pain management” doctors prescribing Oxycontin. Continue reading “Professional Wrestlers Linked to Steroids?”

Big Sister Hillary

I’m really going to enjoy watching these two bash each other in the coming months. Hopefully they will pummel one another to the point that neither can be elected.

[youtube 6h3G-lMZxjo]

* UPDATE *

A co-worker just pointed out to  me that the girl throwing the hammer is wearing an i-Pod.  Also there is an IP address super-imposed on the Hilary video that is registered to California State University.  Interesting.

Ten Reasons to Ditch MySpace and Start YourSpace

1. ARE YOU SMART AND/OR INTERESTING?

If you are smart and/or interesting, you can easily create your own site. On your own website the possibilities are endless. You can blog all you want, add huge galleries of photos and videos, private message boards for you and your friends to contribute, etc. People who want to visit your MySpace account (and actually care about what is there), will come to your private site as well.

If you are smart, you don’t even have to be interesting to start your own site. I have lots of friends who fall into this category, and proudly count myself among them. Even if we’re not that interesting to most people, at least we’re interesting to each other. The last thing I want to do is advertise what a boring dolt I am to a bunch of “cool people” (like those on MySpace)

If you are interesting, you don’t have to be smart. Use your charisma to get one of your smart friends to help you out.

2. PROXY SERVER WASTELAND

Your personal time at home is too valuable to waste browsing around MySpace. If you can’t do it on someone else’s time, don’t bother. Unless you are living in 2006, MySpace is probably already blocked by the proxy server where you work. If not, you may want to consider looking for a job…the guys in your IT department aren’t well managed, and the whole place is going to hell in a hand-basket sooner or later.

Of course I’m joking. You should work while you’re at work, and work on your own stuff while you’re at home. I was just kidding (but not really).

You will more than likely be able to access your own site from work. This will allow you to continually keep up with what your friends are saying about you, what photos of you have been posted, and what other people are saying about your content. Sounds like MySpace, right?

One other plus is that you can set up your own webmail account on your site that probably will not be blocked by your proxy at work. Even if your company blocks most webmail (gmail, hotmail, etc) they’ll not be on the lookout for your site.

3. HOW BIG WAS YOUR LAST CHECK FROM MYSPACE?

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you are smart and interesting, but just not famous (yet)–you have no book to pimp, no movie coming out next month, no album you recorded in your basement, and no calendar that features you in provocative poses with arctic animals. What exactly are YOU getting in return for providing MySpace (News Corp.) with all of this content about someone as original and cool as you?

If you notice, MySpace has ads all over “your” page, but they aren’t leaving messages asking where they can send your share of the revenues, right?

Set up your own site, throw a couple of AdSense ads up there and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you will get exactly what you’ve been getting from MySpace, maybe even 2 or 3 times as much. 😛

Best case, you’ll write a few interesting things that get picked up on bigger sites, and tons of traffic flow your way.

MySpace, along with other sites that are nothing but user-provided content, makes millions of dollars a year off of what YOU write and post! Don’t give it away for free! Keep it for yourself.

4. MY SO-CALLED FRIENDS

I’m willing to concede the fact that every now and then you will find someone, or they will find you, on MySpace that you’ve lost contact with over the years. But those years are probably before 1995 or so. At this point, do you really care? I mean REALLY care? Sure, it’s nice to catch up, but you aren’t friends anymore, otherwise they wouldn’t have had to look you up on MySpace to find you.

Your real friends are the ones that send you a message when their email address or phone number changes so that you don’t lose touch. You may not talk to them on a daily basis, but you feel it’s worthwhile to maintain a point of contact with one another. You don’t need MySpace to keep track of your friends.

Your real friends will be delighted to visit your site.

5. SPAM

MySpace is mostly spam. I’m not talking about the “buy viagra” or “xanax at wholesale prices” spam. I’m talking about the people and bands you’ve never heard of and have no interest in knowing asking you to be their friend all of the time. The biggest clue that you are being spammed is to check out their MySpace page. They will have at least 3,000 “friends” along with a page full of witty comments from their friends like “thanks for the add!” or “what up baby girl?”

Invariably, each of the ass-clowns who left a comment on their site have a thousand or so friends themselves. It’s like there’s some sort of contest to see who can get the most links from desperate people they don’t even know.

Put up your own site, and you won’t have to deal with this–at least not at the same level. Yeah, you’ll get some spam on your blog if you have comments enabled. Just make sure comments have to be approved before they are posted and you are safe.

Again, if you are even a little interesting and have a squirrel’s brain, it’s time to leave the world of “thanks for the add” and put up some real content. Even if you like the stupid side of MySpace, make it your own.

6. JANET JACKSON SAID IT BEST–CONTROL

If you have your own site, YOU control who gets on, what content is displayed, who gets a link, what kind of ads to run. Although there are plenty of people who will have a hard time navigating anything that isn’t exactly where they think it should be, you’ll have complete creative and editorial control on your site with layout as well.

7. STALKERS

Quite frankly, I’m tired of all the chicks using MySpace as a launchpad in their quest to meet me. I’m taken, and I like it that way. So give it a rest.

If you’re like me (and I’m sure you are), build your own private haven from these psychotic impudent strumpets.

8. A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW

Let’s face it. MySpace just isn’t cool anymore. Ever notice when you log on you can always see links to the “cool new people”? I hate to be mean, but if someone is just now getting a MySpace account, they may be new, they may be smart, and they may be interesting. But they definitely aren’t cool.

In fact, most MySpace accounts created any time in the last year or so were created by people who are not cool. since more accounts are added every day (about 230,000 according to Wikipedia), MySpace is becoming less and less cool by the minute.

Based on Wikipedia’s numbers, in the last year alone, 83,000,000 accounts have been added. I don’t know about you, but my tipping point for cool in a group is about 66.67%. If 1/3 of the people in a group aren’t cool, the group isn’t cool.

Start your own site, and only let cool people–at least let people you think are cool–hang around.

9. PUNK ASS KIDS

The older I get, the less tolerant I am of all these punk ass kids. In reality, it isn’t so much that I’m less tolerant as much as it is that I’m jealous that I can’t be a punk ass kid too.

Whether it’s annoyance or envy, I don’t want to be around them unless I’m making them run at rugby practice. I don’t want to be their friend. And I especially don’t want them finding out about how cool Tom T. Hall and Bobby Bare are. Everyone knows that once a punk ass kid thinks something is cool it is only a matter of time before it sucks.

If you are like me, this is a great reason to start your own site. You can talk about boring things that already suck like reading books, politics, or earning a living and building wealth. These topics are sure to scare off the punk ass kids. They’ll never come close to finding you if you’re on your own.

10. TRADE-IN VALUE

It never fails…as soon as something great come out, something greater comes out a little bit later. As they say at my place of employment, “take good and make it better.” As our ADD lifestyle in this country says, “yeah, it was good last year, but it sucks compared to (insert thing that will suck next year here).” If you don’t believe that last sentence, re-read this article.

By going out and staking your claim on the web, you’ll be prepared to handle the next big thing–or not–it’s your choice. You can keep all of your content and work and version up when the time is appropriate. When something bigger and better comes along, take your assets with you instead of starting over.

When you are using someone else’s asset, like MySpace, you are subject to the whims of the people running the company and changes in the market.

For example, lots of us had Yahoo! mail accounts and thought they were great until Google came out with Gmail. Now Yahoo! mail sucks. Actually, it doesn’t, but that’s the perception.

The bottom line is that by going out on your own, what’s yours is yours. You are in complete control of everything and are able to change and upgrade with the times.

Part II (of many) on SEO, Google, and Content–Technology Moves, Build For Change

First of all, I can’t take credit for all of these ideas. Lot’s of them have been borrowed from guys like Steve Pavlina who are basically saying the same thing I am.

One of the more important points Steve makes is that your content should be timeless. What he means by this is that if your content is only pertinent only to what is going on today, there’s not much reason for people to want to look at it tomorrow. This is especially important as you try to build momentum for your site traffic over time.

Early on, your site will not be highly listed on any engines. With Google, you’ll be stuck in the “sandbox” for quite a while. While you may be providing great content that is extremely relevant for the day, week, or month it is published, your potential readers will never find it, at least from a search engine. Down the road, you may be lucky enough to be bumped up to a high ranking for the search terms, but it’s likely that no one will be searching for it.

Of course, there are exceptions. For instance, I maintain a site for my rugby club (www.knoxvillerugby.com) that contains scores and information about the club for the last few years. While the score of last Saturday’s match will get the majority of its traffic in the week following the match, there is a good chance that old guys who want to relive the glory days will one day come back to our site, possibly through a search engine, and read about what happened way back when. But, like I said, the majority of the traffic is going to come in the first week. This traffic is not search engine driven. It is driven by the fact that the site is reliable and updated in a timely manner. Not only do members of our club check our site regularly, but members of other clubs whose place in the league standings are tied to the results of our match check it as well.

So what do I mean by “build for change”? One could take that statement as a call to build in scalability and flexibility. While these are certainly important attributes to consider for your site, this actually isn’t what I’m talking about at all. The basic idea of what I’m saying is, don’t focus your efforts on search engines. Don’t focus on trying to get people to link to you. Don’t focus your energy on driving loads of traffic to your site today.

Focus on providing your customers with exactly what they want–good content that they want to come back for. All the rest will follow.

The biggest problem with relying on technology to drive your traffic is that technology is always changing. In 1999-2000, the .com boom, I was doing some work for a company who was selling its services to European companies to boost their rankings on search engines. Back then, Yahoo! ruled the roost, but they didn’t have nearly the market share that Google has now. People weren’t focused just on getting ranked highly on Yahoo!, but every search engine. We were monitoring rankings on over 100 different search engines as well as checking for links on the highest traffic sites on the web. Our goal was to get our customers rated highly on ALL of these engines. In much the same way that Google’s Page Rank system works now, each customer was assigned an indexed ranking based on their listing in the engines and the number of links to them that existed on high traffic sites.

Not exactly rocket surgery, but useful at the time. What wasn’t foreseen by my employer was the fact that one company was going to come in and basically take over the search industry. I was constantly asking, “what do we do when the situation changes?” I’ve long since parted ways with them, but I can imagine that their customers aren’t very thrilled with their Ask Jeeves rankings being in the top ten if their Google ranking is 97. I’m sure they’ve adjusted their product to account for this, but there are factors they didn’t see coming that I’m not sure they’ve dealt with. I would guess the most difficult problem they had to addres is that not only did the dominant players in the game change, but the technology changed as well.

The way search engines worked has drastically changed since 2000. Search engines are smarter (especially Google). Search engines are better equiped to handle rapidly changing sites. Most importantly, search engines are constantly changing and improving going forward.

Ironically, one of the tasks assigned to me way back then was to develop a “keyword generator”. Literally, those were the specifications I was given–“develop a keyword generator”. Now, my idea of a keyword generator and my boss’s were completely different, and frankly, my idea was a little ahead of its time.

My boss was very disappointed when I proudly showed him my software. He was expecting a tool that prompted the user enter a few keywords, then spat back these same keywords with the <meta> tags around them.

He was actually a little angry when I demonstrated my app that spidered three layers into a site and returned suggestions for keywords based on frequently occurring words and weighted based on the page on which they occurred and their placement on the page.

Which sounds like it more accurately addresses how search engines work nowadays?

The point isn’t that he wanted me to write a tool with very little functionality (and there were a million of these already available). The problem was that he had no inkling that search engines could ever change or evolve and refused to consider it when confronted.

We are facing a movement today that I predict will drastically change the game again. Social networking sites are becoming more popular by the minute as a way to find information. “Rankings” on sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. are driven completely by the users. Relevance and quality aren’t being decided by algorithms at all, but by actual people. So when 1,000 people “digg” your site, you better believe that there are thousands of others who are going to sit up and take notice of it.

As more and more people discover these sites and see the value in them, high rankings on these sites will become more and more important. Some people are well aware of this situation and are already coming up with ways to try to “game” these sites by falsifying user recommendations, and they are responding by banning domains that try to beat the system. I think a better approach is to focus on providing good, original content. You will not only increase your chances of finding good, loyal users, but you’ll also have built for the future.

We don’t know for sure what tomorrow will bring in search, social networking, or technologies that are still in their infancy. What we know for sure is that the goal of these technologies is always going to be finding and categorizing the best content out there.

Build quality into your site, and you can rest easy that you’ve also built for change.

Pulic Education is “Valuable”

At least for some entities it is.  Freedom Daily has the full article.

Sure, a teacher has some leeway to be flexible but imagine what would happen to a public-school teacher who announced to his classes, “What is written in these textbooks is claptrap, lies, and deceptions. I’m going to be teaching you the truth about the nature of the government, government schooling, free markets, individualism, and liberty.”

Well, luckily, because of tenure, it would probably be virtually impossible to fire this teacher.  Of course, it’s also impossible to fire the teachers who teach anything else, or who don’t teach at all.  Worse still are the ones who are teaching something they know nothing about.

I think the major goal of the public school system is definitely indoctrination over education.  At my high school I had to basically demand an education.  I was lucky to have a few really good teachers, one in particular, who were great educators, but I had others who were there to do the absolute minimum, and frequently not even that.

I actually found a way out this when I was in school.  My strategy was to behave just badly enough to get in-school suspension.  This was the “punishment” handed down for doing something that didn’t really warrant suspension–being disruptive in class, arguing with teachers, etc.  Sometimes, I’d just request it–the few teachers that cared and would let me go every now and then, until our principal caught on.

So for “punishment”, I got to sit in a room with the other bad kids, read the assigned lessons for the day and do the homework.  The beauty was that I could complete all of this work before lunch instead of going to class all day and taking work home.  For the rest of the day we were required to sit quietly without talking to one another.  This provided a great opportunity to read whatever books I wanted or work on extra math problems (yeah, I actually did extra ones just for fun–dork).  Not only did I not have to worry about taking work home, but I also got to study whatever I was interested in–that’s education!  I *gasp* chose to learn things!

West Maui–June 2006

Cows Grazing West MauiWe went over to Oahu and stayed in Honolulu for a couple of days. When we came back we got a rental car and drove back to my friends’ house by going around West Maui. It was a one lane road for most of the trip. Unbelievable scenery. We spent more time out of the car looking at things than we did in the car.

Our strategy for the drive was to stop when we saw something cool or if we saw a “local” car pulled over somewhere. This worked out great–got to see a couple of really cool things that weren’t in any book we’d seen.

We drove counterclockwise around West Maui in order to end up at my friends’ house. For the first part of the drive we saw a couple of ecotour vans that were taking people on hikes, so we’d get out there and follow the trail. We saw some really nice waterfalls and there weren’t many people at all.

We’d later find out that West Maui isn’t nearly as traffic ridden as the road to Hana. As is true with most things, fewer people made it better.The picture to the left is probably the coolest spot we saw on the drive. There was a local car parked beside the road, so we jumped out and looked for a trail. It took a while for us to find the small little path to walk down, and we eventually had to climb down a bunch of rocks to get to the water.

To give some perspective, this photo was taken from the road. There’s a girl playing on the rocks while her dad fishes…can you see her?

The next day we took the Hana Highway, camped overnight, and drove all the way around Haleakala on the other side of Maui.