Caboose

I occasionally check my webserver stats, and sometimes find odd things such as the weird referrers. Recently I’ve noticed a few improbable search strings.

For example “german influence in argentina”, “toga party photos” or even “planning a 60th birthday party” (don’t know what search engine they used!).

Some are a bit worrying, “little girls peru” for example (what were you looking for?). Others just never should have led people to my site, why on earth would somebody looking for “second hand petrol go-karts” be interesting in this site?

Search engines are very odd things, even the good ones…

Last week I spotted a link to this Wall Street Journal article in Jim Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room.

Some of the quotes are pretty easy to laugh at (hint: it’s about being in control of the car, stupid!):

It also calls for such maneuvers as driving backwards around a corner and up the street along the curb. Touch the curb with the wheel and you flunk.

My favourite part is the way they completely fail to connect “Britain’s pass rate is under 44% and falling” with “Britain has one of the world’s lowest auto fatality rates”.

Just found BookCrossing , a scheme a bit like Geocaching but with books.

You finish reading a book and then release it into the wild, it’s tracked by a unique ID so you can see where it goes.

I like this idea.

Yesterday showed me that I work for a company with the right priorities. When I arrived in the morning the power was still off after Sunday’s storms. The first priority was to wire up a generator so the phones would work, the next was to set up a generator outside reception to run the coffee machine.

I managed to head back into Cambridge, do my weekly shopping, eat lunch and watch the lunchtime news before the power came back on.

It’s a bit odd all the whinging in the UK media at the moment about how thousands of homes are still without power and the trains aren’t running properly. This was a very severe storm (for the UK, obviously), a lot of damage was done to infrastructure and several people were killed.

Government inquiries aren’t going to improve anything, apart from Government popularity ratings. These things happen sometimes, you just have to deal with it.

Went through to Macclesfield yesterday, for the going-away party of a friend who’s off to Rothera in Antarctica for six months. I decided to go on my motorbike, yesterday was great, lovely day (although a little cold and windy).

Coming back today was very different, most of England’s rail network seems to be out of operation at the moment due to severe weather. The roads aren’t much better, lots of surface water and some quite large bits of tree. Even just the thick layer of wet leaves on the roads meant I had to be very careful on the bike.

I tried to fix the problems with Opera and the BlogSnob box, but I couldn’t work out what was going wrong. Instead I’ve moved the box to the bottom of the page, until I can sort it out.

I’ve just noticed that my addition of a Blogsnob box on the right of the page has broken the layout in Opera. I’ll have a go at fixing it tonight.

It looked fine in Mozilla, probably need to tweak the stylesheet or something.

I’ve been sucked in now. This one tries to work out what (if any) kind of religion you fit into, apparently I’m a secular humanist, which I’d probably agree with.

Belief-O-Matic

They also have a great disclaimer at the top: “Warning: Belief-O-Matic assumes no legal liability for the ultimate fate of your soul.”

There are thousands of ‘which X are you?’ or ‘how X are you?’ quizzes out there on the net. I’ve finally given in… here’s the results of ‘How Jedi are you?’:

:: how jedi are you? ::

Firstly The Dead Media Project, collected information on obsolete media.

Secondly The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, abandoned/destroyed industrial buildings.