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Not Exactly A Designer Drug

I heard about this “new” drug on a radio show the other day, but it sounded too disgusting to be true. Then a co-worker grew up in Zambia and was telling me that it is pretty common there among young people. Now from The Smoking Gun

It’s an inhalant called “Jenkem,” and causes hallucinations and a “euphoric high.” Of course, as the bulletin notes, Jenkem users dislike its sewagey taste, which can last for days. That’s because Jenkem’s active ingredients are urine and fecal matter, hence its street names like “Butthash” and “Fruit from Crack Pipe.”

Even though I have to giggle at the word “butthash”…ICK! Yet another reason drugs should be decriminalized. At least it keep a few people from inhaling human waste by choice.

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Ask Not What Google Can Do For You

I’d wager that most of this blog’s regular readers fall into two main categories. The first group is those who know me IRL and like to see me make an ass of myself. Lately that has been happening online with a keyboard much more frequently than late at night with a debit card. Probably not as funny, but they have the convenience of seeing it whenever they want. It’s a trade off.

The other group is made up of other people who are part of the blogosphere and, like the first group, like to see me make an ass of myself. I see a pattern developing here. Based on what I’ve seen and read on their sites, a large majority of these people are in it solely for the fame and glory of blogging. They can actually write, and they aren’t as concerned with the piles of nickels and pennies that can be piled up slowly by spending countless hours working on their layout, optimizing for search engines, reading message boards about search engines, and on and on.

So for those people who aren’t keeping up with the technical end so much, I’ll give you the quick and dirty version of what’s been happening with Google over the last few months. Whether you actually care or not, this is going to affect you eventually.

* A site’s Google’s PageRank (site relevancy) is influenced by links from other sites
* Naturally, this created a market for links, and people bought links from other sites to boost the PageRank of their site
* Google didn’t like this and is now penalizing link sellers who did not report paid links.
* Some people will stop selling links. Some people will sell links and not get caught. Other people who have never sold links will be wrongly penalized.
* All of these people could become angry.

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again–creating good, original content is your best strategy in the long run. You can game the system for a little while, but remember that the search engine belongs to them–they make the rules of the game.

For those who don’t like Google’s latest tactics, your choices are pretty simple. You can play Google’s game by their rules, you can play Google’s game by your own rules, or you can support a different search engine whose rules you like better. My official stance is that of Switzerland. Although unofficially….

My guess is that we are about to see several new web ranking systems that do not belong to Google. They’ve basically rendered PageRank useless. Don’t be shocked if some big players in the game jump ship from Google and start using their influence with their users to thwart Google’s current dominance.

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Three Things I Haven’t Let Go

When I first got hit with this meme by BillyMac, I thought the topic was “3 Things I Wouldn’t Let Go”. That one would be pretty easy–family, health, and some other random item.

But this is “3 Things You Haven’t Let Go”, which has a much different conotation. Maybe I’m inferring it incorrectly, and it’s vague enough for interpretation, but I take this as “3 Things I Haven’t Let Go (but probably should)”. Believe it or not, this is a part of my character I’ve really worked on over the past few years. I’ve really tried to develop “the ability to let that which does not matter truly go.” Despite my best efforts, I still have plenty options. After all, I am powered by spite.

Spite CanAs I’m trying to narrow it down to the top three, I’m realizing how much I don’t want to admit any of this publicly. It’s not the fear of baring my soul that’s holding me back–it’s the realization of how stupid they all are. All instances of forgiven, but not forgotten. In order of increasing ridiculousness on my part…

Las Vegas August, 2005
I was going out for a weekend with about 15 other guys. Soon after booking my ticket I saw that there were UFC fights that weekend, so I asked some other guys if they wanted to go. I could only buy eight tickets, and as soon as seven other guys said they were in, I bought 8 together. $100 per ticket before all the taxes and charges. Not a problem–these guys are all local and they all have jobs. I’ll get my money back this week, right? Wrong. But that’s not the worst part. Literally thirty minutes before the fights I met up with the final two guys who owed me for their tickets. They walked up with two other guys who I didn’t know, paid me for the tickets, and turned around and sold them for $200 each to the other guys right in front of me! Chuck Liddell is lucky he didn’t have to fight me that night.

Summer 1993
I was living in a dump of a house in Ft. Sanders with two other guys–$300 rent. We split the electric and basic phone service evenly, but if anyone had long distance calls they had to pay it themselves. The month he moved out, one of my roommates had $37 worth of long distance calls to his girlfriend in California. By the time the bill came, he was gone, and the other guy and I had to eat it. Sure, not a lot of money, but at the time it was, and besides it’s the principle. I never got the money back from him, but I did hit him in the back with a folding chair (part of the height of my pro-wrestling obsession) in Long Branch one night when he was playing pool. Surprisingly, it didn’t make me feel any better.

St. Patrick’s Day Rugby Tournament, Savannah Georgia, 2000
We had a pretty solid team, and were scheduled for a Sunday morning match. Of course we’d all gone out on and had fun on Saturday night. At game time on Sunday, we only had 12 guys there. We started the match shorthanded, and when the other guys finally rolled up, I was infuriated. I didn’t even want them to come into the game–my preference was to take an ass kicking and let them sit and watch it. After the match (we lost) I refused to shake their hands. I love all of those guys, but I haven’t let the fact that they didn’t show up for us that morning go. I could have stayed in Knoxville if all I wanted to do was drink beer and not play rugby. Under certain conditions and in the presence of certain people, this one still sends me into a mild rage.

See the common thread here? All cases of being let down by friends. So I guess that is my biggest pet peeve? Possibly.

Up next are:
SVD
Ivy
Taylor–fingers crossed she’ll relate this to public education

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How Fitting

There’s been some discussion here over the last couple of days about some of the problems with education, and more specifically the distractions from learning that exist in the school systems. And today my trusty reader finds this article…

Thursday night, the future student body got together at Hardin Valley Elementary in hopes of finding something they can all cheer for at Hardin Valley Academy, the high school being constructed next door.

The school’s principal also fielded questions from the students. Many were curious about what extra-curricular activities would available.

Things like a girl’s volleyball team and a football team will be just like normal, but the football team might not have enough seniors to go varsity right away.

Still, the mascot debate had everyone’s attention.

I have an idea…

What about The Sheep?

And in related news…
I was eating breakfast this morning in our yucketeria and overheard a table full of co-workers talking about the big election high school football game tonight. Their conversation was interrupted when they paused to watch a Fox Infotainment story about birth control being dispensed at a Maine middle school. Only one guy at the table had a comment, but it seemed to sum up everyone’s opinion, “That’s not the school’s job.”

I agree. Now back to high school football…

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Some Shameless Pimping For WidgetBucks


Earn $$ with WidgetBucks!
I try to keep advertising to a minimum here for loyal readers by doing a few things. First of all, no ads in my RSS feed for subscribers, although there will be one at the end of this one as an example. Secondly, I only put adsense in the middle of older posts after they are archived and not very likely to be read by loyal readers. Thirdly, I try to keep ads unobtrusive (in the sidebar, end of posts) for my regular readers. Lastly, I try to keep them limited only to things I think my readers may actually be interested in.

So, mainly, I’m advertising to other bloggers. Because no one seemed interested (and it was pretty ugly), I’ve replaced the web hosting ad that was in the margin with a link to WidgetBucks (net gain of 0 ads). WidgetBucks is pay per click advertising that works pretty much like Adsense. Contextual ads show up on your site based on what you write, and you are paid for each click you receive. Just another ad network? Not really. They give you $25 just for signing up as a publisher! Also, you can get paid through PayPal, which is nice.

Honestly, ads don’t do very well on this site, but that’s okay. I have more fun with this site than any of my others that actually generate (very little) revenue. So the WidgetBucks link is not one of their ads, just an affiliate link to their site. That’s right–there’s something in it for me if you choose to go there and get $25 from them.

I’ve posted an actual WidgetBucks ad at the end of this post so you can see how it looks. I’ve been running them for a few days on a couple of my other sites, and they’ve done reasonably well, outperforming Adsense in some cases.

Oh, by the way, I’ve also added my latest del.icio.us bookmarks in the margin, if you are interested in what I’m reading outside of here.

Anyway, the ad is below (please don’t click it unless you are actually interested in what is shown). Of course, you can choose different colors, sizes, and styles.

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Barbie Cummings Trooper Indicted

The KNS tells us that former Tennessee State Trooper who received a favor from Knoxville based porn star Barbie Cummings will be prosecuted, even though the work she performed was pro bono…

James Randy Moss turned himself in to Wilson County authorities in Middle Tennessee this morning to face a sealed indictment on charges of official misconduct, tampering with evidence and official oppression.

I’m a little surprised that Barbie Cummings doesn’t still have her blog going, or if she does I can’t find it. She really could have made a big splash with this story if she’d played it right. I thought from the beginning it was just a clever stunt on her part to get her name out–no such thing as bad press, right?

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Language Evolution — Who Be Studying It?

Harvard’s Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel are applying mathematical analysis to changes in the English language to make predictions on how the language will evolve and what changes we can expect.

Lieberman and Michel’s group computed the “half-lives” of the surviving irregular verbs to predict how long they will take to regularize. The most common ones, such as “be” and “think,” have such long half-lives (38,800 years and 14,400 years, respectively) that they will effectively never become regular. Irregular verbs with lower frequencies of use — such as “shrive” and “smite,” with half-lives of 300 and 700 years, respectively — are much more likely to succumb to regularization.

Lieberman, Michel, and their co-authors project that the next word to regularize will likely be “wed.”

If you’re like me you will find this interesting because it mixes language, math, pattern recognition, data mining all together to come up with some pretty cool results. No one? Oh well.

I’m pretty disappointed by this study’s prediction that “to be” will be one of the last verbs to be regularized in the English language because of its high rate of use. Not that I really want it to be regularlized, but I’m pretty sick of hearing it misconjucated. Count the number of times you hear (or even worse, read) a sentence like this today…

“There’s many ways to waste time at work.”

Wrong. There are many ways to waste time at work, or there’s one way to waste time at work.

It’s suprising how many trained professional writers in newspapers and magazines have trouble conjucating for singular and plural subjects.

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Who Really Posted The Photos?

Driving in to work this morning, I heard Melinda England’s boyfriend, Josh Pinkinton (sp?) in an interview with Hallerin Hilton Hill. According to him, the photos of the Inskip Elementary School teacher weren’t posted on her MySpace page, but on his page. He also claimes that England’s ex-husband is the person who contacted the media with the story, and the facts were subsequently botched by WVLT.

Interesting.

I can understand his wanting to defend her, especially if so many facts of the story were wrong, left out, or confused. Still, I think it may be a mistake to go to the media to try to straighten this out. It was almost dead…just let it die.

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Google Buys Jaiku

…and inches a little further towards critical mass. This is definitely going to change things–what will all you Twitter-ites do?

Google has bought Finnish start-up Jaiku, which offers a mobile phone application that locates users and allows them to post short messages to a social network.

The news comes as rumours reach fever pitch that Google could launch a mobile phone, or mobile phone operating system as early as February 2008.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the absolute death of Twitter. There are instances where Google’s product is being outdone–Picasa/Flickr, Blogger/Wordpress. But in general they are heavy hitter in any market they enter. I think the mobile phone arena could actually use a good Googling.

As for me, I have to draw the line at text messaging and Twitter. Those are two things that seem absolutely pointless to me.

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America’s Next Top Televangelist

Why doesn’t this reality show exist?

It would be perfect for CBS Sunday nights, right after 60 Minutes. Of course, you’d have to wait until football season is over.

Let the competitors give both prepared and spontaneous sermons on a variety of subjects. Instead of competing for dollars, they could compete for souls.

Seriously, why wouldn’t this work?

I’ve got dibs on the idea. (as far as I know)