improve upon

2005.03.13 11.05

Yesterday I cleaned up the built-in Google search for this site. The search results colors have been showing up as black text on a black background for at least the last year. Google must have made a change recently that doesn't work well with their custom search. Sounds easy to fix, right? Wrong. The site Google gives you to create the custom script is seriously F'ed. Upon login, I was informed that Google search did not have markshields.com in its index. Riiiight. I wanted to assure Google that, yes, I was in the index, but it wasn't interested in hearing about it. I typed in cnn.com to see if I got the same response: ''Site cnn.com is not in our index.'' Riiiight. Just for fun I typed in one last site URL and got the response I expected: ''Site google.com is not in our index.'' I had to hack around their code to get a non-custom search script to generate. I then merged my older code with the new code. It's working again, but it's sad that they aren't doing a better job of pushing that stuff out to more people. Check out my search if you'd like. Or not.

I had another round of phone phun when the phone at my house rang. It was some company trying to send me $200 worth of redemption coupons or some crap like that. They thought they were talking to someone named Tori. I used my normal old grampa voice, anyway. ''YEAH, I'M TORI. WHAT D'YOU WANT??!'' There was a catch, of course. They wanted to charge $3.95 for shipping these redemption coupons via UPS. I told them to subtract $3.95 from my $200 and only send me $196.05 worth of coupons. The guy on the phone started to have an embolism, I think. ''Sir, we cannot separate the money from the redemption gift.'' They never called what they were sending coupons -- it was A Gift™. They also only wanted the $3.95 paid with a check that withdrew from a checking account or savings account. I'm like, ''yeah... oh boy, that sounds really good! How do I sign up?'' No cash. No credit card. No way, man. Still, I let them think I was going to accept it -- at least Tori was gonna accept it. The guy started reading back the address he thought I lived at. When he got to the city, he kept saying "Howston" instead of "Houston." I stopped him and told him I didn't live in Howston. ''I've never heard of Howston.'' It took him a good five minutes to eventually pronounce it correctly. Yes, I berated him repeatedly for not being able to correctly pronounce the name of my city. After I finally got him to say Houston correctly -- and after I received his assurance that he would never call it Howston ever again -- I hung up. God, I love the phone!

I bought 20 bags of pond stones and some underlay plastic with the intention of finishing off the stone garden I have in my front yard. It's almost there right now, but I could do much better. I was hoping to create a stone garden inside my yard where I could park a third car. I'm still on the fence about whether or not I want to do that. We'll see. I'm willing to entertain opinions.

I went to Number's Underworld last night. It was so lame. It was lamer than lame. The audio sucked when they had a little stage show. I'm like, come on... I could do a better job putting on a show in my car port. I left after midnight mostly because I was starving and hadn't eaten a proper dinner. I decided to get a little cheat on and ordered up the breakfast on a bun ranchero from Whataburger. Mmmm. Not on the menu for 12+ years and they still make it. Good times.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employers both past and present. « query letters \| Main \| every entry ever » improve upon 2005.03.13 11.05 Yesterday I cleaned up the built-in Google search for this site. The search results colors have been showing up as black text on a black background for at least the last year. Google must have made a change recently that doesn't work well with their custom search. Sounds easy to fix, right? Wrong. The site Google gives you to create the custom script is seriously F'ed. Upon login, I was informed that Google search did not have markshields.com in its index. Riiiight. I wanted to assure Google that, yes, I was in the index, but it wasn't interested in hearing about it. I typed in cnn.com to see if I got the same response: ''Site cnn.com is not in our index.'' Riiiight. Just for fun I typed in one last site URL and got the response I expected: ''Site google.com is not in our index.'' I had to hack around their code to get a non-custom search script to generate. I then merged my older code with the new code. It's working again, but it's sad that they aren't doing a better job of pushing that stuff out to more people. Check out my search if you'd like. Or not. I had another round of phone phun when the phone at my house rang. It was some company trying to send me $200 worth of redemption coupons or some crap like that. They thought they were talking to someone named Tori. I used my normal old grampa voice, anyway. ''YEAH, I'M TORI. WHAT D'YOU WANT??!'' There was a catch, of course. They wanted to charge $3.95 for shipping these redemption coupons via UPS. I told them to subtract $3.95 from my $200 and only send me $196.05 worth of coupons. The guy on the phone started to have an embolism, I think. ''Sir, we cannot separate the money from the redemption gift.'' They never called what they were sending coupons -- it was A Gift™. They also only wanted the $3.95 paid with a check that withdrew from a checking account or savings account. I'm like, ''yeah... oh boy, that sounds really good! How do I sign up?'' No cash. No credit card. No way, man. Still, I let them think I was going to accept it -- at least Tori was gonna accept it. The guy started reading back the address he thought I lived at. When he got to the city, he kept saying "Howston" instead of "Houston." I stopped him and told him I didn't live in Howston. ''I've never heard of Howston.'' It took him a good five minutes to eventually pronounce it correctly. Yes, I berated him repeatedly for not being able to correctly pronounce the name of my city. After I finally got him to say Houston correctly -- and after I received his assurance that he would never call it Howston ever again -- I hung up. God, I love the phone! I bought 20 bags of pond stones and some underlay plastic with the intention of finishing off the stone garden I have in my front yard. It's almost there right now, but I could do much better. I was hoping to create a stone garden inside my yard where I could park a third car. I'm still on the fence about whether or not I want to do that. We'll see. I'm willing to entertain opinions. I went to Number's Underworld last night. It was so lame. It was lamer than lame. The audio sucked when they had a little stage show. I'm like, come on... I could do a better job putting on a show in my car port. I left after midnight mostly because I was starving and hadn't eaten a proper dinner. I decided to get a little cheat on and ordered up the breakfast on a bun ranchero from Whataburger. Mmmm. Not on the menu for 12+ years and they still make it. Good times. « query letters \| Main \| every entry ever »