Friday wind-down...
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Friday, March 28, 2003 at 08:07 AM [GMT-6]

...(not to be confused with "melt-down"...

What tha...?! Snow?! It was 87 degreees yesterday; today the high might reach 50, and we're seeing light flurries. These kinds of contrasts are not unusual for west Texas weather, but the snow certainly is. The weather oracles are predicting freezes for the next two nights, which may come as an unpleasant surprise to the many flowering and budding fruit trees around town.

It's hard to sympathize with them; after all, the usual signs that winter has departed have not yet appeared. The mesquite is still bare, and I haven't seen any scissortails. For that matter, I don't recall seeing any buzzards (other than on certain broadcast news programs). The perceptive resident will take note and prepare accordingly.

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It occurred to me this morning that my posting yesterday on liberation theology is akin to a gerbil discussing Toltecian glyphs...the result is hardly edifying or authoritative. This is the "attractive nuisance" of blogging...holding forth on a subject not from any base of actual knowledge or insight, but simply because one can. Reader discernment is critical. As an "industry," blogging will no doubt mature to where this problem is not pandemic, but those of us who are relatively new to the medium will continue to fall into this trap, willing victims of our own technology-enabled egos.

Ahhh...but what do I know?

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Perhaps I can achieve partial atonement by presenting for your consideration a new book, called to our attention on today's edition of ZDNet Anchordesk. The book is Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly). [O'Reilly continues its string of wonderful page covers with a photo of an adjustable wrench; well, actually, it's a vise-grip...savior of homehandymen and bain of professional mechanics everywhere.]

Nothing needs less confirmation than Google's absolute dominance in the search engine field. Google's occasional missteps only serve to highlight just how good it really is. But most of us aren't aware of the depth of usefulness to be found at google.com. This book aims to fix that. Here are a few of the useful tidbits highlighted by the AnchorDesk article:

• Google has a very serviceable phone number lookup (and reverse lookup) capability. Simply enter phonebook: followed by the number [(xxx) yyy-zzzz]; for reverse lookups, enter phonebook: followed by name and city. The book points out that this feature isn't quite as strong as, say, WhitePages.com, but if you're like me and have the Google search bar available at every turn, it's pretty convenient.
  
  
• Google's popularity, grown out of it's sheer competence, has spawned some interesting (term used loosely) collateral sites. Take elgooG, for example. In a Bizarro-World twist, this site is literally the mirror image of Google...down to the requirement of typing your search term backwards. (But, if they really wanted to carry out this concept, search results would be just the opposite of what you are seeking. For example, a search for "loyal friend" would yield "Jacques Chirac." But, I digress.)
  
  Then there's Googlism, a site that will allow you to query Google's database for your own name and see "what Google thinks about you." It's just a way of finding some relationships between keywords, but it's fun in a creepy sort of way.
  
  GooglePeople by AvaQuest purports to answer questions in the form of "Who is...?" It doesn't profess to be perfect, and it's not, but it's an example of a potentially useful tool.
  
  And, finally, there's GoogleWhacking, which you've probably read about elsewhere. This is an exercise in wordplay where you try to find a two-word search term that yields only one search result. The rules are more complicated than you might think. As of this morning, over 134,000 "whacks" have been located and recorded, which to me sort of reduces the exclusivity of the fraternity. Still, out of 3 billion webpages purportedly indexed by Google...

I'm sure the good folk over at Google are giddy over all this attention. It's only going to get better, now that Google owns Blogger; look for Google to become "blog central" in many different ways.

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Last, and certainly least, I leave you with this link to Powers Phillips, P.C., Attorneys At Law in Denver, Colorado. Whoever said that lawyers have no sense of humor hasn't visited this website.