Long Live the King of Queens
The King of Queens sitcom ended last night on CBS after nine years, and cast member Patton Oswalt (Spencer) wrote a sendoff that made the innocuous working-class comedy series sound twisted:I'm also glad I got to play Spencer, who evolved into the depository for all the writer's wild hairs. Making out with old women, gay panic, double-dating Adam West and Lou Ferrigno, wrestling matches over an asthma inhaler, driving all night to stop a wedding, stalking ... if there was something creepy the writers felt like they could get away with, they let me do it.
So today I get something in the mail which I think brings my time on The King of Queens to a poetic, poignant close.
It's a letter and gift certificate from Patrick Lenow, the Director of the "Celebrity VIP Club" for the International House of Pancakes. I quote part of the letter:
"We were flattered to hear Danny trying to convince Spence to go to IHOP after their high school reunion on a recent episode. Even though Spence had a 'questionable' predicament to sort out ... "
(I was going home with a lesbian, who I hoped to still get to ---- 'cause she had mistaken me for a lesbian)
" ... with all of IHOP's delicious menu choices for breakfast, lunch and dinner, there's no questioning IHOP's ability to satisfy any hungry guest!"
Patrick's not wrong on that one. Whenever I bomb out trying to nail a ---- when she discovers my ----, nothing soothes the sting of regret like a short stack of buckwheat griddlecakes!
Using GoDaddy's Domain Back Order Service
I recently got the domain name watchingthewatchers.com in a drop when the previous owner let it expire. Since Watching the Watchers has been published at the same name in .org since 2004, we've been losing traffic from people who mistakenly tried the .com and ended up at a parked domain.
To get the domain, I set up an account on GoDaddy and used its domain monitoring and back order service. You can monitor 100 domains for $5.99 and receive email when they're put on hold for non-payment or their status changes in other ways.
You can backorder a specific domain for $18.99 or five domains for $94.95. This doesn't guarantee you'll get them, because GoDaddy's competing with other domain-drop services and registrars, but if it fails you can reassign your order to another domain at no cost. Based on a few times I tried it out, it appears that GoDaddy loses more often than it wins when the domain's hotly contested. For this particular domain, I felt like I had a good chance because the old owner used GoDaddy as his registrar.
GoDaddy only will sell a backorder for a domain to one customer, so if you wait for the monitoring service to tell you its on hold, you might be too late.
The only disadvantage to using the service is that it increases the likelihood you'll accumulate more dumb domains you had no rational reason to register, which has been an issue for me. I also got sins.biz using GoDaddy's drop service, but all of the decent ecommerce possibilities for that domain are illegal in the U.S. outside of a few counties in Nevada.
Larry the High Voltage Cable Guy
An Imax documentary, Straight Up: Helicopters in Action, includes this three-minute segment on an insane but technologically amazing profession: high voltage cable inspection.My Guess: Opie and Anthony are Screwed
The media's covering a tasteless sexual rant by a guest on Opie and Anthony's radio show Wednesday that was targeted at Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and First Lady Laura Bush, but no one's explaining what the guy said.I put the transcript and audio up on Watching the Watchers, so people can judge for themselves. I don't listen to the show, so I can't judge the comments in the context of what they do every day. I have trouble imagining a context in which the sentiments aren't ugly as hell, especially the part where host Anthony Cumia plays along and chimes in.
Although the comments aired on XM, which requires a subscription and doesn't answer to the FCC, the pending XM/Sirius merger requires federal approval and gives Washington another reason to go after satellite radio for indecency.
Because of the merger plans and the recent Don Imus firing, I expect that Opie and Anthony will be out of work within a week.
I'm not in favor of it, since I don't know the show and think we're encouraging media gutlessness by letting outside groups hound targets off the air. But as a longtime XM subscriber, I must have heard 1,000 ads promoting these shock jocks over the years, and I've never understood why they're two of XM's marquee names.
Down Syndrome Parents Wrestle with Extinction
There's an interesting hot-button issue on the Drudge Retort this morning: Parents of children with Down syndrome are concerned about a new trend some liken to eugenics -- 9-in-10 prospective parents, equipped with safe tests that detect the condition in the womb, choose to abort rather than raise such a child. "We want people who make this decision to know our kids," said Lucy Talbot, the president of a support group. "We want them to talk to us."
From what I've learned through limited experience with people who have Down syndrome, some of them function at a high level with a measure of independence and undeniable quality of life. This is a very complex issue, but I think its valuable to convey that message to prospective parents after a positive Down test.
I vivid recall a relative's experience when a prenatal test detected a possibility of severe abnormalities in her first child (unrelated to Down). Researching the worst-case scenario on Google, based on what she'd heard from her doctor, was a gut-wrench for me, and it had to be a hundred times worst for her. It proved to be a false alarm, thankfully, but it underscored the difficult decision faced here by any parent in such circumstance. We're flying blind on this, as the first generation of breeders equipped with genetic screening.
I've learned enough about Down syndrome that faced with such a decision, I'd oppose abortion because it was detected in the womb. But unlike most of the Republican field in the next presidential election, I would not force that choice on others.
Free the Presidential Debates
Barack Obama and John Edwards have both written letters this week calling on presidential debates to be released under a Creative Commons license.
Edwards' take:
The Creative Commons license terms offer an easy way to ensure that the networks' rights are protected. Much of the content on my own campaign web site is available under just such a license.
Commercial constraints are severe enough in their effect in diluting the substance of our campaigns. Limiting access to long-form televised debates makes matters worse.
I didn't expect a copyright licensing issue to get this kind of attention, but Creative Commons has become an effective lever to pry open content that should rightfully be shared. There's a rising expectation among the public that we should be able to reuse and remix material like this -- C-Span responded to the same pressure in March by allowing non-commercial reuse of the videos it produces at Congressional hearings, federal agency briefings, and White House events.
Make Google Happy: Weed Out Duplicate Content
I spend a lot of time these days trying to master search engine optimization, the practice of making Google's great and terrible algorithm give you the love you never received from your emotionally closed off, impossible to please father1. A commercial venture like Wargames.Com, which I'm running as a bootstrap with no advertising budget, would be utterly hopeless without search traffic.
Towards this end, I've created a sitemap for each of my sites -- an XML file that tells Google and other search engines where to find new and updated content. Here's the Wargames.Com sitemap, which lists the URLs of each of the store's products along with the date the pages were last edited. (Have I mentioned that large-scale combat simulations make an excellent gift for Mother's Day?)
The process of creating these maps taught me that I was making a huge mistake in the design of my sites: Offering the same content on multiple pages, all of which were indexed by Google.
A lot of sites make this blunder. You can see an example from The Onion fake news site with this search. A column by Ben Tiedemann explaining why he blogs has been picked up a bunch of different times by Google.
Google's algorithm aggressively hunts down duplicate content, relegating it to a supplemental index where it gets no love at all from searchers. Another Google search shows that all but one copy of the blogger column are considered dupes.
If you want to maximize a page's prominence in Google, make one copy available to Google and hide the rest by adding the following header to their pages:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
The noindex keyword tells search engines not to index the page, and follow says the engine should crawl the page's links to find other pages.
If possible, you also should redirect URL requests so that each of your pages is loaded at its main URL, which for The Onion appears to be links in the form content/node/number. A page that can be loaded a bunch of different ways will be bookmarked at each of those different URLs, reducing the amount of Google juice it receives for being linked.
Employing these techniques on Wargames.Com has produced search results that are a lot more likely to be useful, reaching specific product pages. I'm not seeing an uptick in sales yet, but the Google results for the site were so useless 90 days ago I was afraid the other search engine optimizers would find out and make fun of me.
P.s. Just kidding, dad!
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