It’s time now to review some more search terms that were used to reach my site, accompanied by my own unique reflections thereon:

crawfish mythology art zodiac – please choose between the crab and the scorpion, I don’t have a sign of the crawfish in my version of the zodiac.

microsoft singularity wirth – At first I didn’t get the connection, but then it hit me:  Microsoft fulfills Wirth’s Law, delaying the Singularity.

bison grammar dibol – I didn’t even know buffalo could speak DIBOL, much less need their own grammar for it.  Oh wait, here’s what they’re looking for.  Sorry, we’re all out.

demotivators oracle – Isn’t that redundant?

she tortures crawdads under her feet – she doesn’t sound “just like the girl that married dear old Dad.”

software fault tolerance user funny quip – how about, “Yes, our software has fault tolerance – you wouldn’t believe how many faults we tolerate in it.”

raving rabbit hammer  – have some more tea, Alice?

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Teeni is welcome to today’s inherent compliment.  Her periodic musings over the search terms that led to her site always give me a laugh or two, so I decided to try my hand at that genre as well:

crawdad of the apocalypse – If you’re talking about Cthulhu, I wouldn’t call him “crawdad” if I were you – after all, he’s a cephalopod not a crustacean.  Great name for a Heavy Metal Zydeco band, though.

how it works chip – it works me pretty hard, how does it work you?

naked emoticons – Come to think of it, I’ve never seen any clothed emoticons.  

batman expletives – Holy guano!

bear deterrent “dryer sheets” — I don’t know about you, but when faced with a bear I’d like something a little more substantial than a piece of Bounce with which to defend myself.

quips for old people – what, do they need to be extra loud?

metaphor sandwich – I’ll whip that right up, if I can still cut the mustard.

short quips for icons – hey, don’t make fun of them, they already have a reduced self-image.

ancient meme generator thou – archaic pronoun user thou.  And whom callest thou “ancient?”

programming punishment language lisp c – if you think Lisp and C are punishing, allow me to introduce you to metaprogramming in COBOL.

quips about toes – I’m stumped.

“read failure on internal hard drive” meaning – it means “if you don’t know what this means, then you probably don’t have a good backup either.”

weird chip – you’ve come to the right place!

Yesterday I had an email conversation with a headhunter who’s looking for a Synergy/DE (or DIBOL) programmer. Not something I can fill because it’s a permanent, full-time position in the Orlando, Florida area. But if any of my readers are interested, please contact me. Here are the qualifications:

• Synergy/DE (DIBOL) and C/C++
• Five years experience desired
• Salary range $80K – $85K
• OpenVMS operating system
• MS SQL Server and Oracle databases
• Must relocate to Orlando

Synergy/DE programmers are a bit hard to find. Not many people know the language, yet it’s used in business applications around the world. Most of these are what you would call “legacy” apps, but many are still undergoing aggressive enhancement, so demand for programmers is high.

In that relatively small pond, I’m the big fish. I not only work with some companies that use Synergy/DE, I also help Synergex develop the language and tools. Since there are lots of ways for someone to connect Synergy/DE to me, I had to ask how they found me. The answer, Google “Dibol resumes”. The only first-page result that leads to me is for this post, which isn’t about DIBOL or resumes. I mentioned DIBOL as part of my past history with standards, but nothing about resumes.

Then I noticed that Doug Karr added a comment in which he proposed an RSS extension for resume information. Google picked that right up. They’re even serving resume ads on that page.

So, thanks to serendipity, Doug, and the Holy Google, I just might be able to snag a referral bonus.

Wow, I haven’t posted for days.  But then, I’ve been somewhat “indisposed”.

Yesterday, I had to go in for a “procedure”.  Anywhere but in a hospital, they would call it “sexual abuse” instead.  BUT (hahahaha), because I have a younger sibling who fought off cancer in that, um, region, I needed to subject myself to the precautionary shining of the light where it normally don’t.

The preparation for penetration was worse than the event itself.  All the day before I was allowed only clear liquids, and nothing at all (not even water) on the day of.  That wouldn’t have been so bad if I had been in the hospital.  But I had to control my appetite at home while watching my children eat waffles, sandwiches, and pizza.  At night I dreamt that I was talking, and my words changed into pieces of buttered toast in the air.

Also on the day before, I had to take medications to, um, clear the path for the imminent inspection.  First, pills that gave me bad cramps (I know, I should try being a woman — no thanks).  Then the liquid refreshment, which came with all sorts of warnings about its evil taste, vomiting, and other possible side-effects.  But after having nothing to eat all day it tasted rather good, I thought.  I selected the lemon-lime flavoring.  It went down easily – and continued out, well, exuberantly.

The thing that bothered me most was the idea that they planned to erase my memory of the procedure with Versed, which affects short-term memory.  I know that the recollection of that event might be traumatic, but just erasing it seems downright Orwellian to me.  Give me my pain and my shame, but don’t take over my mind!

So, after I was dressed for the occasion (or rather, undressed) I noted the names of the attending nurses.  I’m sure that I fell asleep during the procedure, but afterwards I could still remember that their names were Molly and Lea.  So there, Versed.  I haven’t forgotten a thing — at least, not that I can recall.

By the way, the doctor told me that everything looked fine in there.  At least, as fine as it can look.

It’s always instructive to examine your referrer logs to see how people reach your sites, especially via search engine queries. Here are a few recent referrers to Chip’s Tips and my thoughts:

Google: Windows API simple application example c

At least one of these words doesn’t belong. Google led them to this post, which they probably found unsatisfying.

Google: tips for cobol programmers

Um, how about “get a life”. They landed here, where I make only a passing back-handed reference to that venerable language that numbed my brain a couple of decades ago.

Google: ruby Win32API shellexecute

I get several queries a day for something like this, specifying either ruby or C#. They always land on a post where I give an example of using ShellExecute in Synergy/DE, so that’s got to be disappointing. I can almost hear them sigh in resignation, so I finally broke down today and wrote an example for Ruby, and linked to another for C#.

Megite has garnered my attention recently. Two reasons: (1) they’ve been including me in more discussions than does Techmeme (yeah, that’s hard) and (2) Matthew Chen of Megite has eagerly worked with me via e-mail to make the most of my Megite experience. That kind of service always gets my attention.

After noticing Megite popping up in my referrer logs and blog vanity searches, I wanted to set up some sort of monitor for when my posts made it onto Megite. I thought maybe I could use the “personal Megite” feature to monitor just my sites, and Matthew patiently set that up for me. But that didn’t fly, because I didn’t fully understand the feature. Instead, I was able to achieve my goal by sending the Megite technology feed through FeedRinse, and subscribing to the result of this filter:

As you can see, the same approach also works for Techmeme (or should, Gabe hasn’t given me a chance to find out yet).

Thinking about my Megite misconception, I realized just how useful the personal Megite could be as a feed reader. Here’s how it works. You send Matthew an OPML file of your usual reads (or better yet, a link to it so you can update it dynamically). Matthew constructs a Megite section based on that reading list. You read that section or subscribe to its feed.

What does that give you more than Bloglines? Related content. The Megite engine lists other posts (that may or may not be on your list) that discuss the same topics.

My only gripe: the section has a partial feed. That means you don’t see the related items unless you’re reading it on megite.com. Even there, the posts themselves are abbreviated — but that works well for quick scanning and filtering.

As you can see, Megite also includes some images. Not sure how the image selection works. They aren’t always from the post, and yet not all images are included. Perhaps Matthew will explain that algorithm to satisfy my curiosity.

Here’s the result for my reading list, which I affectionately call “Chip’s Blips“. Here’s the OPML it’s based on. When I first signed up, the personal Megite was an “as available” feature, but it looks like now Matthew has removed that verbiage from the page. Give it a try and report back.

Checking out the new experimental search engine, ChaCha (thanks John Battelle). Naturally, I began with a vanity search. I was immediately impressed by the vast amount of time required to obtain the results. In fact, I’m still waiting. It never came back. This was using the “ChaCha Search” button, which the hover help describes as:

“Instantly”, not. And “experimental” is starting to sound like I’m the lab rat here.

So, let’s try “Search With Guide” instead. This option involves a human “expert” in your search. A chat window appears and the following conversation ensues:

OK, so vanity search is not ChaCha’s strong suit. Let’s lead trumps and search for “Web 2.0″ instead. Using either button, we get the following results almost instantly (OK, it actually took several seconds, but compared to the earlier results, it was smokin’):

OK, those are on topic, but both items 1 and 3 can be found in item 2 (in fact, as the third and first results, respectively). So why wait around for ChaCha when you could have had it straight from Google faster?

I was going to try some searches that would require specific expertise to locate, but soon ran into this:

So that tears it. Maybe I’ll try again later.

The concept behind ChaCha (human-assisted search) intrigues me. This could be very helpful for someone who is not search engine savvy and who starts with entirely the wrong search terms. The human search assistant could easily clear that up via the chat session. But for the increasing population of netizens who understand Google tolerably well, it seems superfluous to me.

As I’ve mentioned before, I use ReefeRSS to monitor inbound links. It’s pretty instructive, especially concerning what search engine queries reach your site. Today I saw this one:

If someone out there needs routine exorcisms, then all my little issues don’t seem so bad.

Or maybe they’re wanting to shake off a severe “stuck-in-a-rut” problem.

Or they’ve been accidentally coding demons instead of daemons. I don’t know about you, but I’ve written routines that needed that kind of help.

BSD Daemon Copyright 1988 by Marshall Kirk McKusick.
All Rights Reserved.
Permission to use the daemon may be obtained from:
Marshall Kirk McKusick
1614 Oxford St
Berkeley, CA 94709-1608
USA
or via email at mckusick@mckusick.com

Let’s google ‘google as verb ‘:

Only about 6.39 million results — um, make that 6,390,001 now.

I understand that Google needs to protect its trademark.

Think of the stress they’re enduring, having to be the bad guys on this.

Need some kleenex, Eric?

Take a couple of bayer, Larry.

C’mon Sergey, have a coke and a smile.

I sure wish I could xerox that kind of brand success.

Here’s a word I thought I had just invented: Googlazy. The definition should be obvious:

adj. Too lazy to send Google the few mouse clicks and keystrokes required to find out about a subject, but not too lazy to type even more characters speculating about said subject, all the while commenting on how you were too lazy to do the proper research.

Then I decided that before I claimed credit for the neologism, I should get off my googlazy butt and Google the term.

Perhaps I should have used the name of another search engine to coin my word, but somehow yahootiose, clustslothful, and msndolent don’t convey the meaning quite so readily.