The Art of Googling

Several years ago, I wrote about how librarians will become experts in web searching. While I still believe that this is true, there is no reason that everyone can't become masters at getting good search results. Lately, I've noticed that the ability of people to effectively search using a search engine (my engine of choice is Google) is quite limited and if people learned how to search better, it would really help them.

Anyone can enter words into a search engine, it takes some skill to figure out which words are going to produce the best results in the shortest amount of time, hence "the art of Googling". If you enter too few words or too many words, the results will either be non-existent or provide too many that the results are useless. Even if you enter the right number of words, you have to know which words will get good results.

I seem to have a knack for searching as I can get results quite quickly. Maybe there should be a high school or college class in searching. If more people could search by themselves, us tech savvy people would have to answer far fewer questions that we consider below our pay grade!

Effectiveness of stop signs

The question for today is "are stop signs effective?". I've been running along the same route for 5.5 years and either I've been noticing people failing to stop at the stop sign more or people just care less. At this particular intersection that is a 4 way stop, a small number of people actually slow down and stop, some slow down and continue, and the remainder simply just blow through the stop sign.

On my run today, I saw a teenager not bother to slow down and make a left turn at this intersection. He didn't seem to care that there was a stop sign. This intersection is getting more and more dangerous for me as I have no idea if people will stop. I decided to stop for a minute on my way back and take a video of a car running the stop sign. I didn't have to wait long for this to happen; maybe 15 seconds.

[quicktime width="568" height="336"]https://blog.gruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/IMG_0563.mov[/quicktime]
How can this intersection be made safer? Does this happen to all 4 way stops where no one is around to notice? Maybe steal spikes that puncture tires can be made to come up if people fail to stop.

The end of free money?

When I started ReceiptWallet, I setup an Amazon Affiliates link to see if I could make some money on the scanners I recommended. Turns out, this was a smart move as I was making decent money for no work. After I sold ReceiptWallet, I get my links around on this blog and while I don't make enough money to quit my day job, I make enough to goto dinner a few times a year. I'd rather have the money in my pocket than someone else's, so I keep the links up.

Unfortunately, Amazon notified California based affiliates today that they're cutting us off if the state passes a law regarding online commerce. The law is a bit of duplicate regulation as California residents are already required to pay a use tax for goods purchased out of the tax; it appears that the law is putting the burden of collection on a company that doesn't even have offices in the state. The law argues that affiliates constitute a California presence for Amazon and thus it has to collect taxes.

So us little people get punished because the state can't enforce the current law on the books. Lovely.

A blast from the past (PDAs)

My wife and I have started watching 24 on Netflix and have become quite addicted to it. Since we're behind the times, we don't have to wait a week between each episode, instead we can blow through 2 or 3 episodes a night.

The technology in the show is kind of humorous as they've been using Palm OS based devices, at least in the early episodes. So far I've seen the Samsung SPH-I300 as well a Handspring Visor. I even caught a glimpse of SplashPhoto on the Visor!

This brings back memories of all the technology I thought was so cool way back when. Comparing it to today, it seems so primitive. If you look at the first Palm OS based smartphones, the way they handled data was quite primitive. Basically they "dialed" a special number (00 in many cases) to trigger the packet data connection. This, of course, prevented voice calls during the time. Then using the stylus seems so crude. Let's not forget the displays; today's devices have full color, awesome looking displays. The displays way back when were grayscale screens that were not pleasant on the eyes. The devices were not very robust and resetting the devices was a common occurrence; I got rid of my Treo on Sprint when the battery died because the device crashed and I hadn't noticed it.

I can't wait to keep watching to see what other tech memories come back!