Thanks to a link posted by Gwen, I’ve added myself to GeoURL. It looks like an awesome concept - it uses geodata meta tags to establish the location of a site, and then displays the nearest sites, sorted by distance, for a given site. As of right now, sites near me include…a whole bunch of people I’ve never heard of. I had to journey 153 miles south, past Norfolk, to get to a name I recognized - Simply Sara, whom I’ve never even met. I know there are plenty of local bloggers - there’s a webring called Metro Blogs, plus I know of many personally and count them among my friends and acquaintances.

All this is to say that this is a really cool site, and you - yes, you - should sign up.

Thanks to Mariann for the link to eMode’s Career Test - it’s one of their more in-depth quizzes, though the results are probably as useless as most of their other stuff.

I turned out to be an Entrepreneur.
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I had several hours to kill this morning after my interpreting assignment, so I headed over to Fair Oaks Mall to wander around and visit a few stores not at the mall where I work. I wound up spending plenty of money, which I really shouldn’t have, but I’m pretty happy with all of my purchases. I picked up the Giant Book of Mensa Word Puzzles because it was on sale, and I also got both All About Me and All About Us. They’re both hardbound books, and the content is just one big questionnaire - I adore that sort of thing. I’m hoping A will want to fill out the All About Us book with me; if not I may return it. I managed to snag the red Chinese outfit for my bunny, and I got some clothes too - as if I needed more black apparel! I bought a Chinese-styled black cotton shirt with red piping and a black long-sleeved lace shirt from Forever 21, and some boy-cut black lace panties from Hot Topic.

My Hobbit name is Melilot Goodbody of Brockenborings - I suppose that’s acceptable, given that it would let me pretend I was model material. (Oh, wait.) My Elf name would be Maranwë Léralondë - a rather nice combination of sounds, I think. (Thanks to Kristine for the link!)

I really shouldn’t have wasted the afternoon doing stupid stuff, though, because now I only have time to do the dishes or take a shower before I go to work at the mall, and I’ve got to get the dishes done.

No wonder I keep getting so many hits to the Sanrio Quiz - it’s listed on Yahoo! I wonder if I should request they remove the listing, or just let it be.

I’ve been browsing the …for Dummies book collection for an hour or so now, and I just ran into my first error. It’s nice to see they put some minor thought into a black-and-white text-only error page:

Please excuse the interruption in your regularly scheduled array of interesting, amusing, informative, and otherwise worth your while content.

Error in page rendering

ORA-00942: table or view does not exist

We are working to remedy the situation. Check back in a jiffy to see how quickly we can fix the pickle we find ourselves in.

I’ve just learned that anyone who bought a “prerecorded music product” - i.e., a CD, audio cassette, vinyl record - in the United States anytime between 1995 and 2000 is eligible to register as part of the Settlement Group in a lawsuit recently lost by the RIAA. An article at SiliconValley.com mentioned that few people had signed up for the payout (which could be up to $20 per person), but now that it’s been mentioned at morons.org I’m sure more people will register. The problem with that, though, is that if each individual payout is less than $5, they don’t have to distribute money at all.

Thanks to Kate for the link!

I always wanted to have a website that provided some kind of public service. I didn’t need it to be the only one of its kind (that’s not possible on the Internet anyway), but I wanted it to be the best it could be so people would actually be interested in it. I didn’t even want a lot of visitors - just knowing that I was useful to some people was enough for me.

My main goal was originally to have a list of links. I started in my senior year of high school, when for a year-long project I decided to make a list of links about deafness. This was in 1996, when I knew enough about the Internet to use it for myself, but little enough that I could fill a year with the work (though I do remember a fair amount of wasting time). I researched web hosts and eventually chose Geocities (I already had a personal page there, as I recall), then proceeded to learn about HTML and design the site. WHile this was going on, of course, I collected links; in particular I remember a very early version of Karen Nakamura’s Deaf Resource Library (I was later surprised to realize she was also involved in queer topics). When the year was over, I had a very mediocre little page (today I’m embarrassed by the poor quality of the result), which has since been lost forever - I remember what it looked like, but I’ve forgotten the URL so the Internet Archive isn’t much use.

Cut forward about a year and a half, to the last few months of 1998. I stumbled across the Open Directory Project and became an editor. Ever since then, I’ve felt that making my own link pages would be pointless and selfish. Why do the work myself when I can add to a well-organized directory and be far more complete? Admittedly in the past year I’ve found an alternative goal - my paddlesports directory. I haven’t done much with it yet, but I want to impose my own structure that would be more useful to paddlers than that used at the ODP.

But back to the desire to provide a public service. My goal was largely to make a website that people would visit. Today I’m finding well over a gig of transfers, which means somebody must be viewing the site. All I have here is a journal/blog (and not a very good one at that), but people are coming. Which leads me to my main question: Is blogging a public service? Sure, we all love to write, visit each other’s blogs, improve our own, make minute changes, check our stats, and so on - but is this a public service? Wil Wheaton has thousands of readers - is he providing a public service with his journal? What about Chris Pirillo? How about Mena Trott? There’s no question that Movable Type, the software she produced with her husband Ben, is a service to bloggers - but is her own blog a public service? Kristine of Kadyellebee combed her archives for useful links to develop lovelinks, which is a public service - does that mean her blog is a public service? Is Globe of Blogs a public service? How about BlogTag, or I Wish You Wish? Is it important whether the general public - that is, those who do not blog or keep a journal of their own - would find anything useful in a site?

God, I love my new faceplate! I pulled my phone out of my pocket and got a rush of delight. I was wondering why it took so long to get here - turns out it was coming from the UK! No wonder it was so expensive. It came with a new keypad, too; this one feels a bit different. I’d now characterize the old one as “soft-touch,” as this one not only makes slightly louder clicks but also feels a bit more rigid and plasticy. It’s not going to last long, though: I can tell the pattern is barely on there, and it’s going to get scratched away quickly. But I still love it!

Oh, shit. Well, I just dropped it for the first time. Gave it little dents and everything. Damn! I suppose it had to happen eventually.

I just checked Amazon.com’s Top 100 Bestselling Books list, and I was quite surprised to see that the overwhelming majority of them are self-help books, mostly related to weight loss, with Atkins books showing up most frequently. Over in music, the soundtrack from the movie Chicago is #3 on the bestseller list - and neither the soundtrack nor the movie are in full release yet! It’s too bad the Broadway Revival cast CD isn’t so popular. (I’ve seen both the movie and the show, though I have yet to blog about either of them.)

Google has launched a new website called Froogle, which supposedly combines Google’s admittedly unbeatable searching skills with product searching. I’m not too sure about this venture - they’re starting to do too much, kind of like Yahoo. Once Yahoo started trying to be the one-stop shop for e-mail, games, website hosting, online file storage, photo albums, travel guides, classified ads, personal ads, movie news and showtimes, and everything else under the sun, they stopped doing any one thing well. Their original purpose has been almost completely forgotten and is barely present on the homepage today. Now Google, which I agree does have superb search software, is starting to branch out into the commercial realm. The image search is great, and it’s nice to have newsgroups handy, I love the catalog search, and they seem to be doing pretty well so far with their news site…but now this. Froogle seems barely necessary to me - I’ve never had any problem finding stores in my regular Google search results. I can’t help wondering if maybe they just came up with the clever name and then felt compelled to build the product.