Monday, April 01, 2002
This is no joke …
Yes, it's official.
We (we being Spring and I) have Boston Diaries Coffee Mugs for sale.
No joke.
Even if it is April 1st.
I think this is a new search engine
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., March 25 /PRNewswire/—So what does one kid [sic] frustration over his disappointing fate with online Search Engines get you? The answer is a new place for web owners to list their sites. On Friday, March 22, Mach Find, Inc. announced the launch of its brand new Search Engine Company called, “Mach Find” (www.MachFind.com).
PRNewswire press release that was forwarded to me via email
I'm not really sure what to make of this. Curious, I went to MachFind only to find it doesn't find anything at all. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. As in, “we don't actually have anything in our database yet.”
Now, Dennis Williams, II has an interesting take on the search engine—you submit a URL and it becomes part of the database immediately. Google? AltaVista? Yahoo? You submit a URL and they'll “get back to you” with their spiders (software that crawls a website for indexing).
But, there's a catch. It's $2 per URL submission. Not per site, per URL! That, I think, is a
bad move on his part; more and more sites are dynamically generated and the
concept of a “page” is well … not very well defined anymore. Heck, the
Electric King
James Bible has over fifteen
million pages yet they're not exactly static pages. And if I were to
submit The Boston Diaries I'm not sure exactly
what keywords I would be submitting it under (well, perhaps the ones I have
in the <META> tags but that's a rather limited view of what
goes on in here). Two dollars per site, I can see that; two dollars per
page?
Mach Find operates under a premise and understanding that while the internet continues to grow, through filling up with more websites, it is only the truly innovative net locations that cause it to expand. This expanse has limitless potential, and we certainly want to be a part of it.
It is our belief that rather than bottle up this beautiful potential of technology and growth within the confines of a company, sometimes the higher success and profit lies in sharing it. Mach Find feels that no individual who is interested in the basic knowledge and understanding of technology that he has committed himself to be a client of, should be denied access to it.
Well, right now the search engine is quite useless as there's nothing there to search. I tried several terms, including “Mach Find” and “Dennis Williams, II,” and nothing. Is it too much to ask to seed the database with sites? Or for a period of time, let URL submission be free to help populate the database? Something? Anything? It's definitely in that “Catch-22” stage—it's not worth me spending the two bucks to submit a URL because no one is going to use the engine because there are no search results that I can see, and as a user, I'm not going to use the search engine because there are no search results.
No one is exactly going to flock to your search engine for either searching or submissions, I hate to say.
But I do see they are hiring. Perhaps I can get one of those five positions left on the Creative Team of Experts. Looks like they might need the help.
Packing packing packing
Packed some more of the kitchen at Condo Conner tonight. Yes, we're still moving. Comes from a forced move I think.
And I'm finding all sorts of odd items that haven't been touched in at least eight years (and quite possibly, fourteen), mostly in little used cabinets, or on the top shelves. I found, for instance, that I actually do own an electric juicer—the type that can juice vegitables (“Oooh!” said Spring when I told her, “I can now make carrot-orange juice!” Um … yum?) in addition to fruits. I also own a couple of bottle pourers—they fit into the neck of the bottle much like a cork, but have a metal flute out the top with which you can pour the contents out of (you see them on liquor bottles in bars).
I also found some metal devices that looked like handles but it took me several minutes to figure out how they work. And indeed, they are handles, for CorningWare cooking dishes. They look like mutant bottle openers, one end flares out and has a flap of metal underneath. It looks like it could fit around the tabs that stick out the sides of CorningWare, but the flap is too close to the top to permit a fit. But … the other end of the device can do a quarter turn, and when turned, the flap is lowered enough to slip over the tabs that stick out the sides of the CorningWare. You then turn the other end back into place, and it locks the handle.
I don't think I ever remember seeing those handles when Mom and I moved into the place fourteen years ago. But I did find lots of CorningWare. And a CorningWare hotplate. Guess Mom was a CorningWare type of person.
I also found out that the plastic trays that all the TupperWare was stored were actually screw-in drawers! I never knew that.
I also found out I have more stuff than I thought I did.
