A thought - Boo to History Channel

Today at lunch I was watching Monsterquest on History Channel. The episode, Hillbilly Beast. Location, Western Kentucky.

Seriously, "hillbilly"?

I'd really like to find one of those History Channel execs, kick him in the butt with my bare food, smack him upside the head with my moonshine jug, and crash his SUV down in the holler.

Just sayin'.

Also, does anyone else suspect that these Monsterquest fellers are packing some heavy artillery that never makes it on the screen? "Oh, we're hunting some big Sasquatchy-type beasty, and all we've got are the recorders, low-light cameras and Jim, our trusty driver." Right. And 5 WarPact surplus AK-47s and about 1000 rounds of ammo. But those you don't see.

Just sayin'.

24 Things

Good luck to the survivors. I'm out.

When it becomes more work than fun, the rewards aren't worth the time invested for me.

Photo of the...however often I feel like doing it

This has to be my favorite traffic accident photo out of Faces and Places:


Now that's a driver having a bad day.

WolframAlpha

It was a fun, cute website when it was showed me to a couple months back and some fun was had by all. It's cute, but usually too difficult to find source material or citations. In that case, it might as well be Wikipedia.

It was interesting to see that the Barbi twins share a birthday with me.

It's cute that the 'anniversary' citations are set for the date you search. Hence, Alec Guinness was 54 when I was born.

Search engines - Google features

Some of these features look useful and provide decent answers when tested, but one thing the exercise doesn't mention is where to find these features.

Some of them seem to be under Google, more google products, but not all.

I'm not sure how useful they'll be for me in general, as I suspect I won't remember they're there when I need them, and will do a general Google search, which should return them anyway.

So, useful, just not so convenient for me.

Search engines - Google

I did not know that Google had a script for just typing in a money conversion and having it come up. I wish I'd known that sooner. I do a fair amount of internet ordering from overseas and I am frequently looking up currency conversion sites. If I'd known Google could do it from the search line, that would have saved me some time and steps.

I also didn't know that Yahoo would let you send an email from the search box, just by typing in the email address. (I assume you have to be logged into Yahoo first, which limits the "steps-savings", but it's still interesting.)

Search engines - Blindsearch

Well now, that was interesting. I did a search on "Mexican War" and was pleasantly surprised that all of the results concerned the conflict back in 1846-48, rather than modern drug control conflict, which one gets a lot.

One think that did annoy me right off, though, was that the left-hand column of the results was cut off. It looks like about 4-5 characters on the left didn't show. Crippling, no. Annoying, yes. I got over it.

I was quite surprised by the results. As of recent I have been having more success with Bing as a search engine. This time, however, the column I chose turned out to be Google. It had the largest number of relevant results, in the order that I would use them.

Yahoo's answers were wacky and off the wall, and indicative of why I don't use Yahoo except as a last resort.

Just for fun, I ran some more searches, and very quickly could pick out which engine was which. (Hint - Google is fond of Wikipedia and Yahoo is fond of more obscure sites.)

Interesting assignment.