Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, but first I need more coffee.

Category: LiveJournal (Page 16 of 27)

These are my posts imported from LiveJournal.

Motorcycles

 I use Twitter. A lot. There’s a service called Klout that analyzes your tweets and tells you how influential you are. I tried it. It’s like having your palm read. It means nothing, and doesn’t tell you anything about yourself you didn’t already know. Except motorcycles. 

 
Klout tells me I’m most influential about motorcycles. I’ve never owned a motorcycle in my life and rarely if ever have I tweeted about them. In fact I can’t recall if I ever tweeted about them, but I’ve made more than 28,000 tweets, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I tweeted about them once or twice.

What started this off was someone had also tweeted about something bizarre Klout did, so I replied with my story. Well as is often the case someone else jumped into the conversation. I did not care. I still don’t care. They said I should read their methodology. I told them I don’t care. They never offered an explanation why Klout thinks I’m influential about motorcycles. I have no horse in this race. And this dude or dudette keeps replying about Klout that I have no interest in. I’m trying to convey that I’m annoyed but it’s not getting through. Anger is usually the easiest thing to infer or misinfer on the Internet even when it’s not there, but the dude just isn’t getting it.
 

The entire purpose of Klout is to prey on your vanity and somehow monetize it. I’ll use the Underpants Gnome analogy.
1. Prey on tweeter’s vanity.
2. ???
3. Profit.

Fundraising Letter

I just got a fundraising letter from the School of Business at my alma mater, Oklahoma State University. They want to raise money for an MIS scholarship (Management of Information Systems). One little problem. My degree is in Computer Science and I got it from the College of Arts & Sciences. This really annoys me. an MIS degree is not the same as a CS degree. They are related in that they both deal with computers. It’s like confusing a driver with an auto mechanic.

If the University wants to send me a general fundraising letter for the university that’s fine, but to send me one from the wrong college really really fucking irks me because they conflated MIS with CS, and they were too fucking lazy to to learn there is a difference.

The Search

Creating a search engine is hard work. Actually what I’m doing is writing a search query for a book catalog. I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it where I wanted it to be. Anyway the basic functionality is there. All it does is search by keyword and it’s an AND Boolean search, so all keywords must be present. Though I did add a flag to turn it into an OR search. It’s better than the old search which would only search for substrings. I started to write up a more detailed account but decided that it would be best for my blog. It shows people that I’m talking about my work thus hopefully generating more business.

Space Girl

Great song. Take a trip down Nostalgia Lane of TV and film Sci Fi, mostly TV though. (Note it was flagged as adult. Dunno why. So may have to sign in to YouTube to watch it).

 

Karine Polwart

Melissa and I recently went on a 10 day musical tour of Scotland with Jim & Susie Malcolm. We had an amazing time. Every night but one our group had a private concert. All of them were good but some of them stood out a little more than the others. One of those was by Karine Polwart. I wasn’t that familiar with her. I’d heard of her and I learned she sang one of my favorite songs, "Follow The Heron". Cathie Ryan has recorded it among others. There were other great performers including Karen Matheson. I purchased her CD Scribbled in Chalk and I’ve listened to it quite a bit. She’s an amazing lyricist. Here’s two of her songs: "Follow the Heron" and "Hole in the Heart".

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