Cuil is not cool

All this buzz about the new search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool") going on perks my interest. Now, I'll give anything a chance once. I go there and search for myself. I have a few hits on Google, and maybe a few on Yahoo, but most of the time, I get the results for someone else with the same name as me. So I search Cuil for my name. The results are a little goofy looking for me, but I'll play.
First of all, this image this is ANNOYING! Every search result I have comes up with the same 2 or 3 photos which is really distracting. Now why do they think that I need a random picture to identify my search results? Not very helpful.

-10 cuil points

Next, I add it to my Firefox search bar so that I could use it throughout the day instead of my usual Google, or some other random engine. I'm doing some coding for the sidebar I use in XP; Desktop Sidebar. I need to do some regular expression parsing. So I use Cuil to search. I put into the search bar regular expression debug or something similar and I get 0 results. That's right. nil, zip, zilch, nada, niet, nothing, bupkiss, the big goose egg!!! Now being the proper geek that I am, I should have found out why, but I'm too busy to be bothered with it. DOH! But still, I gasped. No results! FAIL!

-100 cuil points

Now I'm exercising a few searches in Cuil and I'm looking for the next pages. Let's see.... Oh wait... there it is. It's in the black "frame" on the bottom.

-5 cuil points

I found the pagination links. Great. Now lets go through the results. Page 2... hold on... it looks like page 1. Well,.... it's the same as page 1 with the order changed. (well almost) But still, no really new results. All the same images too.

-5 cuil points

Go on to page 3 of the results. Good, there's some different links in there. But all the images are the same. Why? If you MUST have images linked to search results, why not go the ask.com route and take a screenshot of the web site? And why does it insist on putting a picture for a website that's a mailing list archive (read: text only) site?

-5 cuil points

Now the category thing pops into the rightmost column. Do any of the categories have anything to do with the search results or the search term itself? I'm not really sure, and I'm not sure if it's even useful.

-5 cuil points


Total: -130 cuil points

Sorry Cuil, that's a fail!

Its all about the kids

The wife calls me up with a question. Do you want to take the kids to the Jonas Brothers' concert? Let me think... oh yay! A middle-aged guy at a tween concert??? I'm gonna feel awkward, but I'll do it. It's for the kids anyhow. I wonder if they serve alcohol at the tween concerts? I certainly hope so. I can already feel the headache with a few thousand tweens/teens screaming all night, but that's not the point. The point is that I'm bonding with my kids (my tween daughter especially) and hopefully that will reciprocate further down the road. Dad of the year.... here I come! (BTW... do they serve alcohol at that contest too?)

Bad day at the office

Moving my life to google

Now I'm not sure how much sense this makes, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Between home, work, friends' houses, in-laws, outlaws, and wherever else I might find myself, I feel the need to find my online presence. Now here's the hard part: how do I keep everything in synch so that I can get to everything I want? Google. It seems that Google can organize your so-called online life. Email, bookmarks, reader, calendar, groups, YouTube, Picasa and whatever else you'll need to live online.

First, I cleaned out my Gmail account. It had alot of remnants of past lives. Now I'm not sending out a mass change to everyone with a new email address, I'm just adding an "identity" to gmail. You can do this in the "Accounts" tab in the Gmail settings. Just add another email address you want to send from, and then Gmail will send a confirmation email to that address and you either click on the link or enter a verification code. Then Viola! You can send email as that email address from Gmail. I've also added my regular email account to Gmail so that I'll get my email in Gmail also.
Next come the bookmarks. Now what self-proclaimed IT guru would be complete without their own bookmarks? Not I! I've installed Gmarks, a Firefox extension to manage my bookmarks from Firefox. Not a bad extension.

I'll move various other things to Google also and let you know how it goes.

Stay tuned!
-Average Guy X

Just do it!

So now that I've officially kicked off this blog, I'm in a new state of mind. Normally, I'm a procrastinator. I put things off until the very last second that I can. It's always been that way for me. I have a little logistical OCD disorder in my brain that prevents me from doing anything before it's "time". Here's an example. I can't reply to an email as soon as it hits my inbox. Why? I don't know, but I just can't. I tell myself I'll wait five minutes to reply, then forget about it and two days later someone will ask "did you get that email?" Well that's no way to do business and talk to folks. When you have a conversation with people, you don't pause for five minutes to answer them? No. You answer them right away.
Here's my rationale. I've missed plenty of opportunities in my life because I can't "pull the trigger" right away. I have this uncanny ability to put off things just because I'm too logical. I missed the RedHat stock explosion back in the late 90's (I had the opportunity to buy early in the IPO), I missed the Google stock explosion and basically missed the whole tech bubble because I was too sheepish to do anything. This just causes me too much stress. I can't constantly think, what if...? That just doesn't sit right.
Like this blog. I'm going to "just do it" from now on. Who cares if I fail. If I do, I better have learned something from it and the next iteration of it will be better, faster, stronger.

Just do it damnit!!!

And we're off........

Now here I am. In my own little corner of the universe, internet, blogosphere, whatever. I've been meaning to set something up like this, but really have been procrastinating. I have alot of ideas, opinions, like to hit on alot of different topics. Some of them that I'd love to hit on:

• Pussification of America
• Technology (I'm an IT guy)
• Relationships (I've been happily married for 12 years)
  
• Kids (I have 2)
• Friendships
• Anything else I feel like ranting and raving about.

Stay tuned. I'm new to this blogging thing and really would like to try this new fan-dangled technology out!