Funny how the damned spambots seem to find blogs before the real humans.

Even worse is, when I was mass-deleting the porn spam, I saw the word “Google” juusstt as I hit the Fatal Button. So now I get to wonder if there was a legitimate comment mixed in with the junk…which is now forever gone. Swell.

There was a time I NEVER would have imagined something I’d actually rather be doing than playing video games. The Game, ah, the epitome of existence! No?

No! (?!?) The Sale has dethroned it. The intoxicating ding-dong of the email…the psychodelic appearance of those beautiful words, “2 new emails”…That’s one “[Sitename] Order Receipt #XXXX,” and one “Authorize.net Merchant Receipt.” 2 for each Sale.

Then, the glorious feel of cardboard! Pull a box. Pop it into 3d…grab the taper! Make the box. That was such an ugly thing, done in someone else’s factory. But now I see how that’s supposed to be! Doing it as a j*b, as an empl*yee–that’s like seeing a twisted, horror-movie version of something that’s actually beautiful! Here, the perfectly-sized box itself is a thing of satisfaction…when it’s about to be used to ship out my stock.

Put in some peanuts, drop in the stock, tape closed. A ritual of delight.
Make up the shipping label. DHL or USPS? Pick one, hit print, tape to box. All set and ready for…
“Ding-dong” there’s another email. The Authorize.net successful settlement notice. Yes. The money’s coming home to my bank account. The ordered stock is the customer’s, now. Time to ship.

The entire sequence is very drug like on the merchant side. This isn’t just hyperbole: The brain releases a series of chemicals in response to events. Good events = good chemicals. Serotonin and dopamine, if I recall right, are the ones in play here. And I would expect that there’s a huge hit of adrenaline involved. So the overall effect is both very pleasant, and exciting!

And it’s addictive. Not to the degree something like cocaine would be, of course. But still, there’s an addiction factor. I wait eagerly, then antsily, for that wonderful ding-dong sound, to kick the whole sequence off yet again, to experience that delightful chemical cascade!

C’mon sale-notice email account, bing! How long must I wait?!

Amazingly, it’s 72F outside right now! Here in MI!

It’s about time. Too bad that it’s supposed to be back to miz in only a few days, and substantially cooler tomorrow.

The only real cure for MI is to get the hell out and move to FL, but till then I’ll be glad for the first day of non-winter weather this season.

Last night it was super-cold in here! Only 63 F despite the furnace cranking away nonstop (it’s set for 72)…I start thinking “WTF, it kept the temps up last month!”

After freezing my butt all night, at about 7AM I remembered how the furnace filter was on its last legs when I checked it previously…I’d expected it’d last another month, but I could tell by how the papers were (not) blowing that I’d estimated too optimistically.

I got another filter, and within an hour or so it’d gained that other 9 degrees.

It’s amazing how a cheapo $1.99 filter can make or break the performance. Yeah yeah, it’s what lets the air in (or in this case, was blocking most of it OUT) etc etc…still, it’d be nicer if they could find a way to do away with stuff like that so it’d just run without having to remember to replace stuff like that.

Sometimes I see algorithms do things that really remind me how stupid they are! Two examples happened today.

First, what I’ve noticed in my credit report lets me know that credit bureaus have to be running their own version of mindless robotic software….

For instance I just got 13 pts added to my report by TransUnion. Cool! But how? Get this.

For several months, I hadn’t let a balance stay on one of my credit cards. So, they were reporting as “no payment due.” Then a couple months ago, I let a little balance stay on for a month. No payment was due that month, since the grace period was still on, but it made it so a payment was due the next month. This caused it to be reported to the agencies as having a balance.

The next month, I paid the whole thing before the grace period was up, rather than let the place get any interest out of it (they charge an exorbitant interest rate). So, it comes up “paid more than the minimum.”

The month after that, I didn’t use that card, so “no payment due” again.

Presto, 13 pts. added, and a new record high! (Yes, I play every algo like a video game!)

Still, I think it’s a silly algo. How the heck could they call that more creditworthy than not letting a balance remain at all?! I suppose they’d say something like, “it shows you pay your bills.” But shouldn’t paying immediately show that even more?!

Speaking of algorithms…
Google (or as I call it, GOOFle)’s algo is another one that’s stupider than a box 0′ rocks. Get this:

I’ve got an old personal site. I’ve ignored that site for years…I only registered it to keep wanks on a forum from registering it first and sticking something blighted on the URL…

Anyway I put a couple pages on there just for kicks, and that was about it. Old habits kicked in and I threw it a link or 2. So, for a while it had some SE (search engine) rank.

Then, for no discernable reason, it was dropped from all 3 major engines, and proceeded to get 0 hits for 4 months. No exaggeration–I do mean ZERO hits. But since it wasn’t a properly capitalized site, I didn’t put in any effort whatsoever to change that. I just watched the stats with mild irkedness, and finally quit looking at them for that site at all.

Today I bothered to look again. Seems that suddenly it’s showing up again! WTF?! NO change. Nobody went and linked to it, because nobody’d been seeing it (0 hits, remember?). And *I* don’t remember putting any more links to it. But now it ranks. Granted, the keywords are obscure, but they’re the relevant keywords for the pages on it.

Stranger yet, this is affecting more than one engine. Not only is it showing in Goofle, it’s in MSN, too.

I think the search-engine algos have a HUGE amount of randomness in ‘em. Yet if I post that on a particular forum, some yumph is sure to try to claim there’s some pattern in it (rolls eyes)…