Author Archives: Jeremy Cole

Pumping an Even Dollar

So, here’s the situation: You’re pumping gas, and you want to be efficient and get exactly, let’s say, ten dollars worth. In order to achieve such a feat, you will have to gently squeeze the handle at the right moment and very, very gently drift it up to the next dollar. We all know how hard this is, and it gets twice as hard with gas near $2.00 per gallon.

So $9.00 arrives and you start getting ready to hit that perfect $10.00. $9.55 … $9.56 … $9.57 … $9.58 … $9.59 … $9.60. $9.60?!?! Damnit I’m a moron. Yep. There sure are one-hundred cents per dollar. Ooops. Forty cents to go. Start over!

Please, join me in saying “Ahhh! I’m not the only one!”

Passport Full

Well, it was bound to happen… after four years of travelling for MySQL AB I have now officially filled up my passport.

I sent my and Adrienne’s passports to the Swedish Consulate in New York to get our Permanent Residency visa stickers entered into them, and I got a call today saying that my passport is full and they have nowhere to attach my visa sticker. So I have to get a new passport before they can attach it.

Doh. So now I have to get a new passport expedited so I can have it in time to leave for London and Malta. How fun!

Almost A Mole

Nalle managed to almost catch another mole. Yesterday afternoon, Adrienne and I are laying around half-asleep-napping and we hear “thud! bang bang! eeeeeeeeeek!!”

The “thud” was Nalle’s head hitting the glass of the door, and the “bangs” were her paws as she was frantically pawing under the door trying to get the mole. The “eek” was, well, the mole. She was very dissapointed to have not succeeded in getting this one.

MSNBOT Going Berserk

Well, this month has been interesting as far as traffic goes. MSNBOT has apparently gone apeshit on my site. For the first 26 full days of this month, they have hit my site over 56,000 times. That means they are averaging over 2,000 hits a day, with some truly exceptional days, like today.

Today, MSNBOT hit my site 6,261 times. On August 18th, they hit me 10,309 times. Most of their hits are coming at intervals of 1-2 seconds apart. I know when I was looking into writing a simple search spider for a former employer some time ago, everything I read about writing “polite” spiders indicated that you should only fetch one page from each site every minute at the most.

It seems like, as usual, greedy Microsoft wants to cheat a bit and get their search going ASAP, so of course they need to index faster, to everyone’s chagrin. Jeremy Zawodny mentioned MSNBOT on June 17th, and some of the comments there are very interesting.