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.

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.

I just created a plugin for WordPress to automatically link strings of the form “#,###,###” or “D###,###” to the USPTO website search for the appropriate patent or design patent number. For an example, just visit my old blog entry about Gillette Mach 3 Patents.

If you’re interested in it, I put it up for download here.

Somewhat less exciting, but still exciting news: As of July 3, 2004, the rules for importation of pet animals into Sweden have changed in line with an EU decision. In short: My cat will no longer have to be quarantined upon arrival in Sweden!

The rules for Sweden used to be that a cat would have to be quarantined for four months, and wouldn’t be allowed to interact with any other animal for an additional two months after that. With these new rules, all she needs are some additional shots!

I have some exciting news today: Adrienne and I are approved for permanent residence in Sweden!

After waiting 55 days to receive ANY kind of answer from the Swedish Migration Board, today I received the following, by email from Boel, our HR Manager:

I got the decision from Migrationsverket today; they’re giving you a
permanent residence permit – maybe you haven’t even received the papers
yourself. Congratulations!

Wish us luck as we make our plans for moving to Sweden!