Fallible Memory
A long time ago google used to index my entire blog. It doesn’t anymore (nor do I think it should), but there are things I came up with that I’d like to remember, but are no longer in google’s index for some reason.
Google had been my external memory for a long time. It bothered me a lot that it was forgetting things on me, things like a piece I wrote about epicycles - which coined the phrase “interplanetary overthruster” - I did a search for the phrase on google, it’s not there… I swear I wrote it….
Another piece on Epicycles I found pretty easily. What characteristic made the first piece disappear completely?
Sometimes it’s the things you come up with, once, and first, that are the important ones. I’ve recently, and painfully, learned that.
I’ve coined a few other words and phrases, at least Googlethruster is still out there… but I don’t get credit for coining git’s usage of the word “porcelain” (which I did while otherwise losing an argument with Linus), either.
If I can’t outsource my canon’s search engine to google anymore, it’s looking like I’m going to have to implement my own search engine again. Using ikiwiki, I can at least grep through it all, but something more complete would be nice to have.
While trying to look through my old blog manually, I find myself missing the concept of a “next/prev” button at the end of each article so I could move forward or backward in time, easily. I wonder if I can do that with ikiwiki? After looking through my hits on the old blog it looks like most of my readers (and commenters) are on facebook these days, so generating good RSS may well be enough. Haven’t even LOOKED at the RSS generator yet….
While I’m at it, I’d really like there to be a [bugs/Cite) plugin that “did the right thing” with quotes. The font I’m using doesn’t display them as curly… sigh…
Update: After hitting a lot of keys one day with my USA international keyboard I discovered I could get curly quotes. It’s right-alt-shift-{ and } for those. The georgia font displays them the right way, too, so I switched to that from Arial. Georgia was a bit smaller than I liked, I fiddled with that, too.
Find me elsewhere.
Beating the Brand - A pathological exploration of how branding makes it hard to think straight
Inside the Internet Mind - trying to map the weather within the global supercomputer that consists of humans and google
Sex In Politics - If politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it, it would be a better world
Getting resources from space - An alternative to blowing money on mars using NEAs.
On the Columbia - Why I care about space