Friday, December 12, 2003
Peeking at my referer logs the other day, I noticed someone had arrived at the Family Updates site’s entry about Santa’s arrival in Mystic through a search for “Santa Claus Mystic Tugboat.” Out of curiosity I checked out the top result for that search which led to John Keyes’ Photolog. Sure enough John, who lives near Boston, was visiting Mystic when Santa arrived aboard the Seaport’s tugboat Kingston II. (The same boat featured in the snow storm image in Santa’s Tugboat.)
John took a few photo’s of the events and the Kingston II which he has been adding to his site over the past few weeks. When I saw his entry for December 2nd, I knew he had been just a bit upriver from me at the time (at most a hundred feet away–more likely closer.) Sorta one of those small world type of things. John lives near Boston but was among the 150 or so people who were there for the arrival of Santa that cold and windy day. John even reports in the comments that he enjoyed some ice cream from Mystic Drawbridge Ice Cream Shoppe afterwards!
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Ruben Gonzalez, one of the legends of Buena Vista Social Club and the unique Cuban Jazz, has passed away in Havana, according to the BBC. This man was a rare talent and pure joy to watch and listen to.
via Antipixel
The Mystic Seaport’s tugboat—which also served as Santa’s ride for the recent festivities—during yesterday’s snowstorm. All told we got about a foot to a foot and a half of snow from Friday evening to Saturday night. There was a window of about 4 hours late Saturday morning when it stopped. By the time I got out to do some errands around town, it had started up again, and by 3pm it was coming down very heavily.
Saturday, December 6, 2003
Whooops!
Is someone at Google is trying to make a political statement ?
If you go to Google and type in “Miserable Failure” as the search criteria then click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button you get…
George Bush’s bio page the the Whitehouse.
No it’s not a statement by Google, but rather Bush bashers taking advantage of the google ranking system. Of course in a way I’ve just contributed to the high ranking of the Bio getting the top ranking for the search phrase “Miserable Failure”. The high ranking is the result of numerous web sites linking to GW’s bio with the term. The trick uses the fact that Google considers web links as a major search ranking factor. With all the links to GW from that term, his Bio page is now the top ranked web page, even though the words “Miserable” and Failure” appear nowhere on the page or in the meta-data.
Wow, when it finally decided to dump the snow, it didn’t fool around. When we left Mystic this afternoon it hadn’t even started to flurry. By the time we got to Old Saybrook to sell our old crib, it was really just beginning to come down. By the time we left Old Saybrook, we knew it would be a rough drive home. It took us the better part of three and a half hours to go 15 miles. Not really because of traffic congestion like New Jersey had (though at times there was quite a bit of that) but more because of less than 50′ visibility conditions. They are predicting 3–6 inches by morning, and considering that there is already 2–3 inches down and it’s still coming hard I think they may have underestimated just a touch. Hopefully I will be able to get out tomorrow morning to take some pictures, especially of the seaport and the granite rock formations with fresh snow on them.
