Saturday, September 02, 2006

861 Commenting, A/C, and Searching

Saturday, September 2, 2006

I read a lot of blogs and journals. (See the list on the right.) I don't read all of them every day. I had been voraciously reading the middle eastern ones until I got too depressed. Actually, it wasn't depression, it was anxiety as I watched the moods shift. I got seasick from the rollercoaster, and had to take a break.

I don't read most of them directly. My PC is old and slow (how slow? I'll tell you how slow. I push the "on" button in the morning, and then come back 20 minutes later, and it might be up by then. I'm not kidding. As soon as I get the finances straightened out and the den clean enough to let someone else in, I'll do something about that), and I have a very slow dial-up connection (when I click on a link, I play a few hands of solitaire or hearts while I wait for it to load), so I use Bloglines.

Bloglines gives me the entries since the last time I looked, all in one place, without the pretty graphics and long text pages that take forever to load. And without the sound and animations some folks have that can lock up my machine.

But, I can't leave comments through Bloglines. I have to go to the actual journal to comment. So, I don't much comment. Not as much as I'd like to, anyway.

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I switched over from A/C to heat today, and got a bit of a surprise. Actually, two surprises.

I had turned the A/C off at the thermostat about two weeks ago, which should have shut off the water flow, but when I went downstairs, I could hear water flowing through the pipes into the heat pump. The water should flow only when the A/C is actually blowing air. That means maybe the well pump has been running steadily for who knows how long. The actual pump is in the well in the front yard, so I don't hear it. I've had well men tell me that's ok, running steadily is better than off and on, but I still don't like it. If nothing else, it's a waste of electricity.

The unknown is that if there was just a dribble getting through, then the pump wasn't on steady, but was going off and on for a long time. Which is BAD. And having the pump pulled and replaced is a minimum of $3,000. We've done that twice already in the 12 years I've been living here. It's not in the budget!!!!

I have to turn the water on and off to the A/C when I switch to and from the oil furnace. Somewhere along the line I must have fiddled with the shutoff valve up near the ceiling. It was almost off. That's why all summer the A/C wasn't getting enough water. Well, one reason. I suspect it's still pretty silt-clogged, but it sure might have worked better if the valve had been all the way open. My main problem is that with this left/right problem I have, I can never remember which way valves, lightbulbs, screws, everything else, goes.

Too many unknowns. I've got to replace that heat pump, no matter what. Just if it was inadequate this summer because it wasn't getting enough water, then maybe I have a little more time.

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A while ago, I mentioned to Roman that the college ought to offer a credit-free course in searching. With SiteMeter (click on the icon at the bottom of this page), I can see who got here through a search engine, and what they were searching for. I can even click on the search engine results page url and see exactly what hits they got. A lot of people have no idea how to select search arguments that will find what they're looking for.

Like, someone got here a few weeks ago by searching for I love you. I don't know what they were looking for, but that's going to get them hits on every page that contains the word "you", and the word "I", and the word "love", whether the words are anywhere near each other or not. If they wanted to narrow it to the exact phrase, then it should have been in quotes.

Some search args are mysteries. Like the person who was looking for logic problems eye color island ferry solution. I'd love to know what they were looking for! That's some combination. (I would have put quotation marks around the first two args, and around the second two args, to keep them related - " logic problems" "eye color" island ferry solution. There used to be a way to say "Return a result only if these two args are within x words of each other", in which case one might want to say "keep 'ferry' and 'island' no more than four words apart, as in "We took the ferry to Grand Bebop Island", but I don't remember, and I'm not going to look it up now. )

And then there was the person who was searching for and then he put my purse in the other woman's car. This person was obviously searching for a specific page, which they knew contained that exact phrase. But again, without any quotes, they got a gazillion hits, every page that contained some combination of those words somewhere on the page, whether related or not.

No wonder some people complain that searching the internet is useless, that they "can't find what they're looking for".

Besides grouping words into phrases, you have to select the right words. You need to know a little bit about what you're looking for, to know what words to include, and what words NOT to include. That's an art, but it can be taught.

And then there's the wild cards and operators. EBay searching is an absolute art, and I'm pretty much an expert. I can find exactly what I want with very little dross in the list.

But then, with a system as slow as mine, I was forced to learn. I can't scroll through screens and screens of useless hits.

More people should take a look at the "Advanced Search" most search engines offer. It doesn't mean it's for experts, it's quite clear, and will reduce the number of false hits.

Oh, that class? Roman thought it was a good idea and suggested I draw up an outline and sell it to the college, and then teach it. Nah. I'm not that eager to take on more. I was kinda thinking he might do it.

He shuddered.

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