BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Please note that this is not NPR. However, I would like to welcome you to Morning Edition…

Day 2 of 2009: A WillyCon Odyssey (The following takes place between the hours of 5:30AM and 12:00PM. Events occur in real time) <— I tried to get Sutherland for that bit of narration, but he was busy….

5:30 AM – AWAKE!

@mrsellars – There is no java in my room and the Student Center doesn’t open til 7… Oh, Coffee, why hast thou forsaken me?

@mrsellars – Watching morning TV in Wayne NE… Original Adam West Batman movie on… O_o

@mrsellars – Local news is well… Local. Rather be watching @VirginiaKerr and @PaulCooked…

@mrsellars – Jeez… I’m pretty sure I have socks older than that news anchor…

6:30 AM

@mrsellars – @cellphone: boop, boop, beep, bahp, beep, beep, boop, bahp, bahp, beep, boop… Ring… Ring… Ri!

@EK – Hmnomnip?

@mrsellars – Are you up?

@EK – Yam nonno nam nip mmm.

@mrsellars – Okay, just making sure. Didn’t want you to oversleep since I’m not there to wake you up like usual.

@EK – Uhmm nimna hibbit nomma.

@mrsellars – Okay, I’ll let you go then. Love you.

@EK – Wubtoo moo.

@mrsellars – Shower. Check… As coach Verby used to say, “Clean minds, clean bodies.” Well… At least my body is clean.

@mrsellars – Students call cafeteria here the “Gag”. Funny… Noms here are wayyyy better than when I was in College thir-koff-koff years ago.

@mrsellars – Srsly. Noms here really good. A ton to choose from too. Sandwich bar, tostada bar, soups, prepared meals of the day, etc… And they switch up all the time according to what I’m told.

@mrsellars – Had Swiss steak (Northern version = mushroom soup instead of tomatoes and onions, but not bad), steamed veggies, and a salad for dinner last night.

@mrsellars – Salad bar even had beets and unsalted sunflower seeds. How cool is that?

@mrsellars – Looking forward to good noms for breakfast.

@mrsellars – Someone above my head is moving furniture…

@mrsellars – Hmmm… That thud didn’t sound good.

@mrsellars – Wonder if there was a body involved?

@mrsellars – Why yes, now that you ask, everything REALLY IS book material.

@mrsellars – Local weather dude calling for foot of snow, blowing drifts, whiteout conditions.

@mrsellars – SF faculty advisor tells me they’ve been hearing stuff like that for the past couple of weeks and it never comes to fruition.

@mrsellars – Maybe their weather guy needs to talk to Matt Chambers in STL… Pick up a few pointers.

@mrsellars – Hmmmm. Is it Nebraska or is it the fact that it’s a college campus? Man in shorts when 24 degrees not fazing anyone.

@mrsellars – Of course, students are wandering about in t-shirts and ripped jeans. I probably fit right in.

@mrsellars – Familiar odor lingering on the air as I walk to student center. Cow manure. Smells like back home in Kentucky.

@mrsellars – {attack of nostalgia}{wistful sigh}

@mrsellars – Morning noms good. Eggs, pancakes, sausage, mini blueberry muffin, and COFFEE!

@mrsellars – Wonders what these kids would have called the cafeteria where he went to college. :-/

@mrsellars – Hmmm. Place looks almost empty. [Looks Around]

@mrsellars – Oh, wait… A couple of the SF club students I met last night are sitting over there. I should probably sit with them so they don’t think I’m full of myself or something.

@mrsellars – Walkies…

@mrsellars – @students_at_table: Good morning!

@student_1 – [STARE]

@student_1 – Goom nana. Ermm.

@student_2 – [STARE]

@student_2 – Grunt.

@mrsellars – @students_at_table: How’s it goin’?

@student_1 – Nerm goona, arbba tay. Ar ermmm. Nib.

@student_1 – [STARE]

@student_2 – [STARE]

@mrsellars – Umm… Yeah… Klattu Verada Nikto.

@mrsellars – [move to end of table. Enjoy morning noms in silence]

@mrsellars – Remembers his college days… Silently empathizes with the two students.

@mrsellars – Visited with faculty advisor. Signed book. Signed poster. Got more free nom passes for cafeteria.

@mrsellars – SCORE! Found coffee shop on campus. I haz large StarMakeABucks in hand. Life is good.

@mrsellars – Dorm room is about 12 x 24. Two smoke detectors. Must be looking for some pretty sneaky smoke…

ON TWITTER:

@mrsellars – Curse you, Perry the Platypus!

@ perryplatypus – @mrsellars GrRrrRRrRrrRRRrRRrrRr

@mrsellars – Bwuhahahahaha! That just never gets old…

BACK TO PSEUDO TWITTER:

@mrsellars – Temp at 5:30 AM – 24… Now, at 10:30 AM – 44. Supposed to hit 57 before it starts into a nosedive. Then the white shit falls on our heads.

@mrsellars – Camera is loaded and ready.

@mrsellars – Fox squirrels EVERYWHERE. Fat bastards too. Used to see them in MO, but all I ever see there these days are the smaller greys.

@mrsellars – Named one of the reds Skippy this morning. He sat with me and ate acorns while I drank coffee. No shit. Damn near right next to me.

@mrsellars – Tamer than the family of greys I feed at home, and they’re pretty damn tame, so that says something.

@mrsellars – Prevailing theory – the squirrels buddy up to students and sell them the answers to exams. Squirrels are sneaky like that.

@mrsellars – Taking camera with next time.

@mrsellars – You know… Now that I think on it, animals can predict weather even better than Matt Chambers…

@mrsellars – My “country boy sense” is saying these little farts are telling us the sky really is going to dump on us tomorrow.

@mrsellars – #fuckme

11:30 AM

@mrsellars – Coffee empty. Library with coffee shop across campus… Go for more, or relax for a bit and get some when I go for noontime noms?

@mrsellars – Decisions, decisions…

And there you have the morning edition…

More to come…

Murv

In theory, I suspect I am supposed to be posting a blog about how Martians are attacking Grover’s Mill, or going on about Orson Welles coming back from the dead because he’s actually from Planet 10… Wait… That would have been John Lithgow, and he’s not dead yet… wait… I’d better go check on that… (insert Jeopardy music here)… Nope, not dead.

But, never mind that anyway. I’m not really all about the April Fools stuff, especially given the incessant foolery I engage in on a daily basis. No, this should actually be my “no fooling” day… April Serious day…

So, let’s get on with the show…

As to the titular objection regarding my personal relevance, I should probably point out that there weren’t really any lawyers or judges involved. No darkly paneled rooms. No halls of justice… Or, justice leagues… Or super friends either…

Nope, it was just me. Well, me and a search engine… (I know, I know, the grammar police are on their way to get “I” right now so they can rearrange my sentence structure, but “me” wanted to write it that way…)

But, let’s dispense with all this April Seriousness and simply start at the beginning…

There I was, minding my own business, as usual… Another Sunday morning had rolled around, and 5 AM had reared its ugly head. Well, actually, I don’t find 5 AM to be all that ugly myself… After all, I’m one of those early risers, so I think it’s kinda cool. It’s quiet, I have the office to myself, and there’s nothing to distract me, except for those pesky chickens. Either way,  at 5 AM, believe it or not, I can actually get some work done…

But anyway… I was parked in the office, as usual, sipping my first “coff o’ cuppee” of the morn, while paging my way through volumes of email. Once I had perused, with great relish mind you, all of the advertisements for Lithuanian brides, generic Viagra, breast enlargement, penis enlargement, singles, doubles, triples, financial advice, free cans of “colon flush”, and all manner of other “hard to pass up” offers, I moved on to approving blog comments and the like. You know the drill. Just another Sunday morning.

Once finished with the comments and the like, I kicked back and surfed around. Being a bit of a “tweaker”… Not a mother tweaker, mind you. Just a tweaker. And, in case you are wondering, what I mean is this: I tinker about with my websites on a fairly regular basis to tweak them…

So, anyway, being a tweaker, once I was done with the comment stuff, I headed over to the listing of plug ins for WordPress. It wasn’t that I really had anything in particular that I was looking for, however, one never knows when there might be some kind of cool little widget, gadget, or flibbertyjibbet that would be fun to stick in the side panel. Or, more importantly, something that will make my life easier as far as maintaining my blog and website… And, let’s look at the facts here… I’m all about anything that makes my life easier. Of course, that begs all manner of questions, but we won’t go there… Not in this particular blog entry, anyway…

So, back to this whole plug in thing… As I scrolled through the listings, I happened to notice a “dashboard widget” for WordPress that was designed to let you know what your “Google Page Rank” happened to be. If you are unfamiliar with the Google Page Rank, it is a numerical value applied to your website by the search engine, Google… Hence the reason it is called a “Google Page Rank” and not, say for instance, a “Yahoo Page Rank”… Make sense? Yeah, I know, it confuses me too, but hey, it’s one of those things.

Anywho, the “ranking” is based on some manner of algorithm that I am not about to get into, what with mathematics not being one of my strong subjects. And, to be honest, much like the product ranking algorithm on Amazon, even Charlie Eppes from Numbers probably couldn’t figure it out, no matter how may chalkboards you give him. Suffice it to say, Google looks at your page, analyzes the meta data, content, links, images, linkbacks, embedded rhesus monkeys, flying purple people eaters, pocket lint, and every other damn thing it can find sitting there. Once it has done this, it assigns a numerical value that rates the “relevance” of your page.

Just for grins, I decided to install this little plug in. Why not? It didn’t take up much space, didn’t use any real intense system overhead, and wasn’t going to require much in the way of user intervention in order to get it to operate. Besides, it would be fun to see where Google had me ranked, right?

So, I did the clicky-clicky thing with the clicky-clicky thing attached to my computer. Lights flashed on the DSL modem, stuff flickered on the router, and somewhere in all that techno-garble, my computer did the download thing. I clicked install, a few scripts ran, and then the dashboard widget appeared.  Yippee! I must have done something right for a change. I had a look at the results and noticed immediately that it said, “mrsellars.com/mrblog has page rank of  zero“…

I paused. Certainly that couldn’t be correct. Just to be sure, I refreshed the screen.

The widget still said, “mrsellars.com/mrblog has page rank of  zero“…

Now, I have to be clear on something… While I’m a tweaker, I am not some kind of page rank whore. I will readily admit to being a marketing whore. I will even fess up to being “E Kay’s Bitch” most of the time.  That’s why it actually says “Property of Evil Kat” on one of my T-shirts. But, page rank whoring just isn’t my thing… Still, one would think that a domain named mrsellars.com, which has meta-tags about M. R. Sellars, a meta description talking about M. R. Sellars, with content about M. R. Sellars,  a blog authored by M. R. Sellars, internal links to stuff about M. R. Sellars, and external links to things that have to do with M. R. Sellars… Is anyone else seeing the pattern here? Good. Anyway, one would think such a pile of data  would probably have some manner of relevancy where M. R. Sellars is concerned. Know what I mean?

However, with a page rank of zero, basically Google was saying that mrsellars.com is in no way relevant to the subject of M. R. Sellars.

Of course, this seemed a bit odd to me. I figured that the plug in must not have been working. But, rather than delete it immediately, I decided to go check. Jumping on the next swell of DSL to come by, I road the crest, shot the tube, shredded the wave and surfed myself right on over to Google and ran a check.

Much to my surprise, according to Google proper, my page rank is zero…

So… I guess it’s official. I mean, what with Google being the benchmark… The yardstick by which all other search engines are measured… Hell, it’s even a piece of our vocabulary and culture… A proper noun that has been morphed by society into an accepted verb, adverb, adjective, and overall linguistic addition, which is now so deeply ingrained into our culture  as to define a generation.

Yeah… Google… (Insert heavenly sounding music here…) The  multi-colored, content caching, logo changing, power that be on the world wide interwebs…

And, so, Google has decided that M. R. Sellars is irrelevant. I feel so… um… so… well… I guess there’s no other way to say it. I feel irrelevant.

You know, in my way of thinking, this whole irrelevancy issue doesn’t seem all that fair. I mean, I’ve always spoken so highly of thos Googlites…

Hmm… I suppose I should start using a different search engine. Maybe they will appreciate me…

More to come…

Murv