Thursday, July 15, 2004

Criminal Mastermind Captured

The Washington Post reports on the capture of "Magnum," a 110-pound black Labrador retriever with case of lawn-ornament kleptomania. The perp was identified after police publicized a surveillance video of the dog making off with a ceramic squirrel, chipmunk, and fox.

Guess that whole homeland security thing is paying off...

Dangling my feet

As any regular reader of this blog knows, I've been "passively" job hunting for years. This basically means that I keep my eyes open for interesting job opportunities, but don't really actively network or anything. The end result has been several applications and one job interview, but nothing really serious.

At the moment I'm in no huge rush to get out of my current job, although I'm still interested in what else is out there.

So when I was contacted by a headhunter trying to fill a job in Knoxville the other day, I didn't immediately tell him to take a hike. But I also didn't get all lovey dovey with him.

Basically, the job sounds like it would have pluses and minuses. With the biggest minus being that it's in Knoxville. I've always told myself that if I left my current job it would be to move back to the Northeast. So I'm not especially interested in this.

On the other hand, everyone has a price. <rationalization>And Knoxville is closer to the northeast by about three hours... :-) </rationalization> So I sent him a note back essentially saying that I might be interested if they were paying about 25%-35% more than I'm making now, but it would still depend a lot on the particular company (which he's being cagey about.) I'm not expecting anything to come out of this, but it makes life interesting to have it floating around out there.

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Back in the land of air conditioning and electric lights...

The power came back on. Thus concludes this episode of "Frontier House Nashville."

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Blacked Out

Owing to recent large thunderstorms, I am sitting at home in the dark. Lucky for you, I figured out how to blog from my cell phone.

Sunday, July 11, 2004

Modern Marvels: Contextual Advertising

I am continually amused by the contextual advertising chosen by the cutting edge technology over at Google. For example, there has been a lot of discussion about the reunion on our class message board. Google has provided helpful advertising to go along with this: three of the ads are for reunion planning services. One (in German) is for a travel agency that books reunion trips. The reunion theme continues with the final ad: "Ready for BOTOX® Cosmetic?" it inquires. "Order Your Welcome Kit today."

Creepy popunder ads

It has been brought to our attention here at Kumquat headquarters that some of you may be experiencing unpleasant popunder ads when browsing this site. Personally, our Google toolbar was doing a good job at shielding us, so we hadn't noticed. But we aim to please, and wouldn't want the 15 people who visit this site every day to take their procrastination business elsewhere. So we have decided to christen a blue-ribbon investigative panel. Here is their preliminary report:

Whatever is causing the pop-unders, it appears to be hidden in script being pulled from another server, since viewing source does not reveal the offending code. There is no smoking gun, but this guy has a theory that Bravenet has begun serving popunder ads with its "free" counters at random intervals.

To test this theory, we're going to expunge any bravenet-related code from our templates. Please let us know if you continue to see popunders when you visit.