Tag Archives: google

Election 2011…

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As you know from time to time I like to look at the searches and keywords that bring people to my humble home on the internet. OK, so technically I obsess over that kind of thing on a pretty much daily basis, but that’s beside the point. I was looking at my analytics this morning (yes, I check every morning before I go to work, now stop smirking). I think yesterday gave me my new all-time favorite search term: did jeffery tharp win the election-2011. For some reason, this blog returns to top two spots on Google for that group of words all crammed together in the search box. Other than that, there’s not much record of Jeffrey Tharp running for anything in 2011, except a dead link to a local news program in Indianapolis.

If I did run for election in 2011, there’s almost no chance that I would have won. Setting aside the whole telegenics issue for the moment, it’s way too likely that at some point during the campaign I would come unglued and tell some well-meaning, but stupid constituent that they were simply too dumb to vote. I’d have been overcome by compulsive honesty and told a group of concerned citizens that the worst possible thing the government could do for them was try to create jobs out of thin air and deficit spending. I wouldn’t have kissed babies or pandered to old people and I’d have walked off stage at the debate when someone tried to drag religion into the discussion, because believing in Jesus or Jehova or Vishnu or the Supreme Order of Jedi Knights makes you any better at administering the levers of government than the guy next to you who believes in something else.

I wouldn’t have made campaign promises I knew I couldn’t keep. Nope. I’m not going to lower your taxes. We have bills to pay. And no, I’m not going to increase your benefits, because guess what, we have bills to pay. We got twenty years of good times and now we’re getting the lean. That’s how the economy works, people. It’s a cycle. 10 years from now when we’re somewhere north of Dow 20,000 you’re going to forget all about The Great Recession. If four cable news networks weren’t cramming the economy down your throat and telling you how bad it is out there every night, would you know there was a problem? I sure wouldn’t judging only by the number of cars parked at the local shopping mall or the number of flat screen TVs rolling out the door at Best Buy.

That’s my long way of saying that I don’t think there’s much of a chance a guy named Jeffrey Tharp got elected in 2011… But if he did, I hope he’s got the guts to call it the way he sees it and not the way that’s going to make a great quote for the local newspaper.

It’s you, not me…

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Dear Facebook,

We’ve spent a lot of time together over the last few years. I use to love the way you told me what my friends, family, and random people who found my account were up to on a regular basis. Back then you were friendly and easy to use. Unfortunately, you’ve changed and now I seem to have to spend hours tweaking your settings to get even a bad approximation of what you use to do automatically.

I don’t dig it and as much as you want to call it a feature, it’s really you trying to guess what I think is important rather than just giving me the information and letting me make my own decisions. You’re smothering me, Facebook, and I’m not alright with that. This isn’t easy for me to say, but I think it might be time for us to start seeing other social media. I mean, I still want to be friends and all and we can totally still hook up, but I just can’t rely on you to be my one and only. You’ve broken my heart too many times for that. It’s a shame, because we could have had something real.

So yeah, I really think you just need to spend some time focusing on being the best you possible. You still have so much potential, but I’m afraid you’re trying too hard to overcomplicate the plumbing and you’re going end up like that used up old husk MySpace. Please don’t let it end that way.

If you want to talk, you can always hit up my cellie or look me up on Twitter (jdtharp) or even add me on Google+ (jeffrey.d.tharp). I’ll still look in on you from time to time and I’m totally going to use you to shamelessly plug my other endeavors, so we’ll always have that, right?

Take care,

Jeff

The searchers…

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Running a blog is a mixture of art and science. The art comes in the form of the actual words on the page. The science tells you who’s searching for what, why people are visiting, and where their coming from. It’s probably not a discussion to have with your friends who are worried that the government or big corporations are tracking your every move. The analytic tools that are available to me, a poor simple blogger, would be profoundly disturbing for them. Disturbing images of big brother aside, I’m always curious about what brings people here. And since it’s bad form to blatantly ask, I’m using some analytic tools to let me know what web searches lead people to me. So yes, I’m tracking you, but only a little bit. I’m sure there are ways to put names with hits, but that’s not something I’m interested in so your secret identities are safe. All I know is that you’ve been here. Sort of like knowing that people lived in your house before you did by finding a box of their crap pushed all the way to the back of the crawl space.

If you’re wondering what brings people here, there are some obvious answers. The top draw was apparently the DOD/Army hiring freeze. That one’s still bringing in hits although I haven’t written about it in three or four months. Electronic cigarettes is another big winner. Apparently there’s alot of interest out there. Of course my old favorite is still well into the top five: Teamwork Sucks. That’s been bringing in consistant visitors since I opened the doors here. None of those is surprising, really, once you remember the the town square of the modern world.

The ones that are really interesting are the one offs that land just one lone individual here on the site. Some of my personal favorite searches from the last year are:

– memphis storm drain backup
– how can i protect my grass from people driving over it?
– narcotics jeff tharp
– how to piss off apartment manager
– ocd mowing the lawn
– jeff tharp star wars oregon
– tactical retrograde
– glen beck institutionalized

Some of them I can understand. I did spend some time ranting about Glen and an inordinate amount of time worrying with my lawn. If any of you are updating my mother, though, can you please assure her that I have no idea where the narcotics part came from. Thanks for the solid.

Memory…

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I read an article last week about human memory essentially being destroyed by computers that file everything from phone numbers to copies of the Gettysburg Address for us. Far from making my mind less capable, it was the interconnected series of tubes that let me take a passing flash of recognition and run down the rest of the story. It let me make connections that I could have never made on my own, adding a helpful boost on the weakness of 13 year old memories. If there was ever something to be celebrated, that would be it.

Ten years ago, if I had passed someone in the hallway and thought they looked familiar, that would have been it and I’d have gone on about my day without giving it another thought. But thanks to Google, any passing thought can become the focus of an entire day of searching out leads from four year old newsletters, generalized e-stakling, and finally putting a name with that long ago face. All for the simple moment of pleasure at walking up and saying, “I thought I recognized you,” and spending a few minutes reconnecting with someone who knew you a lot more hair ago.

Google+

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I’ve gotten quite a few “adds” on Google + over the last week. First, let me say that I’m not ignoring all you other early adopters out there. Yes, I have a Google + account, but no, I’m not actively using it. I feel like I owe you an explanation for that.

Way back in 2010 when I went all in with a hosted website, I selected Google to host my “business” email needs. The Google Apps for Business account gives the average user a fantastic suite of tools to manage an enterprise-style email set up: multiple addresses, analytics, the legendary Google-powered spam filter, and a metric crapload of additional storage. These are all good things and exactly what I wanted for www.jeffreytharp.com.

Along with the goodness that is Google, however, comes the badness. With the beta rollout of Google+, I discovered that Apps/business accounts are not yet supported. Bummer. This means that in order to poke around with Google+ I have to log in with my old “regular” gmail username. Not a big deal, you’d think, but after spending the last year tweaking everything so it’s seamless from desktop to laptop to phone to tablet, the need for a second logon is a huge step backwards.

Technology is supposed to make out lives easier or better in some way. Until Google+ rolls out support for Apps users, though, for me it’s a little like a broken toe. It’s not going to kill me, but it’s enough to be ridiculously annoying every time something touches it. I’m not going to take a step backwards just to be an early adopter. For now Google’s go at a social network doesn’t integrate into my “everything else.” Until it does, I’ll be sticking with Facebook and Twitter… who manage to play nicely with my Google-powered email address. Too bad Google itself can’t seem to do that.

In the cloud…

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I’ve been working on it for a while now, but I think it’s safe to say that I’ve finally managed to merge almost all of my communications tools into the Google Apps environment. That means that with the exception of the WordPress platform that actually hosts the blog, I can manage every aspect of http://www.jeffreytharp.com from my Google dashboard. Sure, that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but remember, I’m not a gearhead when it comes to tech. For the most part, I can’t tell you why things work, but I’m pretty good at telling when things work well and picking apart where they need to work better. With this last update of the apps dashboard, I was finally able to sync the iPhone with my hosted email/address book without using a clunky and inelegant work around that involved regularly porting my actual address book to a dummy Gmail address I had to set up just for OTA syncing. Now that they’ve fixed the glitch, I’m pleased with the near 100% integration and the ability to essentially run my life and my public voice from a single point of contact. Maybe someday I’ll take another look at Blogger and see if I can round out my reliance on the Google universe. But for the time being, I’m happy with WordPress and it seems like the place to stay until I find some strongly compelling reason to relocate. Maybe I can convince myself to take on the reorganization and facelift in the near future and close out this latest round of productivity. Until then, you can find me in the cloud.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics…

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It feels like I’ve been blogging forever… It especially feels that way when I have to flail around looking for something new to write about. Looking at the data, though, I can see that I’ve been going at it at one place or another since 2005. I guess time files when you’re hostile and willing to share it with the world. In fairness, five years in internet time basically is forever, so I guess I should consider that some kind of milestone.

Some weeks and months have been better than others. My best ever single day = 58 unique views (this was the iPhone 4 release day incidentally). Best month ever (June 2010), 388 unique hits. The statistic that I’m most proud of isn’t a hit count per se. It’s simply the phase most often used in search engines that brings people to the blog: Teamwork Sucks. Given that October is the one year anniversary of that particular post, I take a perverse pride that it still has legs. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and Google “teamwork sucks” and you’ll find that I’m #7. It’s like I’ve really made a difference in the world. We’re going to disregard the fact that Google’s link doesn’t take you to the actual post… It’s the thought (and that fact that it gets you to the blog at all) that counts.

Since Get Off My Lawn seems to be something that is here to stay for the foreseeable future, there are a few changes that I’m hoping to get to in the near future. I want to get a little more focused in my writing… 21 categories and 131 tags is probably something that I can cut down with a little effort. Bringing a little structure and order to the back room of this operation strikes me as being a very good idea.

Searching…

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People search for some really disturbing things on the internet, but I’ve found it curious that the most consistent search that brings this blog to the surface is the simple phrase “teamwork sucks,” which was the title of a post I wrote last fall during the epic battle of wills between me and the Army’s educational system. While that battle has chilled into what’s likely to descend into a long cold war, the post lives on… and gets a few hits a week because apparently, teamwork really does suck. I like the irony of something that only lasted a few weeks now seems to have achieved a degree of immortality because of Google… and some proportion of the populace that is bent towards misanthropic tendencies. That makes me happy inside.

In a related topic, I noticed that we’re starting to work our way up the Google search results list. There’s a pesky orthopedic surgeon with whom I share a name who is currently standing in the way of reaching the top spot. That’s not a battle I really want to take on yet… The time, effort, marketing, and endless tagging seem to be beyond me at the moment. Sure, it’s purely an ego thing… but is there really anything wrong with wanting to be the first thing Google thinks of when someone “mentions” your name?

Doing without…

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Last Wednesday for about six hours my employer joined the ranks of such forward-looking leaders in information technology as Iran and China and blocked network access to Google. Have you tried looking up information without Google in the past few years? It’s not pretty… I don’t care how awesome Microsoft says Bing works, I couldn’t find a damn thing using it. After satisfying myself that the issue wasn’t with Google (i.e. scouring places like CNet and BoyGeniusReport for rants about their epic fail) I called our vaunted Enterprise Service Desk (ESD). The conversation went something like this:

  • Jeff: I’m having trouble getting to Google on my PC, but I can get to it from my Blackberry.
  • ESD: Oh, that’s a problem with Google.
  • Jeff: Ummm… No. I’m using Google on my phone right now.
  • ESD: Oh… Hummm… Yeah… It’s a problem with Google.
  • Jeff: Thanks.
  • ESD: Does that resolve your help ticket?
  • Jeff: *Click*

As it turns out, the disruption wasn’t a problem with Google (I’m shocked, shocked I tell you). Apparently our network operations office decided to start blocking the definitive name in web searching after two individuals “got a virus from Google.” I’m pretty sure they meant they got a virus from something they found using Google. I didn’t have the patience to ask, although it seems like it would be an important distinction to make if you were in charge of network ops. The good news is that the Great Firewall is down now and we can once again use google as a verb.

If an optimist is someone who expects the best and a pessimist is someone who expects the worst, what is the proper term for someone who has no expectations at all? I’m pretty sure having expectations was where I went wrong in this scenario.