Dave Kellam

I don’t use Yahoo’s search and the reasons are mostly personal. The company is the wunderkid in the internet hipster community’s new “omg wtf ajax!!1!” approach to web-design. I’m all for it; flickr may actually be the best thing since sliced bread and MyWeb is pretty cool, but their classic old search is balls.

My benchmarks for this search-engine test are the phrases “dave kellam” and “eightface”. Yeah, it’s personal. Here are links to the relevant searches, although they are subject to change over time.

• Google: dave kellam, eightface
• Yahoo: dave kellam, eightface
• Google vs. Yahoo: dave kellam, eightface

Now as far as the results go, there isn’t too big a problem with “dave kellam” not producing my site as the first hit. There are others around with the same name and I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that I won’t become the number one hit for “dave”. But “eightface” isn’t really a common word and I’d expect it to come out on top.

Drumroll… eightface.com is the first result for both searches on Google. But the site doesn’t even crack the top 100 for either search on Yahoo. Photo set for the two search results and their visual comparison. It’s not that Yahoo’s results are wrong, they will people to information related to me and the website, but in a bit of a round-about fashion. Not a big deal but it has an impact on my use of Yahoo for casual every-day search. I don’t mind digging for information, but it really shouldn’t be hard for the search engine to connect my feedburner feed or my flickr stream to the actual website.

Earlier this year, I replaced by old desk with one of those triangle-shaped Ikea tables that fits nicely into the corner of the room. It has served me well, but it’s not exactly ergonomically sound. I’ve been meaning to raise the monitor up a few more inches for awhile now.

Enter our old amplifier, we blew it out this year and were planning on tossing it at some point. I was looking at it and figured that it would probably be the perfect height for a monitor stand. The problems were that the thing weighed a ton and it was filled with useless electronic guts. That said, it was pretty easy to get rid of insides.

Old electronics were a lot more serviceable than they are now, so it only took a few mintues to get the amplifier apart. I had to remove five screws from the bottom and the whole thing slid out from the wooden case. The last step was to remove all the knobs, and unscrew the faceplate from the rest of the inside rack.

I glued all of the knobs back onto the faceplate with super-glue and punched two holes into the top of the amp, so I could put nails in to secure the front. It would probably be a lot cooler if the faceplate was hinged, but I didn’t have anything usable lying around. The empty space where the electronics used be is a good spot to store cds, spindles, monitor cleaner or whatever other crap you have lying around. Unfortunately, I had to sacrifice the functionality of the switches and the knobs.

Here’s the full photoset on flickr, although it was a rather poorly documented process.

For lack of a more eloquent argument we’ll leave it at that. Copy protection is a waste of time for all those involved. As far as tech arguments, people seem to like making analogies between whatever issue they’re debating and the car industry. It’s worth a shot:

Car Dealer: This is the fastest, nicest car we have.
Me: Wow, it sure is. I like the gold-plated-orphan-catcher on the front.
Car Dealer: Ah yes, that particular model was designed by William Morris.
Me: And the stereo, man…
Car Dealer: Yes, the Linn…
Me: I can’t wait to get this out on the open-road, blast some tunes and hit some orphans at high speed.
Car Dealer: Sir, I’m afraid that the noise-pollution laws have locked the volume knob at 3.
Me: And the high spe…
Car Dealer: The 80km limit.
Me: But, you don’t get the spatter at 80.
Car Dealer: Sir, we all miss the old days.

So, that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But what if I said that I’d been playing GTA: San Andreas? It probably explains the splatter anyway.

Now that you’re thinking about the poor little children, it would be a good moment to mention the game’s copy protection. That’s right — the game with the punching and the shooting and the stealing of cars doesn’t want you to play on a modded xbox.

Seriously, Rockstar paid someone at least a few hour’s wages to make sure the game had copy protection. Now, let’s sit back and think about this: I have a game about the criminal element and I have an xbox that I’ve gone to the effort of soldering an extra chip on to. Do they really think copy protection will do anything other than annoy me? I don’t really want to buy any Rockstar products right now.