Google Street View car on our street, Rochester, New York
My neighbor, Rick, and I were out playing horseshoes when the Google car drove by this afternoon so I wound up with this “making of” shot. I’m thinking we’ll both be in the updated street view when it is released. I had thought Google tried to take these shots early in the day so as not to get so many people, cars and potential lawsuits in the “street view” but that was based on our friends, Alice and Julio, who found themselves in the current street view of their neighborhood. They were up early, walking, and didn’t even see the Google car drive by. Months later they spotted themselves on the sidewalk halfway around the block from their house.
Rick beat me two games to none today. He keeps track of these things on his calendar. I’m up for the year but it’s a long season.
There was an article in National Geographic about wolves mating with dogs and coyotes but it didn’t mention foxes. One of our neighbors took these shots with a surveillance camera he set up in the woods behind his house. I guess the camera takes a shot even in low light when it senses movement. There has been some debate as to whether this is a fox or a coyote. I did an Google image search for “fox” and this guy doesn’t look as good as any of them. Try it for yourself – “fox”. I’m going with coyote.
We hadn’t quite finished the paper this morning when the gears switched and we got into home repair mode. Could there a more boring topic for a blog entry? I had built this temporary form for the bowed concrete block sill under the windows in our kitchen and today I planned on applying concrete patch to try and restore the crisp corners that had worn away over the years. The two by fours propped up on the bottom of the ledge will serve as support for the wet concrete. This sill actually continues all the way around our concrete block house as a decorative accent. We have over hangs that are four feet wide and they shelter most of the house from the elments but this one section where the window is bumped out gets a lot of weather.
I needed more of the patch product so that meant another trip to our second home, Home Depot, and once I finish this concrete repair we will start painting. So that meant a stop at Mayer’s Hardware for Benjamin Moore paint. I tried to check their Sunday hours online but I got a Google warning, the first time I seen one of these.
“Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer! Of the 3 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 08/19/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 08/19/2008.”
When we got to the store we asked,”What’s going on with your website?”. The girl behind the counter shrugged and and asked the other two workers, “Do you guys know know anything about the website?”. One of the other workers said, “I’ve never been there” They were nonplussed to say the least. But they had the New York Times at the counter so we continued where we left off while they filled our order.
Peggi is teleconferencing at a webinar meeting and we are planning on going out walking when she is done. We want to check out the damage in the woods from the seventy five mile an hour winds that we had the other day.
I’ve been Reading Rich Stim’s intellectual property blog and have become infected by the format. “Dear Rich, I have a question”, “I’m so glad you asked” followed by the concise answers. I want the whole world to work like this.
I would like to know why Google doesn’t follow links on photos. That is, the robots that Google sends out to catalog your web site have instructions to not index pages that are linked from a photo. In my case I have hundreds of pages with instructions to “click photo to advance”. The photos have the standard “a href=” link tags on them but Google blows them off. So if I have content on a page that you can get to only by clicking on a photo, then that content will never get indexed. I will redo those pages but I would like to know why it is that they don’t follow these links.
