Here is great little story I found while I was surfing the web one eve. I've always had a fascination regarding how they did it "back then", regardless of what it was. And this particular story, about "the little house out back", just belongs on this page.
Happy reading.
I have, for a while now, done my best to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart. I got sick of turning all of the packages over and seeing the same stamp on the back of them: Made in China. I knew that after Sam Walton assumed room temperature that the company had become less consumer-friendly (no more kick-ass, we'll take anything return policy for instance) but over the years it began to dawn on me just how America-unfriendly it had gotten. In a store that used to advertise how it put U.S. made goods on the shelves before imports, it was now a struggle to find anything that was Made in the U.S.A.
Recently I was pointed to Wake-Up Wal-Mart and saw a list of other unsavory things that they've been up to. Everything from dumping toxic waste to needlessly underpaying their employees to violating child labor laws. Do yourself a favor and check it out, and then think about how often you shop there and how much money you've made them.
I don't know about you, but any company that's this irresponsible doesn't deserve my dollars.
Well, the site has officially been renamed! We have GoDaddy.com and some Aussie to thank for that.
I do share some of the blame, I suppose. I did let the name expire. And I didn't renew it right after that happened. But GoDaddy was charging $80.00 to renew it within 30 days of the expiration. F$%@ that! So I waited a month and tried again . . . oops! Somebody bought the name. (I could pay $18.00 to put it on 'backorder'. Who knows when it'll be freed up though.)
So me, being ever the budget conscious fellow, decided that the old name needed a rest. I'm not about to buy it back from the sheep herder that stole it from me. (He's just parking it at GoDaddy, waiting for me to contact him about just that I suspect.) Forget about it for now. The site is henceforth and forever more (or until I can get the original name back at a reasonable price) known as Hopper54.
The fantastic contraption you see to the left will no doubt one day grace your very own bathroom.
Of course, as you can see, it needs a little fine tuning, but the future of water closet convenience is nearly upon us!
Brace yourselves!
I currently have " . . . the worst case of strep throat I've seen in a long time" according to my doctor. It doesn't feel much better than it looks (see pics 1 and 2 - not for the squeamish, you've been warned) and it's made all the worse by the fact that it's Memorial Day weekend and I'm supposed to be having fun (which is how we honor our veterans these days, I guess). No party for me this weekend. Even if I'm feeling a whole lot better by that time I still don't want to show up and contaminate my friends. :-(
Maybe I'll use the time to send an e-mail so some G.I. in Iraq.
I was so pleased with my new found presence on the web earlier today (see below) that I decided that I had to tell a friend at work about it. My friend, being himself an aspiring geek, got a little excited about it too and immediately went to one of the nearby PCs to Google up 'toilet54' for himself.
It wasn't there.
I immediately went and Goggled it on my laptop, and there it was, www.toilet54.com, right at the top of the list. He tried it again . . . no luck. We double checked the syntax of the address and made a few changes so that they were identical. Still, toilet54.com was not returned as a search result. Dumbfounded, we concluded that Internet Explorer (the only browser available on the PC he was using, which was running Windows2000) may be going to a different Google server than the one that Firefox (one of many browsers that I have to use on my laptop, which is running a superior operating system) was going to and Google just hadn't updated all of their servers with this important addition yet.
I checked again tonight. Whatever server IE was going to has been updated. By now, anyone searching for 'toilet54' on Google will see the appropriate return right at the top of their screen. So I should see a lot more activity in my log files in the future. :-)
Of course, the sites name has changed since this entry. (See "Domain Registry Blues" above.) But, as of July 10, 2007, you can still google toilet54 and find this site at the top of the list.
So, being a brandy new Web-Master, I decided that I would go into my logs the other day and see who (other than me) was checking out my site . . . when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a little old line of text and some mumbo-jumbo that read like this:
66.249.66.82 - - [21/May/2006:05:05:39 -0400] "GET /thunk.html HTTP/1.1" 200 1747 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
Woo-Hoo!!! I've been botted by Google! I immediately searched for myself and, low and behold, there I was!
Funny, the things that excite geeks.
Here's a little something that a friend of mine contributed to commemorate the occasion:
Here I sit in smelly vapor
Someone used up all the paper
Must not sit, must not linger
What the hell, I'll use my finger!
So now you know, all my friends are pigs.
