the other day, i finally got around to implementing some of the suggestions that dylan sent me for increasing google rank. santa cruz real estate had obviously plateaued at #38. (although, with the new slate article, that may change.) one of the things dylan suggested was putting a line of text with the words "santa cruz real estate" right under the body tag so it was the first text on the page. perhaps using display:none to avoid screwing up the page. i went a step further and made it white. children do not do this at home. the site was completely removed from google. luckily, once the offending line was removed, it was restored to it's old position at #38. Interestingly, the other changes didn't affect it's ranking. the only 2 things that appear to have affected it are the googlebomb and the change in the page title. 12:21 pm

we went out to eat at a real restaurant last night. i needed to have some food with flavor. while we were waiting for a table, i had a really bad seizure. i immediately realized that i should never have decided to go out for dinner. i also realized that i had become a person who was concerned about going out. up until last night, i was stuck at home because i shouldn't drive and because i didn't want to deal with the possibility of having minor seizures in front of people. last night i was faced with the reality of having bad seizures everywhere i went. i was staring at the future of all my social interaction and i was scared. jason told me over dinner how lots of people manage to deal with disabilities just fine and that i might have to do that. what i didn't tell him was that i couldn't think of any really good reason why i would want to. 10:10 am

i just talked to the epilepsy nurse because my new medication hasn't been helping control my seizures. unsurprisingly, the dosage has been upped. what was interesting tho, was the result of my meg. i asked what had shown up that caused the request for a surface-coil mri. apparently, the meg showed spikes in my parietal lobe. so they're doing the mri to see if they can pick up any structural problems in that area. up until now, all the data has been pointing to the temporal lobe. there's something comforting in knowing that there might be specific scar tissue or a clearly defined abnormality that can be cut out. there's much less appearance of guess work. guess work is disturbing. 10:41 am

it occured to me on saturday how ironic the high rate of depression is among epilepsy patients contemplating brain surgery. here you are examining every minute of your life trying to decide if it's miserable enough to warrant brain surgery. should you actually be surprised that you become depressed over how miserable your life is? 09:10 am

i'd love to be one of the first human trials of this brain implant. i wonder if they've figured out a way to left and right-click tho. via corante. 09:11 am

Google hit by link bombers - and the meme is tipped into the international arena with this bbc article. via microcontent news. 10:16 am

while reading the tipping blog article -- which, by the way, is a pretty accurate description of a meme expanding (although it's been several years since i've had the pleasure(?) of being hit by wired & /.) -- the section on shyness stood out. a few months back kirsty and i developed a theory. based purely on ourselves, we decided that how well you tolerate others is something you are born with. but shyness, although a common side-effect of low tolerance is part of your up-bringing.

as i child, i was a touch-me-not. i had a low tolerance for people and would rather be alone with a book than interacting with others. kirsty, on the other hand, was so out-going she would start talking to strangers on the street. now, my mum was shy and therefore my shyness was accepted. based on the fact that i've managed to overcome the shyness to a certain extent (not the low tolerance for people), i think that having an out-going mother who could have taught social skills by example would have made me a less shy person. leading me to conclude that shyness is a lack of training in basic social skills. (yes, i had not known until this year that the easiest way to carry on a conversation with a stranger is by asking them questions about themselves.) social skills also give you the ability to mask your low tolerance for people. probably a very good thing to do. 12:45 pm

odd. santa cruz real estate has moved back up to #38. i just realized that i've been mistakenly saying #48 and #49 instead of #38 and #39. thinking that since it was on page 4 of the results, it was in the 40's. i will be going back and editing this mistake in previous entries. 11:37 am

PageRank explained, not by google, but it's better than nothing. 11:18 am

i discovered yesterday, after having a bad seizure day, that not only shouldn't i speak too soon, but also that my depression isn't/wasn't entirely medication related. the general, constant apathy has gone away and i still believe that it was caused by the keppra. however, there were low points within that apathy. i just didn't really notice them that much. i mean, hey, when you don't care about anything, why should it matter that you're also feeling a little more miserable as well. that "little more miserable" happens to still be around. it didn't last very long, but it's still there. i shouldn't really be surprised. 10:23 am

i upped my dosage on the zonegran on thursday night and am not taking anymore keppra. i *think* the depression has cleared up. but, i've thought that before. i was hoping for a very quick change in seizure frequency. but, since i was still having them this morning, i guess i better be patient and wait out the 2 weeks that it takes to get into my system. 11:00 am

well, santa cruz real estate appears to have reached a plateau at #39*. (*edited 3.12.02) since it did drop one slot in the last 5 days, i'm not sure whether there will still be a down turn. 09:49 am

considering how hard it is to tell whether people are male or female, i'm surprised these two are managed to fall in love in d2. at least there won't be the usual gamer's marital problem... "honey, get off the damn computer!" 09:38 am

well, google seems to be spidering more often now. today, santa cruz real estate has moved down to #39*. (*edited 3.12.02) the more i check this, the more i try to figure out how the results are ranked. of the first 50 results, only 5 (including my dad's) have been updated. these are scattered throughout the results, so freshness of content isn't a factor. and the #5 listing is a site called santaweb. a gift site that does have the keywords "real estate" but doesn't have "santa cruz" at all. so despite claim #2 on why use google, you do see pages that don't match all of your search terms. also, looking at the various results, not counting the sites that don't have "real estate" in the text, there are about 10 that don't have "santa cruz" and "real estate" in anything near to what you could call close proximity to each other. something that #3 claims happens. depending how closely google defines "near each other", anywhere from 30-50% of the top 10 results don't actually conform to those factors. which leads me to conclude, through my oh so extensive and scientific research, that it all comes down to PageRank. it's too bad that google doesn't display the sources like daypop and blogdex do. i'd really like to see who was linking to santaweb.com to get it so high on the search results for santa cruz real estate. 11:02 am

sigh. worth a thousand words indeed. 01:37 pm

in case you never visit it but for some reason still care, i updated the layout and architecture of the portal. the key change is a flattening of the site. it's only 2 levels deep now, since i moved all the categories etc. to the front page and moved all the weblog info into the listings. hopefully, it's much improved. 10:02 am

i hadn't realized that there was a google forum. thanks sanj for pointing it out. 09:58 am

i rather corrupted my google bomb experiment. looking at all those higher ranked sites, i realized that i needed to move santa cruz real estate to the beginning of the title. apparently, google is smart enough to ignore everything after a certain number of words/chars. the site was spidered last night and has moved up to #38*. (*edited 3.12.02) how much of that rise is due to the title change and how much is due to the google bomb is unknown. i think google spiders twice a week, so i don't expect there'll be another change until the weekend. 09:11 am

i saw on cnn this morning that santa cruz was auctioning off the "welcome to santa cruz" sign. the brief 5 word blurb made me think it was some sort of historic sign because i couldn't remember ever seeing one. thankfully, it's the river street eyesore that i try to block out of my mind.

speaking of santa cruz real estate, it's still #134. i'm assuming google hasn't spidered in the last 2 days. either that or it's reached a plateau and eatonweb is just not as important as it used to be. 10:12 am

for those few of you interested, UnknownPlayer.com is holding a drawing for a chance to win a shadowbane beta account. 10:37 am

i was discussing with jason the fact that i'd posted an unedited version of my journal. of course, i had to read through it all again. re-living that obvious misery, i can't believe that i thought the stock was worth the suffering. being reminded of those events and emotions made the problems stand out. if tom had brought us into line and made us work together from the start a lot of it could have been avoided. if i hadn't been such a prima donna, stubbornly trying to undermine brian because i thought him incompetent, a lot could have been avoided. if brian hadn't been determined to claw his way up the power ladder, a lot could have been avoided. it's so easy to see in retrospect. we were all to blame, especially me for sticking around in an intolerable situation. but i do truly blame tom for most of it. when he came in, there was no problem. brian and i were good friends even! tom watched the situation escalate and never took steps to deal with it, control it, handle it in any way. thankfully, i've worked for much more capable managers since then. i *am* happy to know that i can look back and say "yep, i sooo contributed to one fucked up situation." at least i can see that now. although, i will say that beyond was one screwed up company at the time. i'm sure that didn't help things. 11:40 pm

i love it when someone takes a thought you have, researches it, and writes an insightful article on the topic. not that i'm implying that john got his idea for the article from my post, merely that he took a concept that i was much too lazy to expand upon and wrote something that i wish i would have written myself. although, i know i never would have. he even mentioned the search engine placement industry. something that i started to go into and then deleted because of articulation problems. anyway, thanks john.

by the way, in case it wasn't blatantly obvious, i was experimenting with my own google bomb when i mentioned santa cruz real estate. on 2/27 when i first posted it, he was #189 on a search for santa cruz real estate. today, he's #144. with john also linking to him, the results will probably be much more dramatic. i've already shown how 4 days on a site with relatively low readership can have an impact. we'll see how the higher traffic site affects it. i'm also interested in how rank longevity can be maintained. once it plateaus, i'll have to let it run off the page and see what happens. then maybe revert to a static side bar link. 11:23 pm