Archive for June, 2010

Some things are dumb

Friday, June 25th, 2010

So Al Gore is in some hot water because a masseuse says he sexually assaulted her. Now maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. If he did that was really dumb. Famous people don’t get away with that anymore. There is just too much incentive to turn him in and he has way too much to lose. But suppose he didn’t? And I believe it unlikely that he did so there you go. What he did was to pay a woman, not his wife, to come to his room while he was going to be both alone and naked. That’s pretty dumb as well. As rich and famous as he is he should have had someone on his staff around just to prevent false charges.

You think that is paranoid? Nope, just common sense. When I first started teaching it was drummed into me that I was never to be alone in a closed place with a student. Period. All a teacher needs is one accusation of sexual impropriety with a student and their career is pretty much over. Now if there are witnesses and you were never alone you’re pretty much protected. Well mostly. But you want to minimize the opportunity for a false accusation. Doctors are the same. There is always a nurse around who if not in the room can at least hear what is going on. Again, common sense.

So Al Gore was dumb. Naive? Perhaps he just assumed he was above suspicion or he is convinced of the good of people. The latter is pretty dumb for a man who was the victim of lots of political dirty tricks over the years though. So what was he thinking? I have no idea but it makes me question his judgment.

Conflicting World Cup Emotions

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

I don’t like soccer. I really don’t like it. It may be fine for little children too young to play organized sports but really by the time you are old enough to run without tripping a lot you should move past it. So of course all this attention on the World Cup drives me a bit crazy. But at the same time I can not bring myself to not root for an American team and we have a team in there this year. So on one level I am happy that they won a game and are going to the next level.

On the other hand the further they go the more attention there is on them and the more attention (of a positive sort) is placed on soccer. This is not, in my opinion, a good thing. Sigh – what is a patriotic American to do?

Oh and yes I know that soccer is probably the most popular game in the world and much more popular in other countries than in the US. It makes me feel very sorry for them.

The Problem With Changing URLs

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

So a few weeks ago my main blog (about teaching high school computer science) got a new URL. For people who subscribe to it using an RSS feed no problem. I updated Feedburner (I started using it before that advertising company bought it and haven’t seen a good substitute yet) and they should all be seeing it fine. Also my statistics on Feedburner seem to still be fine. Although for some reason they are reporting about a 50% increase in subscribers. Makes me wonder but higher is better right?

For people and search engines using old links also not much trouble. There is a lot of automatic forwarding going on and, I am told, it is being done in all the right ways. So access is not lost which is a relief.

Technorati on the other hard is a bit of a mess right now. I have added the new URL but it has very low authority so far. It was 1 (out of a possible 1000) today. The old URL is still showing up because I didn’t delete it yet. It peaked at 471 (in the top 6500 of their list) about a week or so ago but has been dropping precipitously ever since. I expect it to go to zero eventually and then I will delete it. But it is frustrating because i care way too much about such things.

I am more concerned about search engine traffic of course. But so far that seems not to be an issue. I am seeing the same amount of search engine generated traffic as before the move. I guess that is a testament to the people who handled the cross over and the people who manage that sort of thing at the various search engine sites. I haven’t checked my Google Page Rank though. Not sure I want to. I think I’ll wait a while for that.

In the mean time I’m going to try and avoid changing URLs when I have a choice.