Is Google letting politics interfere with business?

Perhaps I am overreacting to this, but I have been concerned for some time, as a big Google paying customer, that they are letting some agenda other than business affect what they are doing. I have wondered about Blogger, where this blog and most of my others are hosted. Starting in July 2007, they started interfering with the ability of Google to index many blogs, including the NSFW Former Naval Person blog.

Now, we read that Obama partisans might be interfering with Hillary Clinton supporting bloggers. Bloggasm has the story. They are said to have persuaded Google to act against some blogs.

Kodak M863, my latest acquisition

I received a box of old pictures from my Mother's house. I didn't want to beat them up by scanning them, so I purchased a Kodak M863, which has a 8.2M pixel resolution. I tried the camera in Office Max, and found that with strong light, I could get good results at will, even quick point and click. One difficulty is that I don't have good light at home. I went to the best room to try my luck, and had some problems with flash and glare. Still, using the "Digital Image Stabilization", I got better results. I often had to keep moving the center of the photo area and took more pictures until I got acceptable results, at least based on the display. I also have an HP R717 that is 6.2M pixels resolution. Compared to the new Kodak, the HP now seems clunky. Partly, that is because the HP was a 2006 purchase, and things keep getting better.

vero possumus

I am not sure if this is the spelling he uses, but Barack Obama's motto of "vero possumus was translated by InterTran as "in truth to be able". The "Day by Day" cartoon wrote it as "Vero Possomus", which is wrong. (I see that they were making a joke about the possumus being like "possum").

Demagoguing on drilling for oil

I was just listening to a Democratic operative on Fox News. The way that he was defending the ban on drilling offshore and in ANWR was to say that the "oil companies" already had leases on a large amount of land that has a large amount of oil that is untapped. Why do they need more land to drill on when they have enough now? Someone needs an effective answer to those tactics, because there are many people, including in my family, who are "environmentally conscious", and who blindly support the drilling bans. By the way, an online poll at KRLD radio's website shows that 79% of respondents support lifting the ban on offshore drilling. That tells me that the Democrat demagogues have some work to do to make their position stick.

Normal or sporadic outages?

Over the last few days, the Formal Naval Person blog (NSFW) has been experiencing a more normal pattern of traffic. To me, a normal pattern shows a great deal of continuity in traffic. There are no odd spikes or valleys. If you look at SiteMeter on higher traffic blogs, you can see what a normal pattern looks like. A return to a normal pattern makes me think that Blogger has been having ongoing problems. That seems more likely to be the problem rather than BlackLabel Ads, SiteMeter, or IndexTools, all of which run scripts.

121 weeks: Weight Watchers is still working for me

Saturday, June 14, I started my 121st week in Weight Watchers. I got my lifetime membership a year ago, but I had drifted back up about 9 pounds, starting late last year. This Saturday, I was back down to 1.2 pounds over my goal weight, which means that I don't have to pay to attend meetings. When you are more than 2 pounds over goal weight, you have to pay.

Of course, now, whatever was happening has subsided

I wish that we could understand what has been happening. I suspect Blogger or perhaps Google having either technical problems. In any case, yesterday was a "better day".

Former Naval Person (my original blog) is practically "flat-lining"

I am not sure of the cause, for sure, but my original current events commentary blog, which morphed into a racy pictures blog, is practically flat-lining on traffic. My recent startup on TypePad is doing better today. The whole business is crazy, but it is illustrative of the power of censorship by search engines. Up until July 2007, Former Naval Person had days above 3,000 visits. Starting in July, Blogger (owned by Google) put robots.txt files on some blogs that keep Google from indexing the blogs. The nasty feature is that the proprietor of the blog can't change the robots.txt file. I was slow to pick up on what was happening. I could see the results, but didn't know the cause. I finally was able to check, using the Google Webmaster tools, and found the problem. At that point, I started up the TypePad version of Former Naval Person blog. I checked with TypePad to see if they had a problem with what I was doing and then got started.

Some predictions

(1) My prediction is that if, in fact, Barack Obama is elected president and the Democrats expand their hold on Congress, that one of their first moves will be to nationalize the oil industry. That will not do anything to solve our present problems, but it will make a bunch of lefties feel good.

(2) Northrop Grumman will be lucky if they get to build some of the new tankers for the Air Force. Boeing "owns" too many politicians. The crazy thing is that Boeing had the original contract, but lost it due to their seemingly corrupt practices.

(3)Barack Obama is sitting on a figurative pile of bombs, at least one of which is "atomic". All their fuses have been ignited, so it is just a matter of time until they "explode" onto the news. My guess is that it won't happen until AFTER he is inaugurated president, so his choice of Vice-President is critical.

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Paid People Searches

I have been doing some genealogical research and background checks, trying to do it online. I have been appalled at how bad the situation is. I have even tried "for pay" searches and was greatly disappointed. I have used USSearch before, but they don't even have an easy way to update your credit card expiration date! What a way to inspire confidence, yes? Another service, Intelius, didn't produce anything useful. Even USSearch seemed to find more, although I couldn't find a way to pay for it. Things that were easy six or eight years ago now seem impossible.

Kristen Schaal

After seeing the YouTube clip of Kristen Schaal stripping down on the Daily Show (Steve Silver has it), I have been looking for images of her. There is apparently an R or X rated pic of her and Dave Hill "exposed", but the one shot on the web is censored. One thing that I found is that Yahoo Image Search has much better coverage of her than Google. Google Image Search is really pedestrian, while Yahoo has many unique images. It is NOT the case that Google Image Search is better. It used to be better, but since they started censoring search results, Google is in near collapse. I can't really explain it.

This would be fun...

If this is true, it would be fun to see: "Rumors Of A Michelle Obama 'Whitey' Video Abound" (by Kevin Aylward at Wizbang!). Given Barack Obama's modus operandi, would he divorce her for this? He has been throwing everyone else "under the bus".