Things Not To Say In A Facebook Status Update

07-31-08
From wired.com:

1. Rockin' Freebird!

2. Rubbing cream on that thing I noticed last weekend. Doesn't seem to be working.

3. Buying DC Universe Classics Wave 5 the Atom at Wal-Mart! Build-a-figure Metallo is complete!

4. Feeling trapped in this male body.

5. Jesus, I'm lonely.

6. D'oh! Accidentally trimmed my pickin' nail.

7. Watching The Notebook again.

8. Quick! Does anyone know the age of consent in Kentucky?

9. Just came up with a new emoticon for sanguine [:<≠>

10. Thinking about maybe talking to someone.

L.A.'s Biggest Earthquake In 15 Years

07-29-08
From reuters.com:

Living in the shadow of Los Angeles, retiree Doug Sparkes thought that Tuesday's strong tremor had squarely hit the big city.
Little did he know his town of Chino Hills, where he and his wife live on a farm with horses and chickens, was the epicenter of the biggest earthquake to hit the Los Angeles area in nearly 15 years.
"The first thing we thought was that L.A. went down and we were on the other end of it," Sparkes said as he shopped at a supermarket a few hours after the magnitude 5.4 quake. "It was a hard shake and it lasted about 30 seconds."
The Sparkes had been through stronger Southern California temblors, the 1994 Northridge and the 1987 Whittier Narrows quakes.
"This felt double that," said Debbie Sparkes. The centers of those quakes were much farther from Sparkes' home, though.
Around 30 miles (48 km) east of Los Angeles and home to 80,000 people, Chino Hills is a pleasant suburb with new large homes built among the big rolling hills.
The town returned to normality just a few hours after the temblor and filled up with people shopping and eating out. Only the presence of police, emergency teams and reporters indicated something big had happened.
The Wal-Mart store where some bottles fell off the shelves was back open for business in a few hours, after inspectors made sure nothing would fall and hurt customers.
Some who were too young to remember previous quakes were shocked by the violence of the jolt.
"It woke me up. I almost had a heart attack," said Brittany Williams, 19, who was sleeping in her Chino Hills house and could hear objects falling out of the closets.
Brittany's mother, Melissa Williams, 46, was in a furniture store in nearby Ontario and thought a bomb had exploded.
"It was a big warehouse and police were shopping in there. They said, 'Everybody get out,'" she said.
"It was long -- 30-40 seconds. It didn't stop. Everything was moving fast. I could see the floor rolling."

Unexplainable

07-29-08

Quote Me: Simply Unbelievable

07-28-08

"The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today are Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyles. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."

A quote from author, friar, priest, contemplative, and speaker Brennan Manning.

Wrong Door

07-27-08

The Internet Is A Trillion Pages Long

07-27-08
From techtree.com:

The web is a trillion pages to Google, and growing at a rate of several billion pages per day, the company said in a blog post. Literally though, the interweb consists of more than the trillion pages that Google indexes. Google claims not to index every one of those trillion pages; not all of them, "We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content..." Most of the pages consist of duplicate URLs -- with multiple pages containing the same content.

The first Google index in 1998 had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. The blog further charts the nature of this task and the evolution of Google's own methods: "Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day."

The blog post led to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch to hint at something interesting come next week. Quoting that Google is proud to have the most 'comprehensive index of any search engine', Michael adds that "That may be true today, but it probably won t be true next week". A hint to a potential challenger to the search engine crown, if there ever was one.