Web PieRat

On our vacation this week to the hinterlands of northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s upper peninsula, First Mate Brian and I stopped by Lake Superior to take in the sunset. As I hunted the shoreline for treasure and arty photo opportunities, Brian drew me a lovely effigy. I knew he was up to something because I paused now and then to capture the sunset’s progress and his silhouette. I’m a lucky girl.

I was underwhelmed by Google’s Thanksgiving doodle … UNTIL I played with the personalization animations. Very cool, Google! Did you know that if you click the wing you get a slot-machine-esque changing of features that settles into a random configuration. And for the first time there’s a link to share your doodle to G+ (nice move, makes perfect sense) as well as a button to get the link to share to your other favorite social network or email around or scribble it on a slip of paper and stash it in the hidden drawer where you keep your toenail clippings. Hey, I’m not judging, everyone has their thing. I love the push pins in the corner of the doodle, too, because who among us doesn’t remember making a turkey from the tracing of your hand and decorating it? Of course, my favorite turkey doodle is a pirate! Check out my Pierat pirate turkey, make your own favorite version, and have a fabulous Thanksgiving!

UPDATE: Ohmigod I’m so excited! An anonymous commenter tipped me off to the all-black-feathers trick! Make all the feathers black and you get a KABOOM full-blown pirate with five extra accessories and a flapping beak: a parrot, captain’s hat, hook, treasure chest and giant black beard! SO Happy! Thanks for commenting, “Me!”

On Friday 11-11-11, my geeky love Brian R. Brown proposed, the digital way. The Web Pierat well soon have a most seaworthy First Mate.

We were having a casual diner at one of our favorite local restaurants, Williams Street Public House, the first place we ate when we moved to Crystal Lake, IL. At the end of our meal, Brian took a picture of me and daughter Hazel with our gorgeous dessert to post to Facebook, and asked me to check my phone to make sure that it had uploaded to Facebook OK.

Instead of the photo, he had posted this amazingly eloquent and moving note asking me to marry him. Naturally, after reading with some slight disbelief and happy shock, I said yes. Emphatically. Of course we didn’t get a photo of ourselves in all the hubbub, so a photo of the ring will have to do. It’s beautifully simple and classic with a squared-off bottom so it won’t spin. He did very well.

Even better than the quality of the gorgeous ring, which he built himself online from scads of loose stones and settings on BlueNile.com, is that it is 1.01 carats. And guess what a 101 server header status signifies?

101 Switching Protocols
The server understands and is willing to comply with the client’s request, via the Upgrade message header field for a change in the application protocol being used on this connection. The server will switch protocols to those defined by the response’s Upgrade header field immediately after the empty line which terminates the 101 response.
– http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

So basically, our engagement is a change in protocol. Perfect!

I had been hoping for a geeky proposal some day, and Brian delivered in spades. I’m the luckiest woman, to have found my geeky soul mate and to know that I am his. He’s my knight in shining armor and the smile on my face.

A merry All Hallow’s Eve to ye all. I couldn’t manage a true Pierat costume, so I settled for a bonny good pirate costume instead. My daughter Hazel, 8, went as a bewitching devil. Ah, but the weekend’s festivities were but a precursor to the Beggar’s Night. A safe and mischievous All Hallow’s Eve to ye all.

I’m going to take a break from blogging about SEO and Android and social media to talk about something that feeds my soul: gardening. All day long I sit at my computer and collect data, analyze data, write content, research links, and produce nothing physical. It takes a surprising toll on my sense of accomplishment, even when the results are great. Gardening helps fill that need for physical toil and reward.

I’m fortunate to live on an acre of land in Crystal Lake, IL, with lots of different areas of shade and sun, great soil and poor, so I have a lot of opportunities to create gardens that feature different types of plants. In my digital life I look for patterns and rules and guidelines to navigate the rocky waters of SEO. Well, it’s the same with gardening.

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Star Wars + antiquated technology + an obsessive drive to create = the “Imperial March” played on floppy drives. Don’t believe me? I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I’ve never been so happy in my entire life. Two floppy disk drives grinding out a melody of chirps and buzzes in perfect mimicry of Lord Vader’s chilling theme. Thanks to YouTube’s sh4dowww90 for the video and accompanying explanation.

Today is, of course, Talk Like a Pirate Day. On September 19, geeks the world over begin to talk, write and code like pirates. Those misguided folks who identify instead with ninjas have no day, since ninjas are known more for their stealth that their colorful language.

Being a PieRat myself, I have no official day (yet). And my language, while frequently colorful, includes more instances of “canonicalization” than “argh” or “shiver me timbers.” All the same, I do adore Talk Like a Pirate Day.

These are just a few of the ways I celebrate this and every piratical day.

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Woot’s daily t-shirts often amuse me, but until now I haven’t felt compelled to buy one. Lets count the reasons the Pie(Rate) Chart shirt is awesome, shall we?

1. Pun on pirates featuring the word pie. Obviously awesome. (*cough* PieRat *cough*)
2. Features a pie chat detailing stereotypical pirate attributes.
3. Pie chart does not appear to add up to 100%, which will perturb friends and strangers.
4. Pleasure experienced in explaining the joke to the unenlightened.
5. Last but not least, it’s a geeky pirate math joke on a t-shirt. Come on, people!

If you’re still wondering what the punchline is, here you go. I love a geeky discussion thread even more than a geeky t-shirt.

From the shirt’s description:

“Well, ye blasted fool, did ye not notice that the circle has a great big patch in the center? Aye, lad, and that patch be coverin’ a missin’ 9%, most likely! And don’t ye be feelin’ foolish now?”

From a forum geek:

9% missing
“i” is the ninth letter
i = eye
Patch = to fill
therefore: eye patch fills in the missing value
It is a simple case of pirate math people

From the shirt’s creator:

haha, sorry the lack of 100 percent add-up has made some people jump overboard on this shirt’s purchase! There were actually two reasons/jokes we were going for here and both have been mentioned already:

1. 9 percent eyepatch!

2. Pirates ain’t no good at mathimacation, land lubbers!

As for some of the pie slices not matching up to their percentages perfectly, we felt melding the pie colors in a visually pleasing way was more important than aligning to the exact percentages. For instance, the red pie slice is supposed to vaguely look like a sideways pirate hat, as well as the peg leg placed around where the leg might be on a person, the squawk on the shoulder, and the booty…well, I won’t sink as low as our tee does on that front.

Thanks again for the love/indifference!

I have a love/less-love relationship with algorithms. Yes, you choose what content to consume, but algorithms choose the pool you get to choose from. Mostly I love algorithms – professionally they’re the reason I’m employed, and personally they help me weed through the overwhelming amount of information that floods my life. But I do often wonder and occasionally worry about what I’m NOT seeing that I should.

Interesting TED video on algorithms and the control they wield via The Next Web: The Danger of Algorithms. The speaker is Eli Pariser, Moveon.org’s Board President, a co-founder of Avaaz.org, and the author of The Filter Bubble.

Howdy Web PieRat pardners. I’m back in the blogging saddle, though some of my giddyup has got up and went with a new job, new city, new house and all that other stuff that comes along with big life changes.

Practical Ecommerce will be publishing my SEO articles monthly again, starting today with a post on SEO for businesses with models or niche targets that make SEO a bit more challenging.

In my monthly column, I’ll be focusing on the challenges of in-house SEO and the struggle for competing resources. I must say, it has been more of an eye opener than I thought it would be. Having done in-house online marketing for Intel and agency SEO for large ecommerce sites with Netconcepts/Covario, I naively thought that those experiences would give me some foundation for the challenges of in-house SEO. More on this topic soon, but for now I need to get back to my day job: Creating an architecture to sell more restaurant deals and discount massages for Groupon’s local businesses.

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Thanks for sharing.