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!”

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.

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.

Plants have patterns and rules that need to be followed to produce the best results, just like SEO. And as with SEO, if something you’ve tried isn’t working it’s easy enough to tweak it and try something else. Just dig it up and plant it somewhere it is likely to do better. Or divide it. Or shade it. Or remove the shading overgrowth.

Now that it’s Fall, there’s less to do in my garden besides mulching, cleaning up spent foliage, collecting seed, planting Fall bulbs for Spring blooms and trying to get a last few hardy plants in the ground before the hard frost. And enjoying my efforts. These are my favorite Fall views of my gardens for the Fall Color Project 2011.

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.

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.

Me ship: The PieRat Prius. Known for a short while as Tortuga (Spanish for “turtle” and also the island of piratical gluttony in “Pirates of the Caribbean”), when we moved to Illinois I gave it a PieRat vanity plate. Ironically, it’s also a special “Prevent Violence” plate with a dove on it, the funds from which support programs that prevent violence in Illinois. Blackbeard would not be impressed, methinks.

Me flag: I sail under Henry Every‘s Jolly Roger. It’s less aggressive than the front facing skulls and I didn’t want to scare my daughter who’s a bit squeamish about skeletons. Plus there’s the nice earring and do-rag. Tres chic for a pirate. I did try to fly this flag from my antenna, but sadly me mizzenmast wasn’t man enough to handle the drag.

Me signature phrase:

The next bilge rat to 302 walks the plank!

Me first mate: Gotta love a man who wears the Jolly Roger proudly on his cuffs in honor of the day. Even if they’re do depict Edward England‘s flag instead of the Henry Every. I understand, there aren’t many choices in piratical cufflinks these days, piracy being more of a fashion statement in the US than an actual profession. Though some may disagree…

Me proud beauty: Hazel rather prefers Batman to pirates, but at least it’s the right colors. I’ll have to keep working on her.

Me favorite celebrity pirate: I know it’s trite, but I do love Captain Jack Sparrow. The worst pirate you’ve ever heard of … ah yes, but you have heard of him. Is there anything Johnny Depp can’t do?

Me favorite drink: Mint cucumber cooler with rum, of course. But really anything goes with rum — lime coke is quite nice, any juice. I’m not so much for swigs from the bottle, thank you. Of course I do like a nice bottle of red, and I’m a sucker for girltinis. Cosmo anyone?

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!

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.

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.

Share Web PieRat, Matey
Delicious	DIGG	Facebook	FriendFeed	Google	Linked In	MySpace
Reddit	Sphinn	Stumbleupon	Technorati	Twitter	Yahoo Buzz

Thanks for sharing.