When I was at Petsmart recently a funny thing happened. I don’t bring my dogs, but it is allowed, and I always like seeing people bringing their dogs to the store. I noticed a lady there with a boston terrier near the toy section as I was going back to get food. When I came back she was trying to pull a toy away from her dog. I don’t know if she gave the toy to the dog or if he got it off the shelf but he was loving pulling on that toy. Somehow before I got to the checkout this lady and her boston terrier were in front of me and the dog still had the toy in its mouth. I guess the lady had decided to buy the toy. As they were checking out the dog tried to walk out the front doors with the toy without paying for it, but he was on a stretchy leash and was stopped before he could get out the door. He really wanted to get out of there with the toy. His owner paid for everything else and now the cashier needed to scan the toy. But the dog wasn’t going to give it up. The owner tried to get it from him but he just pulled on it and growled. So the cashier just leaned over and scanned the tag on the toy while it was still in the dog’s mouth. And finally the dog got to leave with its toy!
Category: Uncategorized
Colorado
I got back from Colorado Sunday night. We spent two days in Denver and then two in Manitou Springs (Pike’s Peak) and the last three near Granby in the mountains. I had a reunion of the Peace Corps group I was in while in Thailand. There were 13 of the original group of about 40, but with kids and everyone else it came out to 28 people and two dogs. On the way back we drove through Rocky Mountain National Park on roads that still have been cleared of up to five feet of snow. I’ll start work on a web page pretty soon but I’m still going through the pictures. For now here’s a sampling.
Band Pictures
I found these on 99-X’s website today.
Priceline
For my trip to Denver in June I was tasked to come up with a hotel reservation for the first two nights (the Peace Corps Reunion is only 3 nights and we’ll be there a week). I have no idea about Denver but I wanted to stay downtown near all the stuff. A friend at work had recommended Priceline, so I decided to try them out.
Spelling
Happy Birthday, Grant!
I track visits to my website via Site Meter and I’ve talked about it again and again. Lately I’m up to 200-300 visits per day. And still almost all of the visitors go to the Dejumbler or to the iPod battery pack page where I put AdSense ads. Because so few people visit the other pages I didn’t see any point in putting ads there. My pages about my trip to the Gulf of California rank very high at Yahoo (10th if you search for the words Gulf of California) for whatever reason resulting in a visit or so a day, and some people visit all of the pages. (I think my page rankings are helped because I link to those pages from this blog which is also indexed pretty well.)
But I also have hundreds of movie reviews that rarely, if ever, get visits. In fact, about the only time I get visits is when I have misspelled someone’s name and someone searches for that misspelt name. There was news today that Renee Zellweger got married and about 5 people visited my review of “Nurse Betty” which included me misspelling her name Zellwiger no less than 3 times.
So when I see a visit to a movie review, I look at the search terms the visitor used and then look up the correct spelling. Then I correct the spelling and post the updated page. By improving the page in this way, the result is no one will ever visit that page again. It makes me think that you could generate a lot of traffic by knowing how people will misspell search terms and count on them not seeing that Google or whatever other search engine is asking them if they used the correct spelling (a great feature that saves me all the time).