It appears that the Ewoks have been roped in to be the mascots of what passes for Valentine’s Day celebrations over in Star Wars Galaxies. Is it a rule over there that every festival has to be tied to a furry humanoid? Folks are still trying to lose the pounds they gained during the Wookie lifeday festival. Are Ewoks particularly wise in the ways of love?
Anyway, this is as good an excuse as any to indulge in one of my favourite things. Barbershop Quartet!
Lets sing along!
Yub nub, eee chop yub nub;
Ah toe meet toe peechee keene,
G’noop dock fling oh ah.
Yahwah, eee chop yahwah;
Ah toe meet toe peechee keene,
G’noop dock fling oh ah.
Coatee chah tu yub nub;
Coatee chah tu yahwah;
Coatee chah tu glowah;
Allay loo ta nuv.
Glowah, eee chop glowah;
Ya glowah pee chu nee foam,
Ah toot dee awe goon daa.
Coatee cha tu goo; (Yub nub!)
Coatee cha tu doo; (Yahwah!)
Coatee cha tu too; (Ya chaa!)
Allay loo ta nuv,
Allay loo ta nuv,
Allay loo ta nuv!
In honour of Mr Leonard Nimoy’s voiceovers for Star Trek Online, which were finally enabled in the most recent patch. And also because I never miss an opportunity to post videos of Star Trek actors singing.
No, seriously. This isn’t a come-on. If you go out there you’ll either freeze to death or be devoured by hungry yeti.
The five day weather forecast for Norwich doesn’t hold a single day where it gets above freezing, so everything is continuing to mount up. Our current weather is taking me back to when I lived in Indiana, USA, where winter meant a lot more than the usual British grey skies with drizzle, and the occasional short-lived snowday.
My main concern is that I live at the top of one of Norfolk’s few hills, and while I am all too sure I can get to the bottom of it, I’m not so certain of my ability to get back up again if we get any more ice and snow. Compared with many parts of the country, we’re getting off pretty lightly too.
The Alexa Ranking theoretically determines how popular your website is, out of all the websites in the world. It does this by extrapolating from the behaviour of users who have the Alexa plug-in installed to their browsers. For instance, this humble stop along the internet superhighway is currently the 520,865th most popular by Alexa’s rating, though it fluctuates fairly wildly. That sounds pretty awful, but there are a heck of a lot of websites out there, so it actually ain’t bad. Because I am something of a numbers geek, I watch it leap about, seemingly independent of how many visitors I actually get, and have watched the ranking of some other sites I frequent, and I’ve reached a startling conclusion. Well, not literally startling. I just said that to make this sound more interesting. Alexa ratings aren’t exactly the sort of things that startle anyone, unless perhaps you are the sort of person that is shocked when a rather large yet unimportant number gets a little larger or smaller. I am not such a person, and I’ll wager neither are you.
It turns out that the best way to raise your Alexa ranking is simply to make a post telling people how to raise their Alexa ranking, and then thousands of people come in from the search engines to find out how. Because they all have the Alexa widget installed to raise their own page ranking, it also raises yours. (If you really want to go for broke, make a website all about SEO, Alexa, and Adsense. You’ll be in the top 10,000 before teatime.)
Now, some might suggest that this is a fatal flaw in how Alexa rankings are worked out. It means that the websites frequented most by people who care about such silly things as Alexa rating have inflated figures, rendering the ranking system mostly meaningless. In particular, websites dedicated to Search Engine Optimisation and such things frequently have ridiculously high rankings.
Some might even say that anyone who used such a method to raise their Alexa rank would be a terrible person. Or a very silly one, considering how little meaning the Alexa Rank actually has to 99.9% of web users. Possibly even both terrible AND silly. Some might also declare that it is good that I have warned of this danger, so that we might all be alert for such outrageous scampery.
Myself, I choose to break into a chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “A Paradox”!
Let’s sing along! There are pirates in it too! Pirates make everything better.
Alright, it’s not really a paradox. It’s more an out of control positive feedback loop, but I don’t know any songs about that.
When not pretending to send his children off in UFO-shaped balloons or having his trousers dry-cleaned, Richard Heene likes to write theme songs for his science adventures. This one is getting slated across the internet, but I find it rather catchy. Tune into the show that’s really effective: Watch Richard Heene…. Science Detective!
Unfortunately for Mr Heene, the non-Science Detectives have also proven to be fairly effective. I would suggest to him that the fatal flaw in his plan was expecting 6 year olds to hold up under the brutal interrogation techniques of cable news.
If you want to know what it’s like to be arrested,
be blogged about quite rudely, and widely detested.
With parenting skills that are truly defective:
Ask Richard Heene…Science Detective!
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