slimster.net

The Red Shoulder hawks have taken up residence in a tree across the street from my house. Here they are sharing a mouse. My neighbor Rob took this picture.

This is from this past weekend. I’ll be deleting this video and sending it to you on CD (Mom).

I have had a number of instances where I create a post only to have it scraped and pre-dated by another blog aggregator. In some instances the scraped post ranks higher than my original post.

Hopefully the Wordpress update will fix that issue. In the meantime, I want to get this auto broker site crawled as I’m doing a little bartering with this guy and I need Google take note of the site without image text. And this is a good test to follow the path of scraper bot because this particular site has zero inbound links or link associations. So, here ya go, scraping software, let’s see if I can track your steps…

I’m not sure how the national news plays it, but Georgia has been suffering from a severe drought for several months. We have also been under a water ban for some time and it is evident from the dry landscape. Personally, I would rather not water my lawn in the first place, so I haven’t had to change my behavior much. My water bills have increased from around $30 to upwards of $50 a month. But that’s not a big price to pay, in my opinion.

However, this month my water bill was $754.00! Say what!? How could this be? I checked and rechecked the water bill and I noticed that this month’s bill was an “estimate”. An estimate based on what, exactly? And why an estimation? I looked further.

There was a small note on my bill that said that the meter could not be read because it was “covered with landscape”. If I’m going to suffer a 1500% increase in my water bill because of a landscape malfunction, I had better fix this problem quickly.

The image below shows the state of my water meter and the “landscape” problem. A dusting of pine needles? Give me a break, Dekalb County! Get out of the truck, lift the metal plate, and read the freakin’ meter. Being lazy and/or incompetent is no excuse to gouge customers.

The best degree from the greatest institution in the world means very little in the face of experience. Just because someone can conduct a train, doesn’t mean they can pilot a plane.

My dad is one of the smartest people I have ever met and he doesn’t have a degree of any kind. But he listens. (He is also a natural math genius, but that’s a different story.) Like many successful people, he learns by doing and he has done plenty. Two of the smartest programmers I have ever met do not have college degrees. Yet somehow, the basics escape so many who have the advanced Pedigree.

If you don’t succeed the first time, try and try again. But for heaven’s sake TRY A DIFFERENT APPROACH!