patrickg.net

Did i miss something? Did i sleep in and wake up in a time where google wasnt enough? I think that microsoft’s bing.com “decision engine”, ITS NOT A SEARCH ENGINE! (i bet MS people get repremanded for calling it that). Microsoft is not competing to compete. The classic “the contest is hopeless, lets change the terms and act snooty” strategy that so many immature children play on a day to day basis has been adopted by one of the most influencial companies of the modern era. All the venting aside…I need to take a look at this thing.

Well ill be a son of a bitch. It works! It knew before i even got to the site that i was curious about charles de gualle’s thoughts on cheese and government. Now, if i remember correctly, their commercials feature people going crazy with “information overload”. Nah, its completely different. Its bing!

Side note; call me what you will, i like looking at other people’s photography about as much as i like smelling other people’s gross cooking. There is a reason that i frequent flickr about as much as i like using dirty public restrooms. Not just because everyone who got a digital camera for christmas is suddenly a “photographer”, but because i might just not be in the mood to look at two grown men scurrying cheese about some foreign country getting dysyntary all over everything. (the guy has on a watch. AKA jewelery. AKA inappropropriate food handling attire). Also, why should he have been a cook? Is bing poking fun at Mr De Gualle’s position on dairy products and the government thereof? Rude.

Lets put bing.com to the test against google. Now i dont give enough of a shit to do some big important write up on how bing sucks, you can visit it yourself and find this out, lets just take a single search and compare.

Search Term: Pickled Eggs

Google Review:

Fair enough. I see lots of pickled eggs, jars of pickled eggs, and a man eating a pickled egg. I would go as far as to say that my search has been satisfied and that i have found my pickled eggs.

Bing Review:

What the fuck? DVD’s? Aparently, bing has made a judgement call on my behalf and instead of finding me a picture of pickled eggs, it has found something more desireable. Also a mug.

In conclusion, i want to say that the only way bing.com would even be able to be competitive with google would be to offer the SAME results, with a better enviroment/response/experience. Since none of those things matter due to the fact that its fucking retarded, it will ammount to nothing and soon join vista, windows ME, and the paper clip in the halls of who gives a shit.

This is a test….grrrrrreat!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I dont get it. Sometimes im on top of the world, others im on the bottom. I was sitting in the car last night after coming back from a drive, and i was listening to the baseball game going on across the street in the park. I said to heather “listen to that. Those people are off of work, enjoying themselves, watching their kids play, no worries”. Seems like i cant wake up in the morning without being dragged down by some kind of ongoing thing that i cant seem to overcome ot get off my back. The worst part is, i cant seem to let go of the things that bother me. Its as if im set up as a person, to see things through until they are a success, no matter how much of a failure they are.

Solutions? Ive debated taking a hiedus. Putting down the computer, perhaps taking a job in management somewhere. Spending more time on the weights, play games, relax. Spend time with my kids and try to forget about the problems and hangups. Then it hits me. I cant. I know why i cant. I cant because this is my job. This is how i make money, and i cant afford to let a possible chance go by. Or can i?

If someone told you, that the next winning lottery ticket was one in the next 10,000, how long would you spend your money for food or living expenses buying up all the lottery tickets to get the winning one? The analogy isnt sound, but the point remains. How long do i keep going?

WVURL.com is a free url shortening service for WV. Of course anyone can use it, but it was built with state pride in mind.

To use the site, simply navigate to wvurl.com and enter a long url and click the button. You are then taken to a page displaying the new shortened URL and an option to post it to twitter.

I also created a “search” plugin for firefox users to add the service to the dropdown search box feature in FF. Instead of searching however, you can paste your URL to be shortened, into the “search” box and hit enter, taking you to your short url summary page.

I also released a free and open API interface for wvurl, allowing a text only output of shortened URLs that can be used with all sorts of programs and applications, some of which i will be writing and posting about soon.

BeckleyRT, which stands for Beckley Retweeter, is an automated program i created to repost tweets that mentioned the word Beckley.

In order to do this i saved the RSS feed from a search using search.twitter.com where i searched the term beckley. Then i took that rss feed, and pumped it into yahoo pipes. I then perform a couple functions within yahoo pipes such as filtering and arranging and preventing the script from retweeting its own retweets.

You can view the pipes layout below..

WVJobs ReTweeter is a automated program that pulls job listings that are located in WV, and automatically posts them to the twitter account WVJobs

The pipe, which can be viewed here, simply pulls from 5 job search feeds localized to west virginia, then arranges them by order of origin. That list it then output into a seperate RSS feed, which i use my AutoTweet script to pick up, and post the last item, to the wvjobs twitter account. I can set a cron job to do this, manually visit the file in my browser to activate it, or setup an email pipe to run the script when i text it.

A week ago I drove to Charleston to meet up with some other like minded people from Twitter, at a coffee shop in town. I parked, went in, sat down, and was right at home in the discussions. One of the guys there, Jason Keeling, who runs A Better West Virginia, asked me to write a blog post about what i feel hinders the advancement of our state of West Virginia.

Ive thought about this and came to a conclusion. The tweetup. Thats whats wrong with West Virginia. Now, dont think I mean that having tweetup’s is bad for the state. What I mean, is that in order for me to have an intelligent discussion with people in my state about technology and culture, i had to drive 50 miles. Were there people in my home town (beckley, btw) who are up on internet trends and technology? Sure. Where are they? Thats the issue.

West Virginia suffers from a big little city complex in most regions ive visited. There is a certain feeling of being disconnected from the rest of the world once you step outside or turn off the TV. Ive lived in Beckley my whole life and dont know the vast majority of the people in this city let alone and who share common interests. I bet nobody in this town knows my history on the internet or what i do for a living. At the same time, im just as uninformed about what other people in the area do or are capable of.

All of this relates to culture too. Not just e-culture, but any kind of culture. Large parts of West Virginia lack public outlets for creativity and thus are losing first dibs on talent to the internet or larger cities with a cultural scene.

I am taking steps to try to get a handle on the area’s talent atleast online. I have launched the website wvurl as a free service to everyone in hopes that people will have a tool to help share what they want to share. I do want to say that i am very proud of the state’s adoption of twitter. I was just telling a friend how West Virginia seems to miss out on all big things but it was our time, we were due for a kick in the pants and when we stepped up to the plate, we swung and knocked twitter out of the park.

In closing i just want to say that communication and networking are key. I have no doubt that we are on the right track to overcoming the problems i mentioned above, time is the only factor at play. How long do we want to wait for change? Personally, i dont want to wait. I try every day to make my own world a better place. I suggest we all start doing the same.