Ned Your Always Wrong

I saw several articles on “The biggest drawing in the world”, and when I read it was done using DHL, I had to laugh. Every time I deal with a new vendor, and they tell me they ship through DHL, I toss a coin to get an idea on if the package will arrive in a timely fashion, or make it at all. It seems that from my past experiences, DHL drivers are incapable of checking a building directory, for a suite number. I have waited days with DHL making multiple attempts to deliver a package, and because of an error somewhere, the full suite number does not appear on the label, something like Suite 40 when it should be Suite 402. But they can’t seem to take the extra 2 seconds to check the building directory, etc…
Ok I am digressing, but now back to the point…

So now this comes out that DHL has assisted in making the largest drawing in the world (well it’s not, more on that later), to make this alleged largest drawing, the “Artist” shipped a GPS with big ass batteries, with the exact instructions (Just like my packages) on where the package needed to go, and 55 days later, the GPS showed back up, with all the Data to make the picture. Then the guy breaks out a map, a pen, and tracing paper, and using a lot of artistic license, proceeds to connect the dots.
I am very skeptical when it comes to this based on past experience, as recent as last week, that only took 4 days to straighten out.

Now to the biggest drawing claim…
Since when is a drawing on D sized paper, the biggest drawing in the world? For it to be what the artist claims, wouldn’t there need to be a large ink line all over the world? Because what he has is just a representation of a GPS track, and that is only 110k kilometers, what about that picture that NASA is constantly drawing, that is track of the International Space Station ISS, jeez that has to be billions of miles/KM, since an average shuttle mission does millions of miles. So as far as I am concerned, unless I can see big lines on google earth, I ain’t buying the Biggest Drawing In The World claim, at least he could have done is draw it on a really really big piece of paper.

I used to do a lot more travel then I do now, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I remember that when the whole thing started with the drought out west, and that hotel visitors should d their part to help save water, from the shower flow restrictors from hell, to use less towels thing, by hanging them up and we wont replace them thing. The hotels spent a lot of effort in trying to get guests to do their part to help save water, or guilt you into it. Now we fast forward a few years to the late ninety’s, and on top of the never ending drought that now has every hotel in the country doing their part to end, the hotel operators in California have a new problem to solve, it is the lack of power generation capacity due to the new spiffy de-regulation of the California power companies. So suddenly, hotels are brought in to help, they remove all nonessential lights, in some cases I had seen brighter caves, and on top of this they also add a $2 to $5 a night “Power Surcharge”, and it didn’t take long for hotels elsewhere to also impose this surcharge, including locations where power was/is abundant and cheep. As I understand it, this charge has pretty much gone away. I guess I am confused by the whole “less for more” philosophy that governs the hotel industry.

So now lets go forward, and by the looks of all the little placards all over my room last week, that the hotel industry has saved us from the drought, and is now moving on to save the world from global warming, because that cards no longer talk about saving water for drought purposes, but now it is the whole spectrum of cleaning the room linens and towels. The cards told me of how much energy is expended in the laundry process, and that all this laundry and cleaning is increasing my carbon footprint, and that I should do my part to help.

Enough is enough guys, stop acting like you have some kind of green soul, and you hugged the trees that were chopped down for paper to print all those USA Today’s that are delivered to every room, not to mention all those silly little placards. Why is the outside of most hotels lit up with big bright lights, thats not very green.

If you want me to help you save money, that you can apply to the bottom line, why don’t you just say so. Give me the option to stay in a “Green” room, without a big TV, and reduced lighting, and where the towels and linens will only be replaced every third day, and charge me less… I’m sure that will go over real big…
Don’t treat me like I am as dumb as dirt (or you), and plaster my room with all the propaganda on how socially conscious your company is, when you are really not, you are in business to make money, but you should at least be honest about it…

Okay one last thing, I had a sign like this in my room, never thought about hanging stuff from the fire sprinkler, but I wonder how many people have gotten a surprise shower, apparently enough flooded rooms to motivate hotel chains to start posting these signs….

I have several websites out there that are more of a hobby then anything else, a lot of proof of concept stuff, some public service, but all pretty much niche stuff, and nothing I am ever going to get rich off of, well maybe never, I can hope…

Ok enough background, I used to get, still do I guess,this stupid email about once a quarter per website, from some alleged Elmer Fudd (aka PHD) telling me how he has analyzed my website, and tested it against search engines globally, and how much better it would be traffic wise if I was more reachable to non english speakers globally. Well first of all I really don’t care who can find that website, more then a couple hundred miles from where I am, and anyone who actually looked at the site would easily figure that a out. The other thing is I went ahead and looked at how that site fared against the likes of Google China, and guess what I actually rate number 1 in a lot relevant search terms. Same with India, number 2 in Russia, and Pakistan, but always top 5. I can’t figure out where all that foreign traffic is, I guess no one in outer Mongolia cares about that stuff.

So now I want to know, what do these guys actually do, and how much do they charge. Well it seems that for the low low price of ~$400 per language they’ll convert my meta tags and submit my site to relevant search engines for the language. Plus they offer all kinds of other translation services for a fee, I guess I’ll just stick to babelfish.altavista.com for my translation needs..

I have to believe that this whole SEO thing is just a big scam, maybe a short term bump, and what all the search engines say, that the best SEO is good relevant content. I have to believe this, because as much scamming that goes on with the Internet, that if SEO actually worked as advertised, BillyJoBobs Chevy Emporium on Rt 5 would stand as much of a chance for the number 1 spot as Chevrolet when searching for Chevy…