digitalBush

Google has a "do no evil" policy, and I can only hope that they stick by it. I would like to put on my foil hat for a moment and explain to you the significance of their capabilities. Every time that you do a search, you are filling out some information and sending it over to Google. There they take your query, pull it apart, find related matches, and return those results to you. If you think that's all they do with your query, then you should stop using the Internet now. It's for your own personal safety, you see.

So, just to give you an idea, let me share with you what Google should know about me.

• I am a c# developer. At work I am constantly searching for information about my current area of interest. In fact, a lot of times I'm looking for code snippets, so I'll stick a "c#" on the beginning of my query to try and narrow my results down.
• I like lawn and garden stuff. My more recent searches in this area have been about various types of grasses for my lawn and seed stores to get tomato plants. If you want to get specific, they should know that my yard is fescue, and that I will be growing some heirloom tomatoes this coming season.
• I like to cook. Is that all they should know about me? Hardly not! They know that I like to cook chili, grill meats, and that recently I was interested in getting a smoker. They could even infer from what I haven't searched for in relation to what I have searched for that I'm not interested in baking or desserts (I do like to eat them though!).
• I commonly misspell and/or mistype phrases. I can't count how many times I've seen that "Did you mean:" dialogue at the top of my search results. One day I could type a letter and Google could recognize it as mine just by the way that I spell something, or some phrase that I use.
• I just recently acquired food poisoning from Captain D's in my hometown. In fact, they should know which one! Even creepier is that they should know about the time frame I got sick.
• I wrote this about them! They will eventually crawl this post and see that I wrote this. Since I use Google Analytics to monitor traffic here, they'll be able to track this to me directly. Couple that with the fact that I use the personalized Google homepage, they always know my searches by me and not just an IP address.

I could really go on and on about this, but it would be incredibly dull. Besides, I think that I've already made my point. The more you depend on a company for services, the more they know about you. I'm not embarrassed by my searches and there is nothing terribly incriminating there, so I'm fine with it. Can you say the same?

Who else is sick of the commercialism surrounding Christmas?  Retail stores are shoving it down our throats before Halloween even starts.  I have a problem with the exploitation of Christmas and then not even calling it by it's proper name. 

I'm a Christian and I celebrate Christmas.  Therefore whenever I see someone I'm going to tell them "Merry Christmas" and they better not be offended by it.  I certainly wasn't offended when a Buddhist co-worker wished me a happy Chinese New Year.  I won't be offended if I'm wished a Happy Hanukkah either and here's why.  Whoever gives me a greeting (regardless of religion) is feeling in good spirits because of a special time that they celebrate. They are extending that cheer to me in the form of a greeting.  How can I refuse that? 

I would like to expand on that thought a little.  I certainly wouldn't call a menorah a holiday candle stick, that would be silly!  Now, why do you have to go and ruin my Christmas tree and call it a holiday tree?  I do realize I'm griping about events that transpired last year for the most part.  I also realize that several companies have retracted last year's "goofs" and are calling it Christmas again.  There are a few (cough, cough Best Buy) that are continuing to try and be too politically correct. 

 What bothers me is the fact that they are saying "Happy Holidays" and yet are still using Christmas imagery in their ads.  I'm not seeing other religious symbols to justify their use of "holidays".  Nope, it's all Christmas symbols I'm seeing. Excuse me, but you're trying to take advantage of the Christmas season by selling me stuff so that I can give out on Christmas.  You are taking advantage of the spirit of the season in order to bring your books into the black, but you aren't going to call it Christmas? No thanks, I have and will continue to take my business elsewhere.  You can't have your cake and eat it too.  This is about good will towards men, not selling 1,000,000 more units.

Merry Christmas!

The current project I'm working on centers around a 175+ line query that I wrote (don't knock it, it runs fast).  Without revealing anything critical, the query produces a table full of data that is customized for each of our clients by ranking items which they have available to them with a scoring system I concocted.  I tried to account for inability to generate a score by defaulting to 0 and stupidly -1 later on down in the query.  Given a few items that the query was choosing against, it was flip-flopping the items on back to back runs.  Not good.  That stupid little oops cost me a couple of hours of grief.

I just read The Programmer's Bill of Rights over at Coding Horror.  I must say that I couldn't agree more.  Currently I have 4,5 and on occasion 6.  I definately think that with a little more investment in equipment that my company could see huge gains in productivity from me and most likely the other developers as well.