Google – Is – Shit

Today @fromjason shared this article.

I’ve been playing with DuckDuckGo for a few months now.

Today I did a comparison search.

My friend Jeff and I run the world’s only talk podcast about the Traveller RPG. The only one. There are no other talk podcasts in the world dedicated to Traveller. It is called SAFCOcast (SAFCO stands for Super Adventure Friends Co.)

I searched DuckDuckGo for “Traveller RPG talk podcast”.

Our podcast was the first thing to show up. As it should be. It is the single best answer to the fucking query.

DuckDuckGo search results -- they are good
DuckDuckGo, doing what a fucking search engine should do.

Then I searched Google. Our podcast was not even above the fold. The first thing that came up were videos on the Google-owned YouTube and links to threads from Reddit, who Google has a “deal” with.

Google's shitty crooked search results
Google’s shitty crooked search results. They are shit.

It’s not really a surprise that Google now sucks. I’m a reference librarian. I have known this for a long time. The thing is, it is getting worse and worse.

My new project for the remainder of the year, which I’ve been meaning to do and not gotten around to, is to gradually remove myself from using any Google-owned products, at least in my personal life. For the time being we still use Chrome at work. I deleted all my videos from YouTube earlier this year.

Back to the Sweat Shop

OK, maybe I don’t work in a sweat shop, but my 3-day weekend is drawing to a close.

Amazingly, after having 2 days off and having some fun and relaxation with no stress from rushing around, I had the energy today to clean our bedroom really well. I mean — like – really well. Going to really enjoy sleeping in there tonight on clean sheets, with a clean floor, the bathroom super clean, and all my clothing washed and folded/hung.

I’m not necessarily looking at a 4-day work week though. I have a library outreach event to do on Saturday, and some other stuff that will keep me busy a bit late one night this week. In the morning I’ll look at everything and see if I can work out a work-free Friday. That would be nice.

Record Shopping 3-Day Weekend

We are halfway through Memorial Day weekend.

If there is anything better than a three-day weekend, it can only be a four -day or more weekend, vacation, or simply being retired.

Yesterday I spent the morning skateboarding, then we chilled the rest of the day, listened to music, and just generally relaxed.

Today we got up, bought some coffee and took the pup for a walk at the nature preserve, came home and relaxed with more coffee. Then we drove out to Forever Young record store in Grand Prairie and did some record shopping, my wife procuring two excellent albums and I bought 1978’s All Mod Cons, by the Jam, one of my favorite bands. I need to delve into Paul Weller’s other material. Note to self. Genius is genius.

The more I look into it, the more I realize how much of my favorite music was created before 1980. I feel kind of dumb to have not realized this before, but that post-punk era was just so good!

It is, as I type these exact words right now, 6:29pm. With the lovely three-day weekend I have been able to relax, have fun, enjoy my family, and not feel rushed at all. I worked from home on Friday, so the Tyranny of Laundry is not currently oppressing me.

As the fateful hour of 8pm approaches, the usual feeling of Sunday night depression is not seeping into my psyche. As we walked our dog about 20 minutes ago I was thinking about this and coming to the realization of how much middle-class misery is caused by feeling like one must rush from one thing to another. Constant time pressure cooker. To some extent we do this to ourselves, but only to feel like we actually have a life outside of work. I am lucky I actually love what I do and have a great employer, something 99.999999999% of people can’t say, but still I’d like to work less.

Aside from buying these records today, my holiday consumerism included ordering a higher-quality cartridge for our turntable, the red Ortofon 2M. My friend Dale tells me this will make a noticeable difference from the stock cartridge that came on our turntable. Looking forward to checking out the new records with the new needle.

3 record albums
3 great albums. Yay for us!

Yesterday’s session – another video

I made this video from yesterday’s clips. I told Chadwick, from Super 8 Skateboards, that next time I rode one of his boards I’d shoot some footage, knowing that 60 year old slightly overweight freestylers are highly influential on the social medias. Seriously, everyone looks to see what we’re doing and models their behavior after us, but they can’t keep up at all. Pitiful.

Anyway, here is the clip. I generally hate “portrait orientation” videos, but again, as this was for potential social media use in case he was insane enough to use it, I had my friends shoot it this way.

Ditch Session in Fort Worth

Today I went out to Fort Worth my friend Mark (white shirt) to meet up with our friend Carter (yellow shirt) at a killer ditch to skate.

I am the old guy in the black shirt.

It was hot. Mark and I skated hard for about 1.5 hours before we gave out. Carter just kept hammering at a trick he wanted to get, and he got it.

I haven’t been skating much lately and it felt really great to get my legs back under me. Severely out of practice, but the legs feel good again and I feel the desire to skate, which is great.