Home of the Dutch Gecko

The last few weeks I have been working. And I don’t mean the kind of work where I spend a whole day staring at my mass of illegible code, interspersed with a few sessions of DotA. This is real life in-the-office nine-to-five work.

Well, two days a week.

I’m working for Web Certain, a search engine optimisation company based here in York. They’ve been working multinationally for years, and recently aquired a few Dutch and Belgian clients, and needed a Dutch speaker who could participate in the mind-numbingly dull task of “link building” - the act of creating new links to a website so that search engines such as Google notice it more, and consider that page more important. Link building requires no real thought, and where better to find bored, semi-qualified and cheap labour than on a campus!

Amusingly I was contacted via Facebook, which is certainly a new recruitment method to me, but hey it could become popular. Do a search for fields that interest you (e.g. home address - the Netherlands), and mass spam the results that appear. You’re practically guaranteed to find the right person. You never know, it might work for love as well.

So, I now spend my Mondays and Thursdays in an air-conditioned office at the other end of York, after huffing and puffing five miles uphill to get to the place. And I get paid to, essentially, surf the internet. It’s not really that simple of course: I’m expected to either be looking for website directories, similar to the famous Open Directory Project, or to be applying to these directories to have links added. At least the searching involves some thought, even if the twinkling at the back of my brain is constantly diminished by having the same sites turn up time and again, but the actual application part is tedium beyond measure. Visit site. Search for category. Check if indexed by Google. Click “Submit”. Click the automatic form filler. Click “OK”. Next site.

It’s just too complicated to be completely automated, but at least I’m winning against the machines (for now). But the work leaves my brain with free cycles (they’re cycles, right?) to do what it pleases in the background. Having to keep this spare thought literally work-safe, I’ve instead made a few observations.

1. Dutch websites are butt-clenchingly face-gurningly ugly. Now I’m sure that many sites will be absolutely fine on the eyes, but for a country so reliant on the internet and with quite a rich design history, the fact that these abominations even exist is terrifying. The process to get a .nl domain is already pretty difficult, why not add “your site may not cause permanent sight loss” to the terms of service? The nerds amongst you may want to laugh/cry at the underlying HTML for those sites too.
2. Directory sites don’t mind lying. Despite claiming to be “SEO optimised” and “guaranteed to improve your search engine ranking”, many will resort to dirty tricks like asking for a so-called reciprocal link: we’ll include a link to your website, if you include a link to ours. Such practises were figured out by Google a long time ago, and nowadays are more likely to harm your ranking than help it. Amusingly these sites are running themselves into the ground by encouraging this technique.
3. Most multinational companies don’t have the time to work on SEO, instead outsourcing the bulk of the work. Last week I was collecting sites on which Microsoft Belgium could post their link, since they apparently aren’t doing too hot in the Belgian Google index (I’ll do them a free service here). And now the talk of the office is about a new order from Xerox needing to publicise some of their newest laser printers. These are big, big companies, and Web Certain appears tiny in comparison, but apparently they’re the team to pick.

Anything else?

Apart from real work I’ve been doing some fake work as well. I recommend checking out the new improved Artotron, a showcase site for artists. Do art? Sign up in the forums. The community is still small and needs your input!

I’ve also been secretly designing a big web-programming project, but I need to learn more PHP and MySQL before I can get on with the nitty gritty. It could easily take a few years, but you’ll hear more about it as it starts to become more complete.

Since I failed to (re)complete my last post, I’ve passed the year, and things are dandy. Heleen passed her year too after some resits. I’ll get round to rewriting the last post “soon”

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Read the linked article to find out why.

Once again I find myself up into the early hours “working” on stuff that was meant to be completed in a lab. Tonight it’s creating a prototype electronic die. The design was pretty much complete, and I merely needed to create a JEDEC file for use in a Programmable Logic Device. This involves the use of an excellent (I wish HTML included <sarcasm> tags) piece of software called Viewlogic Powerview, which I’d love to give you a link to but both the company and product names are so incredibly generic that Google gives me nothing. Nice marketing.

Powerview is awful. The interface was clearly made using some kind of interface creator software. In turn, this software was clearly developed in the early 60s to run on valve computers and was designed by a team of “highly” trained monkeys with a management team consisting entirely of porpoises. Communication was probably minimal.

Forget everything you know about user interfaces. This thing provides everything that you are familiar with, and then changes it a tiny bit. Want to close that file menu? You have to press escape, you can’t click on it again. Want to quit? Oh right, use the red square (seriously, a red square), not the file menu like in every other piece of software ever.

And now, I know that unix has always been heavily dependent on the famed third mouse button, but Powerview takes it to new levels. Middle mouse used to mean paste. Here it’s everything. If you want to add something, it has to be the middle mouse. You go through the tedious menu to reach your component list, select one with the left button, and then have to place it using middle. This despite left not being able to perform anything at that point, as helpfully pointed out by the status bar which exclaims that “LEFTMOUSE is not bound.” Want to put in an identical component? Tough, gotta click in that component list again. No, not middle dummy, left.

And so I plough on through the clunky clicky hell, constantly switching between keyboard and mouse as if they were a divorced couple and I the family pet. Close that window, open that one. Wrong shortcut key. No that command doesn’t have a shortcut, despite the obvious letter not being in use. No you missed the bound on that button, you selected the window instead, here’s an error message to inform you of your grave mistake. Middle mouse middle mouse middle mouse no how dare you use the scrollwheel just use the button you imbecile.

This software makes me feel stupid and I hate it.

Yep, I’m fiddling again. You may already have noticed the addition of a fuzzy border, hope you like it. Right now I’m working on prettying the title up without resorting to images, which is a fun game of smack-the-incompatible-browser-in-the-kneecaps. I’m not happy with the way it’s turning out so far so I’ll probably change everything later anyway. I wrote a WordPress plugin just for the occasion, which I just might release to the general populace if it behaves and doesn’t break stuff for others.

Life is good. My sleeping pattern is destroyed. I am a fish. Good night.

It looks like it’s past five am again. Not to worry, it’s now Saturday morning, and nothing happens on Saturdays. It’s all just a question of getting some sleep.

Thing is that several things are keeping me away from sleep right now, and one of them is sleep. It’s a linux command, that neatly counts out the number of seconds, minutes, hours or days you specify. This one is meant to be waiting five minutes, before changing the wallpaper. At the moment it’s averaging about 45 seconds. It’s one of those little niggling things that seem to happen so often in linux, yet appear completely unrepairable.

It just changed again.

On the upside, the script appears to be changing the wallpaper at random, which it isn’t actually supposed to do, but I wanted that functionality anyway so it saves me coding it in later.

One alternative would be to use usleep, or microsleep (completely unrelated to the bodily phenomenon), but that involves counting to 300 000 really really fast, and I’m not sure if the PC would appreciate that too much.

What the hell, that was less than ten seconds.

I got my exam results today, and they were pleasant enough. I marginally failed Introduction to Digital Design, which is not an issue since its sequel module, Digital and Analogue Design, is going rather well, so that’s something to look forward to in the summer. The other results were very pleasant, which is a good feeling after all the mess of last year. The fact that I failed what is basically the electronics module though is possibly a very strong hint that I’ve placed my interests incorrectly.

There have been, uh, other things keeping me awake the last couple of weeks too, but they won’t be discussed here

Good night.

I win.

I need to test to see if my advert blocks are appearing correctly, so here’s a post. With an advert.
Now that wasn’t so hard was it?

Well that works perfectly, so I guess I’ll stick a little text in here. Might as well include some real content eh?

I’m in York. It’s winter. The geese have left. Well, the dumb ones. The smart ones hang around and feed off the scraps they are given by the students.

A whole load of stuff has happened over the summer and I didn’t tell many people because I’m like that. Electronics is out - things were going badly, and the exams confirmed that. I’m now doing Computer Science (or Computer Systems and Software Engineering if you listen to the admissions department), and it’s going surprisingly well. If you want to learn esoteric programming languages, York is the place to be. Scheme will blow your mind, not to mention being thoroughly useless after the first year.

Life’s been good, course is easy (for now). The website switched to a new server, and I was a lazy shite but knew that it was about time to redesign the thing. So I didn’t, obviously. Instead, I made websites for other people:

• James College, where I lived last year
• Ennef, my mother’s own venture into language teaching and translation
• Question of Balance, for a friendly guy down the road. He’s made a few alterations to it though, and the code isn’t valid any more. Not my fault, I swear.

And now it’s time to do my own. I’m trying to make this theme as elegant as possible, and hopefully I’ll be able to package it up and make it available for download. It looks ugly just now, I know. That’s because it needs images, and images need photoshop, and installing photoshop requires me to get off my arse. One day, I promise.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what all the extra hints at galleries and photos around the site are for, it’s because I found one sweet photo management plugin. It’s gonna rock.

This is actually just a test for something that a friend wants to try out. If you’ve ever heard of Albino Blacksheep then you’ll know who he is - he runs it. If you haven’t seen the site before, check it out, it’s stuffed to the brim with talent.

Anyways, it’s some javascript thing that creates links to social networking stuff. I’m not sure exactly what it does, because he wasn’t that clear about it, so I guess I should find out.

ABS Share

Now, let’s see if that worked.

It did! Good! Now let’s see what it does! It didn’t, give me a few minutes.

I hacked it to make it work. What a waste of a test :\

Time to break everything of course! Here comes one theme without styling. And possibly horribly broken syntax. This is gonna get ugly.

Update: Yes! It parses!

Don’t fill my shoutbox with too much crap while I get a layout working. Thanks.

I need a second post to test out some stuff and observe behaviour. In other words, there’s nothing to see here. Sorry!