The rank of love, Part 3: john love

The continuing saga of how to find john love in the Google search engine.

I discovered in late December that my main web site, ejohnlove.com is back at #1 in the Google search engine again! If you enter the word john followed by a space, and then the word love and hit enter, my web site pops up at number one out of over 23 million search results.

I was afraid that after losing this wonderful ranking a few months ago, it would never happen again, but I suppose the loss was only a temporary one, possibly Google doing a clean-up or re-evaluation of it's data, or something.

Anyway, people seem to search for john love in Google every day. I don't know what they're looking for exactly, but if it was me, at least I know I'm not that hard to find. (I guess that's a good thing. I still haven't decided why I think it's a good thing...)

Blue Knob??

I guess this just proves how sick I am...

Today, as I was working on one of my employer's commercial listings pages, I ran across these company names:

Blue Knob Vacation Rentals
Beaver Creek Vacation Rentals

...and I just couldn't stop laughing...

Who the heck names their company "Blue Knob" anyway? Only someone living in Blue Knob, Pennsylvania, I guess...

...but who named the town?

I'm sure it's probably a lovely town, but is it really cold there?

Now here's a Sexy Beast...

Now here's a Sexy Beast... (taken from "The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Joey deVilla's Weblog")

"Yeeaaahhh... Work it... work it... Ohhh yeeaaaah... You're sexy..."

(whispering) "Um, Bill, why is there a Macintosh on the desk back there? Maybe we should move that?

Whaddya mean 'Shut up and immortalize my sexy greatness'... Fine..."

Click. Poof.

...and thus, a soon-to-be reviled software demi-god stumbles into the centrefold for the 1981 issue of Byte magazine (or wherever the hell this piece of shmaltz was published...)

Is it just me, or does this dude look exhausted. Get some sleep Bill! Like just put your head right down on that monitor and close your eyes.

Is that shirt on correctly? Is that arrow pointing the right way?

The last few weeks have been full of sad news; of large and small losses. By various unrelated circumstances, four people have left my work in as many weeks. This to me, seems like some kind of negative record. This is just my subjective opinion.

But I'm not used to getting wounded by a bunch of little paper cuts: "#1 Ouch, that hurt. I'll miss working with that person. Sigh. Get over it and adapt. #2 Ouch - that hurt. Sigh..." etc. etc. I think the proper phrase is "death by a thousand cuts" or something. I'm not used to this. I'm used to a full-on, glorious group beheading; to the whole blamed company going down the tubes, with a big layoff of the staff, whereafter a bunch of us might run into each other at the E.I. office the next morning. You know, big and agonizingly painful, not just small and slightly depressing.

It could just be some displaced guilt on my part, due to the fact that I'm still around. It's probably unwarranted or stupid for me to even entertain any guilty conscience. Maybe it's that I'm used to feeling a lot worse than this. (That sounds backwards.) Maybe it's just the residual after-taste from dozens of "goodbye" cakes. They taste nice at the time, but can repeat on ya later... (ah, finaly, a metaphor I can sink my teeth into.)

Top this whining off with killer tsunamis, feeling sad for other coworkers who are suffering through family losses and grief, or news stories of people freezing to death on the streets. And in the foreground of all of this stuff, my regular monthly cycle of not being able to get my work completed quickly enough. I feel like I've been apologizing for little failings for weeks now.

There definitely are happy, positive, or successful moments where I feel gratified again - proud of my accomplishments and of how I try to treat my friends, family or coworkers. However, sometimes it's difficult to keep the happy thoughts balanced in mind alongside the unhappy thoughts.

Today, I was having a bite of lunch in the school's dining hall with my coworker Carol. She asked me what my t-shirt said. It's a Christmas present from my in-laws that says "I'm with Stoopid" with an arrow that points up. (I'm quite proud to wear it, really.)

"What does it mean?" she asked.

"Huh? 'I'm with stupid', but the arrow points up." I made a gesture towards my chin and smiled cheesily.

"Where are you pointing? To god?" she asked, looking to the ceiling and laughing.

Wow. Good one, I thought to myself later on.

If a god is up there somewhere (and as an ahtiest, I'm not saying I would believe in him/her/them/it even if he/she/they/it did exist), then I think that such a being must have a wicked, dark sense of humour.

A buddhist would tell me that the dark humour is all my own. Maybe *I* really am with stupid. :)

I can't wait for Spring, when things begin to grow and bloom again...

"The Day Undramatic" with John Love

Today I watched the movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou at Cinemark Tinseltown.

What sucked me into this film in the first place was the overall quirkiness of the production, which to me had hints of the Beatles or Monty Python fantasy elements, and the right-on soundtrack (a Devo song - yay!).

Afterwards, I got an Americano and headed outide into the early afternoon sun. It was weird and lucky to find a spot at end of a sidewalk bench where the sun hid perfectly behind the silhouette of the street signals.. I HATE sun in my eyes. I knew in a minute or so the sun would creep around that lamp and get me right in the eyes. Oh well. The air was crisp and the coffee hot, and there was nowhere I had to be anytime soon.

After my coffee was done, I took the Skytrain all the way out to Surrey and back, just because I hadn't been out that way in many years. Overall, it was a nice little day.