Took a bunch of great guys up to Lake Michigan (St. Joseph. Mi) for a day on the lake fishing for salmon..

The day was great.. The water was reasonable with about 5 to 6 foot rollers coming through.. We didn’t get the big haul I was hoping for, but we did boat our share of fish.. Total fish count was 11 with 1 Coho, 2 Lake Trout, and 8 King Salmon.. Russ got the biggest fish, and the easiest to boat while I got the hardest fish.. Took almost 20 minutes to get him in the boat.. He simply refused to come to the boat.. The fish we did land were all deep (except that one crazy trout).. We were fishing 46 to 55 feet deep in about 58 degree water.. And most of what we caught was on green striped spoons..

And last, and definatly not least, CrankyDave gets the hero of the day award.. This poor guy started feeling the rollers about 2 hours in to the trip.. And he spent the next 5 hours chumming the water for us and not complaining about it at all.. A less dedicated fisherman would have asked to be taken back to the marina costing us at least an hour, possibly 2, of valuable fishing time. So next trip, more Dramamine and less Tequilla seems to be a good plan..

And of course the trip wouldn’t have been any fun at all without our charter captain.. Gary Gamble runs Sundowner Charters.. He’s based in St. Joseph, Michigan and runs charts on both the big lake and the St. Joe River.. This guy knows how to find fish and we’ve been with him on every trip out of St. Joe.. Definatly worth the money to hire a professional charter.. Besides, he cleans the fish after the trip while we sit and drink and tell stories..

Dave, Bill, Me, Bob, Russ, Pete -

~Fey

Seems I’ve been slipping a little lately in keeping up with these morons that claim to be SEOs yet don’t even have the most basic of clues about the industries and techniques, or even tools needed, to provide a useful service to their clients..

Take this (http://www.searchune.com/) idiot for one.. Over at SEO Forum we have a new loser “searchune” posting a simple question.. How do I find out how I rank in the SEs, or even determine if I’m in the SEs.. In itself a simple question to be asking.. Until you look at his sig..

This guy claims “Our team of analysts, developers and search engine strategists constantly update their skills. Their expertise is sharpened through constant analysis and experimenting, which assure incomparable search engine rankings.”.. Now it may just be me, but shouldn’t these guys have, is my site in the search engines as a basic skill before they even begin to offer their services to others??

Homey please.. Crawl back under your rock and come back out when you have more than 1/2 a clue..

~Fey

So the wife has a damned cool boss.. He’s in town from Arizona and invited the folks to join him at Back Forty Sporting Clays for a morning of target shooting.. For those of you not familiar with target shooting sporting clays, skeet, trap, etc., you basically move through several, in this case 10, stations taking 10 shots at each station..

Each station is different with targets moving left to right, righ to left, toward you, away from you, and at various speeds.. And for today’s event we have 7 people show up..

I admit that I never was a hugely accurate trap shooter.. I never really precticed enough to get great.. And the last time I shot was about 3 years ago so I didn’t expect to do more than have fun.. Which I did.. I did fair, 49 out of 100.. The best shooter was the boss, Mike at 70/100 so I don’t feel too bad about my performance..

But the best part of the trip was discovering Back Forty Sporting Clays.. I didn’t even know that they existed.. A few miles outside of Bremen, IN., they were just 45 minutes from home.. They have set up a fabulous area for safe shooting complete with automatic tossers, comfortable stations, club house, gun shop, even gun rental for those that want to try it out without having to invest $1000 or in a shotgun.. And it’s affordable fun..

$28/person and husband/wife teams get a discount and if you are early enough they even have a free youth model 20ga loaner for the women and children donated to them by the NRA.. Allin all a great place and a great time.. Can’t wait to go back and get some practice in for the next “competition”.

~Fey

ZDNet has a short article about Tim Berners-Lee’s talk about a semantic web wiki.. As a proponent of collaboration and artificial intelligence Tim’s stance on the subject is obvious.. A semantic web would allow search engines ingeneral, and artificial intelligence greater ability to deliver relevant content to the user..

And in an ideal world, I would agree..

But the folks over at Google actually get this one right.. Peter Novig (Director of search) says users tend to be incompetent.. A semantic web requires that web developers, bloggers, CEOs, etc., ‘get it’.. It requires that they include URI and RDF (Resource Description Framework) tags along with their normal XHTML and HTML markup.. And most people can’t even get basic HTML right, so how can we expect them to provide reliable RDF and URI data??

The people that will get it right, and get it right quickly will be the v1agra pushers, the heavy spammers, and of course the MFA (made for adsense) sites.. But this puts us right back where we are now with a broken search system that has little to do with what people are actually looking for and everything to do with web developers cashing in on the easy money to be made by being a whore for Google.. Not that that is a bad thing..

How do you make semantic web search viable?? Not with artificial intelligence.. At least not any time soon.. Armies of web browsers looking at site after site and determining which are eligible for inclusion in the index?? Maybe a better solution.. But there are a lot of sites out there and not enough people to search them.. I don’t really see a semantic web, LSI (latent semantic indexing), as anything that will be of any great use for quite some time.. It will simply put even more power in the hands of those willing to study and game the system at the expense of those that simply want to publish good information but lack the technical skills to compete..

~Fey

Dark and lonely on a summer’s night.

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

Watchdog barking. Do he bite?

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

Slip in his window. Break his neck.

Then his house I start to wreck.

Got no reason. What the heck?

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

C-I-L my land lord!

-Tyrone Green