September 11, 2002
Dear Everyone:
Hard to believe it’s been a year since I sat in that hotel room in “Hobby”, watching it all unfold on television, since there wasn’t much else I could do, what with all of downtown “Hobby” shut down for the duration. So much has happened in just one year.
Now, as then,
Vice President Dick
Cheney is in “an undisclosed location”.
But this time, whether he’s hiding out from potential terrorists,
or potentially damaging financial reports, begs the question.
Now Bush
plays “Wag the Dog”
with
How the Republican Party must look back with sad fondness at the days ten years ago, when they could trot out Dan Quayle to make a fool of himself and draw attention away from the issues. Ah, the Good Old Days.
Anyway. It was just a year ago that I had a cold, caught while I was in “Hobby”. Then, last Friday, “Jeannie” and I both woke up with colds (third one this year for me). Luckily this one seems to be relatively mild and hasn’t kept me away from work. Today and tomorrow I’m taking a course on “meta tags”. What are “meta tags”? The latest thing, apparently, in searching on the Web.
You’ve heard of Search Engines, like Yahoo and AltaVista and Dogpile (my personal favorite). These are programs that send out “crawlers” that index your Web Pages so that they will show up in a search. But the “crawlers” (also known as “spiders” and/or “robots”) can’t always index what’s on your web site. They’re trained to look for words and “hot links”. They can’t see the pretty graphics or follow pull-down menus.
So now there are “meta tags”. These are special clues hidden in the web pages. Regular viewers, like you and I, don’t see them, because they’re buried in the “source” code. But the crawlers can see them and follow a fascinating array of rules to index them. So even if your web page doesn’t appear to say anything about records management, if there is a “meta tag” that reads “records management”, a search on those two words will bring up your web page.
Why am I taking this course? Haven’t a clue. Apparently my supervisor thought it was a good idea that someone in our group learn about “meta tags”, and I’m the one with the most aptitude for computer-related stuff. And besides, it counts as 16 hours of “professional development”, which looks good on our metrics.
I’ve also sort of set myself up as the de facto technical support for my group. It would be easier, of course, to just tell someone to map a network drive to our shared folder on the server; but you score more brownie points if you sit down with them and walk them through it step by step. And it makes more sense for one person to order cable-locks for all the laptop computers that we have than to expect each person to place a separate order, especially since they would need me to show them how to do it in the first place.
In other news…
“Jeannie” and I haven’t been to the movies together since mid-July (Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood). This is partly because of traveling and being busy and not that many movies out that we both felt like seeing. Here’s hoping something good comes out soon. We are, after all, getting close to Oscar Season.
In the meantime, assuming our two colds continue to abate, we’ll be spending some time this weekend working on her “arch”. This is apparently something she bought for her patio and it’s reached the stage where two (or more) people are required to continue the “some assembly required”.
And, maybe some time this weekend, it will be time to take down the little flag in the front window and put it in a closet somewhere. A year is long enough, I think.
Love, as always,
Pete
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