Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

Anyone who has taken a step inside the northern half of Utah is aware of the age old rivalry that exists between Salt Lake City’s University of Utah (the Utes) and Provo’s Brigham Young University (the Cougars). It’s often cast in terms of good vs. evil, Christians vs. heathens, clean-cut vs. long-haired, conservatives vs. liberals, democrats vs. republicans, etc. To summarize positions: the Utes believe they are smarter and the Cougars believe they are more righteous.

Naturally, I am often asked where my loyalties lie. My bachelor’s degree is from BYU and my MBA is from the UofU. Were I an avid sports fan, this might place me in quite the dilemma. Fortunately for me, watching sports for me isn’t so interesting, unless it’s world’s strongest man competitions or Olympic track and field events (especially sprinting). Given the choice, I’d much rather go outside and play football than watch it (of course it’s moot, now that I don’t have TV). But basically, you’re not likely to catch me at many collegiate sporting events, unless it’s gymnastics, and, as we know, the UofU’s team is much, much better than BYU’s.

I’m starting to ramble. Where was I? Oh, yes, cEvans, a colleague and friend of mine, completely unsolicited, placed a large Ryan Byrd dot net advertisement banner on his site, UteFans.net, and I have been getting a fair amount of traffic from him consequently. Traffic is good ‘€œ thank you cEvans!

If you would like to link to me that would be helpful as well. Spread the word — Thanks!

This just in: according to Alexa.com, Ryan Byrd dot net is now ranked 1,306,547th. That’s up 1,060,158 from the last time I checked!

UPDATE: it’s july 24th and alexa shows Ryan Byrd dot net at 1,292,445!

I’ll admit that posting images has been annoying up until now. Basically, I’d create the thumbnails in photoshop and then hand-code the html for the blog entry (sometimes I’d use a multi-image thumbnailer windows freeware application.) Now that I have WordPress, I figured that there would be a plugin to speed up the process. As it turns out there are a couple such programs. The best among them interface with the opensource Gallery. I installed Gallery, created my first album and then installed the WPG2 WordPress/Gallery plugin. Unfortunately, after tinkering with the plugin for a while, I could not get it to function properly, so I spent another half hour and wrote my own. Basicially, the process now is to upload the original photos to a new directory in my images folder, create a new album in Gallery, mass-import all the files in that new directory and then add a single tag with the album id to a blog entry. Voila! I get a thumbnailed mini-gallery built into WordPress.

Life is better now.

I just finished reading The Search, by John Battelle. John talks about the meteoric rise of Google.I remember the pre-Google times, when searching for something on the Internet meant wading through oceans of either 1-completely unrelated trash or, even more onerous, 2-slightly related, but paid links masquerading as relevant links.

Along came saintly Google and revolutionized the world wide web overnight. At last, in their clean GUI, you had lightening fast, super-accurate search results. At last, ads were few and clearly delineated as such. No more “portal madness” like the likes of Yahoo or their clones. No more having to go to domain specific search engines for your queries. It was one stop shopping. And it was, and is, cool.

Since then, nearly every month, Google turns out something extremely cool: Gmail, Gtalk, Google maps, image search, Google Earth, Google analytics, to name a few. What has Microsoft, the other large software company, done during that same time? Absolutely nothing. at all. it’s pitiful, and shameful.

Google has risen so fast as to make all other search engines just about worthless. In fact, the company name itself has become synonymous with searching on the Internet — “I’ll Google it and find out”. No space seems untouched by Google’s growth. Even now, the sacrosanct Microsoft office suite will be encroached as Google acquires online versions of office productivity software.

With rapid growth comes a potential departure from their informal motto: “Don’t be evil.” Of late, Google has been criticized for their complicity with the Communist-run government of China. In order for Google to enter China, Google was required to heavily filter their search for Chinese, filtering out pro-democracy sites and the like. Then there was the stink of Google bowing to a few Scientology lawyers and yanking anti-Scientology sites from their index. It’s all rather spineless and deplorable.

I’ve not even begun to talk about the dangers of a Google monopoly, privacy considerations, etc. I’ll speak more about those later.

Or at least a whole new blog-managing software installation. Up until yesterday, I was using Serendipity for my blog. No longer! I’ve joined the growing crowd of WordPress users, largely because Serendipity wasn’t faring well in IE. In the transistion (which took about an hour), I learned:

• WordPress doesn’t have a Serendipity importer so I had to use an RSS export
• Serendipity’s RSS export is wacked up and I had to hack it
• WordPress takes forever to login, so I patched it
• WordPress has lots of cool themes: Chuck Wobbly Dark Maple Falling Dreams Fast Track

So, what do you think? Is it an improvement?