Yeah, they've got me onboard for another season.

because i don't have enough to do as it is, i suddenly got the urge to upload all of my photos that live on the blog to flickr. just for safety's sake. the first ones to go are some taken in italy over the past three or four years - you can see the beginnings of my uploading effort here. they're pretty disorganized, though.

sigh. what did we even do before flickr?

UPDATE: there are just a crapload of new pictures up there, so you may as well click through on all of them. this one is a favorite. I LOVE TED LEO.

I'll be tuning over to the Lost season finale at 9, but for the moment Charles and I are watching the two-hour American Idol extravaganza (that doesn't include the red carpet telecast, of course). So far it's pretty awesome. Do you like... scatting? Yeah, I hate that shit too. But we got some of it!

And Live played! Remember Live? They had that song that was about abortion, maybe? Well, their lead singer and one of the American Idol contestants (possibly the one who Fuel has an embarrassing crush on) just had an epic falsetto/bald-off in their ridiculously high-heeled boots and sweaty, billowing synthetic shirts. They will presumably take alternating shifts on tour/in cryogenic suspension, supported by an increasingly cybernetic backing band, allowing rock-FM summer festival victims to enjoy "Dolphins Cry" well into the next millennium.

Also, Katherine McPhee sang with Meatloaf, who looks and sounds like he could drop dead at any moment.

And now Wolfgang Puck is brandishing a lobster at newly short-haired Kelly Pickler, who is either a masterful comic actress or simply proof that my taste in women is the product of a deeply sick misogynism. Either way, the segment is pretty fantastic.

Alright, focus: why am I writing this? To protest the travesty that's about to unfold. It seems clear that Taylor Hicks is going to win this thing, despite Katherine McPhee being talented, beautiful, and scary in exactly the right way. Now, I've got nothing against the idea of the women of America publicly proclaiming their love for a prematurely gray shlub — I'm kind of partial to the idea, actually. But not this shlub. Not this Michael McDonald-aping motherfucker. I can't take another lifetime's worth of whiteguy-soul-filled MCI commercials. I was counting on the original abomination to eventually die... or at least be imprisoned by some sort of unbreakable enchantment. Don't take that away from me, America.

But there's one normally-noxious player on the screen that I'm actually growing to tolerate: Ryan Seacrest. Sure, he's awful in every conceivable respect. But think of it this way: if it weren't him, who would it be? What's the Death Takes A Holiday scenario? I'll tell you what: it's Billy Bush. And no matter how awful Seacrest is, it seems unlikely that he'll ever become president. We need to support Ryan; if that slot opens up, it's not going to be Dunkelman taking over. It's going to President Billy and First Lady Jenna and their hemophiliac children.

Lesser of two evils, people.

clearly my blogging ability up to this point has been driven by my frenetic obsession with veronica mars and my impending move to atlanta, and now that those two topics have dried up, it has become apparent that i am a big empty vessel, devoid of any content. the media management project goes full churn for the next two weeks, stopping only for alcohol fuel along the way, so it's likely blog stuff from my end of the site will be pretty lacking. but still - random things for your discussion:

I'm heading to the beach this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm intent on bringing the internet along with me. Last year I still had a fly-by-night dialup ISP that only charged you in months when you used the service. That business model has since run its course, and I'm casting about for another way to ensure connectivity. Needless to say, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

So I stopped by the Ver/iz/on store on my way home and signed up for EVDO service. By the numbers: $80/month, $150 for the PC5740 card and — most importantly — 14 days to return it all. I'll still get charged a prorated fee for the service I use, so it's not totally shady. Just mostly.

There's one complication, though: the card doesn't work with Macs. Well, okay, it sort of does: I've already gone through these instructions, but they mean it when they say the account has to be activated on a PC. Sadly, Charles' laptop isn't up to the task (it's always been flaky about PCMCIA cards, and refuses to recognize this one). But we have one sort-of-working PC laptop at work, and a number of EVDO cardholders who've successfully gotten their Powerbooks working with the nominally PC-only technology. So spirits remain high.

Remember when I was singing the praises of Google Sitemaps, only to quickly reconsider? Well, I'm moving from "reconsidering" to "being kind of pissed off".

For those who don't know, the idea behind the sitemap is to give Google a specially formatted file that says "here's where my content is, here's when it was updated, and here's how important each piece of it is relative to the rest". It's supposed to make the Googlebot that crawls your site work more efficiently, and give you better results. Personally, I'm sick of having old-style URLs (e.g. 001234.php) showing up for our site.

But so far the sitemap hasn't managed to do anything except banish every included URL from Google's systems entirely. Which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do. I posted the following message to the Sitemaps Google Group; I'll let you know if I hear anything back.

I hope someone can help me figure out what's going on. Last week I submitted a sitemap for my blog (http://www.zunta.org/sitemap.xml). Everything seems to be working properly according to my Google Sitemaps account dashboard.

However, since submitting the sitemap every page that is in it has been excluded from the index, including many that I know used to have relatively good pageranks. I know that there have been some recent hiccups with the site: operator, but this applies to other queries as well. I wrote an SSH tutorial with the word "sshirking" in its title a while ago that got a number of links and attained a high pagerank for the unusual word "sshirking". The proper permalinked URLs used to be among the top hits; now they can't be found anywhere in the index (as proven by entering the full url as a query, e.g. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/2005/08/30/sshirking_work_1/index.php).

What's more, the old version of these pages -- before I changed permalink naming styles -- are still in the index. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/004498.php was the original URL of the above link (it now redirects to the proper URL). Only this second, less descriptive URL (which is NOT in the sitemap) is still in Google's index. It's only the files included in the sitemap that have been dropped from the index.
I tried deleting and resubmitting the map, and have patiently waited since May 18 for a new crawl to include the results. Nothing so far.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? Right now it seems that having a sitemap achieves nothing other than nuking your results from the index entirely.