Simple enough:

i.e. means "in other words"
e.g. means "for example"

Sigh.

I'm an idiot.

I've been fighting Yahoo! for the longest while. Like, for years, trying to get out of their search engine databases.

Well, I posted a comment to Slashdot, and included the contents of my robots.txt file. If you look at my post, you'll see the typo. And now I'm the laughing stock of the Ask Slashdot post.

Sigh.

That typo that's been there for five years. Five freaking years.

I'm an idiot.

Fortunately, I'm not quite the idiot of one of the follow-up comments, who thinks I'm a guy.

Ah well, time to laugh. I've been (mini) slashdotted.

All of Kris's clothes, except the ones he has on, are now washed, dried, folded, and put away.

All of my clothes are now washed, dried, folded and put away. And I do mean all.

I am standing here naked, amazed how many clothes I have, given I wear only a few at a time, and have gotten rid of so many that I no longer wear.

How can someone who cares so little for clothes have so many? Boggles the mind.

What I don't have enough of, however, is underwear.

Bella has decided the the bestest treat in all the world is my underwear. As in, my dirty underwear.

As in, "Ew!"

At one point, reminiscent of my brother's underwear tale of woe I was down to 4 pairs of underwear, because Bella had chewed through all my other pairs. Four panties. That's one, two, three, four. Four.

I made Kris buy me new ones. Like forty pairs of new ones. Four. Tee.

I could go weeks without doing laundry. Didn't have to. Not only did I have clean underwear, but I had clean underwear to spare.

But not now.

Now I can't friggen find half of them because that dog, that dog, has somehow figured out how to retrieve underwear from the really tall hamper and she still continues to chomp on them.

So, now I'm standing here naked, counting my remaining underwear, and realizing it's time to go shopping again.

I'm down to eight.

Dog.

I own a pair of red pants that I'm particularly fond of. They're warm and comfy and well-fitting and stylish. Everything pants should be.

I wore them recently, and this morning wanted to wear them again. So, post-shower, I looked around for them in the bedroom.

Huh? Where'd they go?

"Kris, do you know where my red pants are?"

"No. Are they in the bedroom?"

"I can't find them."

In case Kris had dumped them in the laundry sorter, I started pulling clothes out and putting them into piles (dark colors, light colors, whites and dark but need to go into hot water anyway). I sorted all the clothes, and still no red pants.

Hmph.

After a few moments, Kris showed up in the bedroom and, looking at the piles, started looking for the red pants, too. He looked on the dresser, in the clean clothes basket (clothes just waiting to be folded), the folded clothes piles (clothes folded, just waiting to be put away), and the other clothes basket.

No pants.

"Did you put them away?"

"I can't believe you just asked me that."

"Why?"

"When's the last time you've seen me put away clothes?"

"Good point."

We continued to search for another few minutes. Damn it, the bedroom just isn't this big! Not in the closet, not in the bathroom. Red pants! Why have you forsaken me?!

"I'm going to check the guest bedroom."

"Okay."

My dresser is in the guest bedroom. It's the only place in our tiny bedrooms to add another dresser.

Kris opened the guest room door, and, what do you know, red pants!

He turned to me, and said, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever's left, no matter how improbable, must be true."

Hmph.

I don't understand this. I really don't.

There are so many sites clamouring to be on search engine site results pages, why waste your time on sites that don't want to be there?

I have many domains. Some, like this one, have lots of content. Some I'm building the content up. And some have absolutely nothing up yet.

Of all of those, some I just don't want on search engines. This one in particular. If you know who I am, you can find me. But I'm not interested in random people finding me. I post all the pages I want random people to read over on my dot-com site. Sure, I could password protect this site, but then my Mom, my ex-coworkers, or the casual friend (or even the boyfriend from high school whom I do want to contact me) can't just pop in and see what's going on.

To request search engines spidering a site (i.e. loading every page and following every link on the page) not search a particular page or part of a site, a site own needs to set up a robots.txt file. This file says which search engines can view what part of the site.

Only it just requests the search engine spiders to limit themselves to particular parts of the site. It doesn't actually stop them from viewing the site.

My robots.txt file basically says, "Don't search this site. Go away." I'm not interested in having search engines hit this site. This site is for me and having the search engines crawl this site amounts to stealing money from me in terms of bandwidth and processor time. I don't like it.

Most search engines honor the robots.txt file religiously. Google is great about it (see?). Some are less good (MSN). And some (Yahoo!) completely ignore the robots.txt file while claiming they honor it.

I sent an email in April asking them to remove my site. They replied with a form letter telling me to fix my robots.txt file. When I responded my robots.txt was exactly to the specification they sent to me, the search results dropped from 900+ down to about 500. A month later, they're back up to over 1050.

I sent another email to them today. This time, much to my chagrin, I threatened legal action. I hate doing so. I hate even suggesting contribution to the litigious mentality that seems to permeate modern culture (They look at you wrong? Sue them! Not doing what you want? Sue them! They type your name wrong? Sue them!). But I'm not sure what else I can do to get them to honor my requests.

Boo.