Odds and Ends

We're moved in, we've pretty much got the kids back to a regular sleeping routine, we've finished watching Heroes Season Two on DVD (including all the extras), and I'm mostly recovered from the delirium-inducing flu I had the beginning of this week, so I just might post here more often now. Probably not, though. I'm not particularly inspired to blog lately, which is probably the subject of another post. But I did want to mention a couple things:

1. A couple people have asked what exactly my job is all about. So here it is, in a nutshell. I work for a company that shall be known henceforth as The Company (remember, I just watched eleven episodes of Heroes in four nights). The Company has a contract with a search engine provider that shall be known henceforth as Mr. Searcho (I am contractually obligated to keep Mr. Searcho's true identity a secret; I am not contractually obligated to keep The Company's true identity a secret, but I don't feel like having web searches for my employer's name leading to my blog).

So anyway, my job title is either Annotator or Judge, depending on who you ask. What that means is that every day Mr. Searcho feeds me a bunch of queries that have been entered into his search engine (i.e. "pariss hilton" or "utube" or "free movie download" or "who is samantha stevens bestest friend ever"), along with a bunch of web pages that their search engine has provided as possible results for those queries, and I look at each web page and decide, in 30 seconds or less, whether that page is an exact match, a strong match, a weak match, or a super crappy match for what I think the person who typed that query into the search engine was looking for. The ultimate goal here, I believe, is to "teach" the search engine to improve its accuracy. Or something like that. A side effect, though, is that I see a lot of stuff--random trivia, four-year-old news articles about people in Alaska, blogs, website subpages that were never meant to be seen, movie and product reviews, message board arguments, and parts of women (and some men) I'd really rather not ever see (and some parts I don't mind seeing). After seeing 500-600 web pages a day for nearly four months now, I've concluded that at least 50% of the internet is spam.

2. The halfbike. I cleaned it up and put it back together last Friday. An important connecting bolt/clamp thing was broken, but I managed to improvise with a quick trip to Ace Hardware. And here's a picture of S-Boogie's new school transportation:


I love love love it. She gets to ride a bike to school, but we can go at my speed instead of hers and thus get there in seven minutes instead of twenty. And we produce no smog with our daily commute--only smug.