Worries

Lately I've received fewer visits on my blog, one reason for this is probably the fact that I update less often the other reason would be that I "expose" my blog less than I used to.

In the beginning the only visitors I received were reviewers from blog directories. Then I started having one-time readers who came to read the post I wrote on them. I also had a few more avid readers who went all through my archives and then reminded me of a few things that I put here and had completely forgotten about. -I have even gone back an modified old posts a few times- And then I had Rizal who came here in the most unexpected and improbable way. And recently Apostle John dropped by.

As people are coming here and actually reading what I write -and as all my other activities are taking more and more of my time- I started thinking more than twice before putting anything on this blog. As I'm about to click on the publish button I start thinking about all those who might read what I'm putting on the Internet. I think about what the things I write say about myself and how I might even influence people who come here, I think about how uninteresting to anyone else than myself what I write is, I think about how I was supposed to have fun doing this but how I'm taking it more seriously suddenly because of how far a blog can reach; the world is too small and the Internet is everywhere.

Maybe I'm just loosing my inspiration and I'm trying to find an excuse to those posts that I obviously don't take enough time writing or maybe I'm just worrying too much -as usually- about things that are not all that important. That's enough introspection for one blog post.

The Inevitable

I met a Haitian guy in one of those chat rooms! The odds of that happening are very low. This is even more surprising than when I received repeated visits from someone in Haiti on this blog.
I was always aware of the fact that I might meet a Haitian person one day but..., not like that.

I did meet a Haitian schoolgirl once last year but she thought I was a guy and was just too attached to me for some strange reason so we only talked once. This time it was different.

Desylf was chatting in English, he even asked me what I thought about Americans and referred to himself as an American. He told me that he was in Haiti recently, at the shores of Gonaïves, I thought he was in the US Navy and I was right. When he asked me to be his tour guide for his next trip to Haiti, I said "yeah, sure..." actually thinking "whatever, as if he were really going to come here..". When he told me he was serious, I thought "oh, so maybe he is coming, maybe but no time soon". Then, to my surprise, the second time we chatted, he's writing Creole!!! No way!
The guy is actually Haitian or at least of Haitian origins, I just can't believe he did not tell me that right from the start. I would never have guessed that he was Haitian, never! But now, there is no doubt, he is Haitian.

Scary! I could be talking to one of my relatives or ex-classmates without even knowing it... very scary...

How about msn Messenger?

In the "About", on the right, I say that I use Yahoo! Messenger, but it's not like Yahoo! is paying me or anything so I do use other IM programs like msn Messenger and ICQ once in a while.

But msn is one that I don't like at all, the only reason why I have it installed on the computer is because my university friends use it. Lately, it's been doing one of those things that I hate about it. I try signing in and it just fails every time without any apparent reason. I've been unable to chat with Rizal for the past days.

Msn is just not for me. With msn, you cannot enter chat rooms freely. And I still have awful memories of the days when it would ask me to download the latest version before I could even sign in, the connection was extremely slow so it took forever... The worst is that it did that almost every day, a real nightmare.

I tried to install the version 7.0 to see if I would be able to connect, still nothing. I tested the connection with the msn messenger connection troubleshooter and it tells me every thing is ok and asks me to send a report. I carefully fill the form only to find out that it wont let me submit it, telling me to enter my email address while I had already provided it.

I finally decided to do the one thing I should had done in the first place, I checked the Internet for the error code (81000306) it gave me. While reading what people wrote on many forums about similar problems I started thinking about the windows updates that I was too lazy to install... And finally, when I landed on an msn arabia page they seemed to be confirming my suspicions.

The Windows Updates just bug me, what I hate the most about them is the fact that you have to restart your computer, and then I never really know what are all those things that are installed. So I install the updates, I restart my computer I wait for the internet connection to come back up again -it was down-. I try signing in Y! Messenger and msn Messenger while I'm already chatting with a friend on Y!, msn tells me it can't sign me in. I guess it wasn't the updates after all. Well, I'll just wait until msn lets me sign in again, in the mean time I'm using yahoo!

[The following is a message to Rizal]
message to Rizal: "Rizal I need to tell you something" -need is not the exact/appropriate word- rather "Rizal I would like to tell you something!".

Chat Archive Please

I wish Yahoo! would consider an archive feature in Y! Messenger for chat room conversations. Now that would be a very useful one!
I've often added people on my list after talking to them inside a chat room. As a person who relies heavily on the message archive to "remember" most of the people she chats with I would really appreciate a feature such as that one. When I have a second conversation with on of those people it is very common that I had forgotten their personal information, I might remember other things like the reason why we kept talking or something "interesting" he/she said but age and location are hard ones unless the person is much younger or older than I am and/or lived in an "unusual" place.There might be software out there that do this but I'm always a little hesitant to use add-ons.

Insignificant experiment with search engines

After experiencing an unannounced downtime in Blogger and being unable to post anything for at least a day I noticed that Google was no longer searching my blogs, they seem to still have at least this one in there index but the Google bots are no longer crawling them.

I was so glad when I first got visitors coming from Google and I couldn't wait for them to deep crawl my blog so they can give to people who are searching better result or just to give me something to brag about on the net. Well, it just didn't happen. I must admit I felt a little bad about it...On the other hand, Yahoo! Search which was also crawling my blog still kept me, they even deep crawled the blog. It's a little scary when you see how often I get hits from Inktomi on the blog –Yahoo! uses Inktomi technology to "search" the web and Inktomi uses Firefox when they stop by at my spot-. Yahoo has already deep crawled both of my blogs for this Blogger profile. Msn search has not yet indexed my blogs -what are they waiting for?-

I tried to search for "marguerite jasmin" with both Yahoo search and Google and Yahoo was the one with the most "relevant" results, by relevant I mean that they are related to no one else then me. Yahoo had my blog and my Blogger profile has first and second results and then they had many of my posts, a few comments I left on other blogs and of course other "irrelevant" results. Google of course has none of my blog and they don't have my blogger profile either only a few of the comments I left on very popular and high profile blogs. For those of you who did not know it, Google owns Blogger. It did seem odd that Yahoo would crawl Blogger more than Google did as if Yahoo took Blogger more seriously than Google did.

My first conclusion is: if I am not searching for something really technical or very specific, using two different search engines might be beneficial because they might actually give you different results. But old habits are hard to get rid of. Google is still my search engine of choice; I only use Yahoo! Search when I'm not satisfied with what I find with Google but if you want to search recent information from blogs it seems Technorati is a better alternative Google results are more likely to be outdated. In the end it all comes down to knowing the best tool to find the specific kind of information you are searching for.

My second conclusion is that you should be careful when you comment on someone's blog especially if it is a high profile one where your comment might be just one among a hundred others because you can always delete something you write on your blog but the odds on having a comment you put on some stranger's blog deleted are very low.

Filipinas

I went into a Philippines' room in order to ask the meaning of two words (pinoy and chinoy) that I had read on a Filipino's blog. And I realized how some girls give Filipinas a bad name. I had one guy offering me $200 to chat about ...mmm.. ."stuff"... He expected me to be interested in the money and just say yes. Then I remembered it's not the first time a guy mistaking me for a Filipina "treats" me that way, insisting that I would like him, that he likes girls from the Philippines, that he has money, that he would come to the Philippines etc....

Then again I have heard stories about Filipinas wanting to leave their country at any cost, it's just awful, they don't mind not getting any respect from the guys. Still, I just hate it when guys act like that, I don't think any woman deserves to be treated that way. I did tell them that they should show these ladies more respect; I don't know whether they are actually going to do that...

Unexpected encounter

I was a little busy therefore I did not stay online as much as I use to. When I came at 19:00 UTC, which is 00:30 in India time -I think-, I saw Dozy online! It seemed odd -if you knew Dozy a little you would think so too-. I thought I asked how come he was still there. And guess what? It wasn't Dozy, nooo. It was actually Dozy's Dad!!! Hopefully I did not send a sexy message to Dozy -as if ...hehehe-

From his writing I could tell it wasn't Dozy. I suddenly started sitting straight and preparing my most formal and polite response. -I couldn't believe I was actually chatting with Dozy's dad-. I mean, Dozy told me about his dad and the idea I have of this man is that of a very strict dad. I was already thinking about the consequences this could have on Dozy.
So of course I apologized very politely to mister Singh. He asked whether there was anything I needed (?) maybe he thought that I was some Indian friend of Dozy's. As I was taking leave of Dozy's dad and wishing him a good night he wished me "good dreams", a very nice man after all. Now I know where Dozy gets all his niceness from.