Holy Jackhammering Christ

Woman cuts 10-month-old child's arms off.

Death to Billy Ray, Rodentia

At work, I use a portable phone a lot, wandering around with the phone on my belt and a headset in my ear: listening to others make phonecalls. When said others aren't actually on the phone, I hear a mixture of low hum interference and the ghost of some awful Disney radio station. What this means is that this week, just like every other week, I've heard Alvin and the Chipmunks sing "Achy Breaky Heart" at least four times.

It's drivin' me crazy, it's drivin' me nuts.

A Forty On The Curb

for the post that Blogger ate yesterday. In a way, I'm glad -- it was my first post lost to angry software, and it wasn't particularly compelling stuff. Mostly a bunch of ranting about blogdom and communications and my time spent in IRC every day. Nothing special. Nothing to write home about.

Who am I kidding? It was brilliant and I am heartbroken.

The Many Faces Of Josh Millard

There's something both gratifying and worrisome about maintaining a high Google profile without actually doing any work. I've managed to hold onto the top result for "josh millard" for a pretty good stretch of years now, with a couple exceptions, mostly by bothering to, y'know, have a website.

For a while, after Google tweaked their PageRank algorithms months back, the top hit was an old Word document that my Worcester open-mic folk mentor Patty Keough had posted to the website. It had a picture of me and a caption with my name; not prime real estate, but at least it was me.

Worse: for a couple of weeks some suicidal crew jock was camping the top spot. Memory fades, though; as of now he's creeping down the list of hits, clocking fourth place after my fugly main website, the music section of same, and some anemic audioscrobbler stats on a few songs I uploaded last year to the abortive Metafilter Music project.

I'm competing for space with what I like to think of as the Foo Joshes, including:

• Amazon Reviewer Josh, who is apparently [jmillard@ccu.edu] associated (student? faculty? janitor?) with Colorado Christian University, and who is a terrible, terrible writer.
• Wrasslin' Josh, a former NCAA wrestler and now, good for him, an assistant coach for Elizabethtown College in PA. This bastard has littered Google with wrestling results for years now. I'm battling the fucking sports section.
• Track and Field Josh, who in all fairness can probably jump higher and run faster than me.
• Guy With Whom Some Other Guy Named Josh Slater Hung Out This One Time Josh -- you'll have to scroll down for this one...
• Magnificent-School-Blazer-Wearin' Josh (New South Wales Parliment Football Rules!)
• Guitar Recital Josh, who might also be a wrestler or a runner for all I know...
• Grammatical Ambiguity Makes It Impossible to Know if He is the Groom's Brother Josh, see above.
• And of course the above-mentioned Suicidal Josh.

Make a body feel lucky just to be part of such a crowd. So long as they keep their goddam mits off my search results, anyway. Looking at you, here, Lock Haven.

Me

and my blog. I feel a bit dirty -- shouldn't I have rolled my own? Shouldn't I have at least hosted on the server where my stuff lives? Am I a bad nerd now?

But fuck it. This is fast, this is pretty, and if I like it I can always take measure to internalize the processes later. Right? Right.