Joke

I just dug this one out from my collection of jokes that have come to me at work via email in the last few years...

A little old lady went into the Bank of Melbourne one day, carrying a bag of money. She insisted that she must speak with the manager of the bank to open a savings account because, "It's a lot of money!" After much hemming and hawing, the bank staff finally ushered her into the managers's office (the customer is always right!).
The bank manager then asked her how much she would like to deposit. She replied, "$165,000!" and dumped the cash out of her bag onto his desk. The manager was of course curious as to how she came by all this cash, so he asked her, "Ma'am, I'm surprised you're carrying so much cash around. Where did you get this money?" The old lady replied, "I make bets." The manager then asked, "Bets? What kind of bets?" The old woman said, "Well, for example, I'll bet you $25,000 that your balls are square." "Ha!" laughed the manager, "That's a stupid bet. You can never win that kind of bet!" The old lady challenged, "So, would you like to take my bet?" "Sure," said the manager, "I'll bet $25,000 that my balls are not square!" The little old lady then said, "Okay, but since there is a lot of money involved, may I bring my lawyer with me tomorrow at 10am as a witness?" "Sure!" replied the confident manager.
That night, the manager got very nervous about the bet and spent a long time in front of a mirror checking his balls, turning from side to side, again and again. He thoroughly checked them out until he was sure that there was absolutely no way his balls were square and that he would win the bet.
The next morning, at precisely 10am, the little old lady appeared with her lawyer at the manager's office. She introduced the lawyer to the manager and repeated the bet "$25,000 says the manager's balls are square!" The manager agreed with the bet again and the old lady asked him to drop his pants so they could all see. The manager complied. The little old lady peered closely at his balls and then asked if she could feel them. "Well, Okay," said the manager, "$25,000 is a lot of money, so I guess you should be absolutely sure." Just then, he noticed that the lawyer was quietly banging his head against the wall. The manager asked the old lady, "What the hell's the matter with your lawyer?" She replied, "Nothing, except I bet him $100,000 that at 10am today I'd have The Bank of Melbourne managers balls in my hand."

Froogle doesn't like backslashes in URLS

I've always considered URLs containing backslashes to be technically incorrect URLs, and HTML uses the / "foreward slash" character as a separator. Infact, using backslashes is unique to Microsoft as far as I know. I just realized that on a large shopping site I run, all the image urls contained a backslash. I hadn't noticed this before, because both the Microsoft and Netscape browsers understand "\" in the code.

Ive just been looking at Froogle, Google's online shopping directory. It's quite impressive, it's like a big online shop, taking pages from millions of online stores around the world. It displays images from the product pages, and I notced mine were not displaying. I've just noticed in the logs that Google is replacing the backslash in the URL with %5c when it's crawling the images. I've fixed it all now, I'll update the static pages on Monday and all will be sweet. It's a bit annoying though because Google has just done a massive deep crawl of our site, hopefully they will be back soon.

The Hungry Jacks Australia Website

For all those who are interested, I just found the Hungry Jacks Austraila website. http://www.hungryjacks.com.au
:)

Hmmm Hungry Jack's

Well, it's a nice Sunday, the suns out and Ive been in front of this thing since I woke up at 2:00pm this afternoon. It's now 5:57pm. I've read heaps of interesting things and done some fiddley little updates to the main site. I'm thinking Hungry Jack's. There's one not far away, and I'm a regular customer. It's better than MacDonalds, although I go there a fair bit aswell, altho not as much recently becuse I'm trying to get a bit more healthy. Hungry Jacks have fresh salad and tomatoes and things like that, I just recon it's a better feed. Probably just as unhealthy tho. I'm about to haul my lazy ass thru the drive-thru and get a large Ozzie burger meal. It will be good to see what's happening outside too:) I'm not even dressed yet. Still wearing a towel. I love it. Sunday, my only day off.

Spell Checking your Site is important

I've just finished the tedious task of running a spell-check on the descriotions database for our main product site. It's a horrible thing to do, but I found well over a thousand mistakes. Mainly just typographical errors from putting in a couple of hundred products a day.

If a user lands on your page, after doing a specific search on Google for your product, and they see a basic word spelled incorrectly, they may or may not look down on the site, why take the risk. Besides, it looks unprofessional.

I have also heard that correct spelling can contribute to a better ranking on the search engines. I don't know if this is because if you spell the work correctly, it is more likely to be searched for, or if Google runs a filter of some kind to penalize sites that have poor spelling. I wouldn't be surprised if they do to some extent, as it would be a good way to sort poorly prepared "slapped togeather sites (like this one:) from the serious professional ones.