Yesterday evening I was forced to smile about two things ….  and people following my blog might be aware about two things I have mentioned here during the past.

One was Google nearly driving me crazy with their wish to verify my Google Adsense Account with a prior received pin – I never had received – until yesterday!!

Wasn’t there a shiny neat postcard directly coming from New York City within my P.O. box yesterday?? Just sadly the verification possibility within my Google Adsense account had mysteriously disappeared in between …. and I would have so much loved to show them that I’m a real trust worth user of their service!

And 2nd, finally my iTunes told me that Apple had written a new firmware upgrade for my iPod   …. isn’t that nice of them taking so much care about me and my iPod?

Giving again the loyal and compliant customer, I agreed with iTunes updating my player and … “OH Wonder” … the problem with the amplifier not really switching off anymore, was fixed again!

I love so much seeing that all these big companies do really know what they are doing ……

“can we bring shampoo to great barrier”

That was the search string used at Google’s search engine leading a visitor to one of my pages. Besides the fact that Google did send me a new visitor and this fellow was obviously environmental friendly…… I felt very annoyed about seeing this query string listed in my sites search statistics.

Doesn’t it dramatically show that normal internet user (surfer) are helpless overstrained with actual technologies?

Sure, Google – as also all other modern search engines – does work with modern full text search algorithm, knowing all about high sophisticated way to optimize the user query. Stripping away useless filler words and picking up reasonable searching term is usual practice today without question!

But what does this people expect? Just a quick “Cut&Paste” of the first chapter of the bible does not give you a valid search result directly leading you to god and the ultimate answer to everything!!

Looking behind, search engines are nothing different than highly specialized databases running with a “user friendly” interface allowing an easy querying of the stored data basis within. And even the order of the given search terms have a significant influence on the fact whether or not you will get a useful result.

Think about and try it your own …. searching for “shampoo & great barrier” will for sure come back with much more search results than a “great barrier & shampoo”. This is easy to understand, when you are aware that it is a given fact, that it is much more ususal to publish general info about shampoo, than writing about shampoo carried to the Great Barrier Reef!

Years ago, within a private discussion with a friend, I pointed out my opinion that, considering about the growing amount of data daily published on the internet, a new profession like an professional and reliable “Internet Scout” being trained to find authentic and trust worth information on the net quickly and reliable will become an urgent need in future ….. looks like I was right ….

Yesterday until lunchtime I thought I would be allowed to enjoy a calm day. Far away from that!

Shortly after lunch – I have to confess that I didn’t had lunch, as for I was using these few minutes to dig into a problem of a friend – the whole day suddenly changed, with me being confronted with sitting about a lot of unexpected “paperwork” to do. All contract issues and a strategically project plan, I was trying to find out about all it’s issues and finally to solve them.

It is not, that I would in general not like such stuff, but I hate to do it out of a position of defense. You know these customers using each “even just possible” weakness of your plans for their own benefit?

It was already 6:30 pm when I stopped working on that stuff, by feeling more or less unhappy with myself and what I had archived until then.  Just the curiousity of such situations is, that I can’t gear down. My brain highly active just needs to focus to something else, not able to slow down.

So I decided to come back to this friends problem, which was about to integrate Google Maps into a commercial property renting software solution. I quickly had found a possibility to include individual pages and also the Google software API itself wasn’t a real challenge for me as for I had already worked with it before.

Just as always, things were not really self explaining and a short look into their documantation – all nice Flash based animations (very useless at the end) – brought no answer for my problem. What is that about today companies are not able to document their software anymore? Spending hugh effort to get/produce animated documantation clips while a short and pregnant programmers reference or API description would do instead?!

This was the moment when I switched finally in analyzing mode again, which is taking away the fingers from the keyboard and running my brain at 100% thinking about how this “clever programmer” could have written the interface.

Sure, I could have had a look at the source code instead … just this mostly ends up in hours reading through the code … and following my intention, I recognised just the front end interface of the application, was not willing to store the Java code, as the problem!

So a quick SQL insert statement was written in seconds, storing the few Google Java based API for calling their map,  directly within the corresponding database table of this commercial tool …. And it worked like a charm, showing a shiny and glowing map as wished!

This was the moment when I was finally able to relax …. With the well feeling of having really something archived today!

Every day could end that way! Couldn’t it?!

I got a aware of a special offer of a Samsung SyncMaster 223BW 22″ at a local electronic market. That sounds like a must “mission” to me and I really hope I will have the time today to grab one. Guess it will look very cool and sexy next to it’s little brother with 20″ I do already own, in nice neat “Dual Head” configuration. )

Still no answer from Google belonging to my AdSense Account! But they did send me New Years Greetings instead today ….

Got one!!!

Today I received the second request to actualize my Google AdSense account with the pin they had send me earlier … they have?

At lease I wouldn’t aware that I have got one and therefore I entered there pages trying to request a new pin as mentioned within their email. Hm … the button was “greyed out” and I thought perhaps I just need to specify wrong one and they will offer me to send a correct new pin again?!

Far away from that! Now they locked me out!! Not sure this makes many sense at all … What do you think?

Now we will see how long they will need to process my unlock request.