Google crushes the competition again
Google retained its commanding lead of the U.S. search engine market in June, when it handled almost half of all queries, leaving competitors such as Yahoo and Microsoft to fight for the remaining usage share, Nielsen/NetRatings said Friday.
NBC Just released their premiere dates for the fall TV lineup. I have added the shows to my public Google calendar.
If you’re interested in when your favorite TV shows will premiere this upcoming fall season, I have created a public Google Season Premieres Calendar (All times are MDT). This calendar lists all of the primetime shows that have firm premiere dates. So far, only Fox and ABC have announced fall premiere dates but as the others make their announcements I’ll update the calendar.
The RSS feed is located here. If you want to add the calendar, you first need to have a Google calendar. Then you can add my 2006 Fall TV Premiere Dates calendar to your account.
You can also click here if you have a Google calendar account already set up.
If you haven’t seen the new fall schedule, Metacritic has a very nice layout of each day of the week with show times.
Found this on Boing Boing.
Some hooligans hanging out at the local park in a Sydney suburb were bothering local residents and town officials so they decided to blast Barry Manilow and Doris Day music into the park from 9:00 PM to midnight each weekend. Apparently the music was so offensive to the youth that they decided to hang out somewhere else. The problem now is the residents surrounding the park are complaining because they can’t get any sleep.
Too funny!
Did you catch Barry Manilow on American Idol last season? He seems like a first class guy and of course is one of the most successful song writers of all time.
I have a mailing list of about 6,000 records. I maintain this list using a MySQL database and on occasion I use the list to update members with new information. I wrote my own email program to send emails to my list. One of the problems is that I now have hundreds of bad email addresses. I haven't taken the time to clean the list in some time and with the list dating back to 2004 you can imagine the level of bounces I get after each mailing.
The other day I received an email from DHL that said the following:
Your DHL WebShip/CorporateShip User ID XXXXXX is set to expire on 7/19/2006, due to inactivity over the past 180 days.
To keep your registration active, please log in with the User ID at https://sso.dhl-usa.com/sso/ and highlight the 'Ship' menu in the top navigation and then click on 'Prepare a Shipment' prior to this expiration date.
This message is the only notification you will receive before your User ID expires. If you do not log in prior to 7/19/2006, your User ID will no longer be valid. All shipment history and address book entries will be removed. At that point you will need to re-register with DHL WebShip/CorporateShip to process any future shipments.
If you have forgotten your password please go to www.dhl-usa.com and click on 'Forgot Password' or click the link below.
https://sso.dhl-usa.com/sso/forgot.aspIf you need technical assistance, please contact Technical Support at 1-800-527-7298 or email easy.help@dhl.com.
This is a system generated email, please do not reply.
That gave me an idea.
I wrote a script that searched through my list and selected the records where the user has not logged in for over 180 days. An email was sent out informing the user that they needed to log in by July 20 or their membership would be deleted.
This accomplished three things. It eliminated bad email addresses from my list, it trimmed my list of users who have no intention of ever coming back, and it reminded inactive members about my services.
The next step is to set up a cron job to run the script once each week and then delete those records that expired. Hands free, no hassle solution to managing a large email list.
Another cool thing I learned while building the script was a neat little snippet that can be used in a MySQL query to select records that are older than 180 days.
Where lastlogin is the column holding the timestamp of the users last visit.
Here is my latest list of blacklisted words that I maintain on my WordPress blog. Download the file, unzip it, and copy and paste the list of words into your Comment Blacklist located under Options and Discussion.
All times are MDT
To air July 2, 2006
To air July 9, 2006
To air July 16, 2006
To air July 23, 2006 (Pioneer Day)
To air July 30, 2006
Welcome to johnhesch.com, a blog about my life, projects, and interests. I have been blogging for over 10 years in one form or another.