The “dining room” is by far the most neglected area of our house, for furniture and general decor. Indeed, as a room per se it’s hardly there. The living room is at an angle to it, L-wise across the face of the house, and then everything divides in two–bedroom - bathroom - bedroom towards the left side, connected by a hall, and dining room - kitchen arranged to the right. Evidently when the house was built there used to be a small mud room at the end, of that has long since been removed, walls and all, and a good thing, because the kitchen is more than small enough.

So the dining room is where the computer is. (”I don’t want the computer in the dining room!” Bonnie told me even before we bought the place, and yet here it–and I–still sit,) exactly where it was for the previous residents. Just so is the dining table, but for now it is the work table for her home business of fabricating shippers and footies. The dining room table bears the burden there, and it and a mismatched set of chairs, some of which have a very tenuous connection to life, are all the dining room furniture that we have. I am tempted to say that this is the way it always will be. Although the table is a good one, with wings built into the center of it so that it expands, every so often she grouses for a new one, but as of now that really seems unlikely, as dining tables cost money (although the site I reference has free shipping and discounted prices.) The best that might happen is new chairs, I fear, particularly with things as they are in the world at large, although a china cabinet is pretty badly needed. Where we’d put it I have no idea. The big problem is keeping things off the table that don’t belong. If anything, I’d like to head in the direction of some kind of rustic furniture.

And a bad example of furniture crowding: the living room . . .

The world of SEO has become strikingly more competitive than when I first got involved with the internet. Back in those primitive days it was very common for search engines to baldly sell rank, at high premia in mid 1990s dollars. Yahoo specifically, as I recall, was a top”offender” in this category. People hardly understood SEO at the time, and the formulae of each site were different, sometimes contradictory, and often entirely obscure or arbitrary. The deeper problem was that targeting each search engine’s methods could make clumsy pages and warp content. And who knew what was most important? Remember META tags? While I would hardly advise people to not put meta tags in, out of general principle, I admit freely that they are nearly valueless: the most static thing in a net world that now values fluidity, change, and fast-paced motion above everything. Fifty or sixty META tags now have about the same value as one: i.e., zero utility.

With the supremacy of Google came, at least, one approach to SEO. But the question is, what was that approach? It’s partially content-driven, partially link-driven, that much we know, but now has the added burden of Page Rank, a gift that Google can give and then snatch away with seeming capriciousness. A loss of Page Rank is punishing to a site, and comes often in the wake of SEO efforts that Google disapproves of, or in the wake of other types of site monetization. Selling links, for instance, is now they great crime: only the King, Google, may commit it, in adwords, and in your gmail, and wherever else Google itself does it.

Thus search engine optimization, instead of becoming simpler, has become far more difficult under one master, and show little promise of become a layman’s hobby as time goes on.

White Shoulders was my grandmother’s favorite scent–still is, I suppose, so whenever I get w whiff of that I think of her right away. It really is amazing how smells link straight to memory: the smell of grilled cheese takes me back to 1975 every time, and there’s another perfume, which name I do not know, which takes me back to the very early days of my tenure at The Place That Must Not Be Named, and then there;s something called Poison, which reminds me of something else altogether . . . Fresh-mowed grass for some reason always reminds me of the milk plant back home.

Those smells just reach into the mind and summon a memory. I wonder why.

The AC people were out this morning and replaced our thermostat, which they though would fix it. It most certainly was not a permanent fix. Grr.

I remember when I started at the Place That Must Not Be Named. I worked in the back, doing data entry for copyright permissions and pasting up course packs. I squatted on a ratty old office chair, worse than any dismal home office furniture you ever sat down in, blotting out black dots with white out. Black dots were my life: copiers back then did nothing but throw black dots, one after another, in a negative galaxy that required me to pursue them individually. A good chair would have meant the world to me, but I didn’t get it, not ever. Eventually I started working on the floor–out of boredom if nothing else–and the point beame moot.

Still, every time I sit down in our awful chairs, still bad even though much newer, my body responds the same way, and I find myself reaching for a bottle of white out.

. . . and it’s hardly financially worth it any longer, either.

Some years ago I was given a t-shirt as a birthday present that had been specially ordered off the net. I had one of my favorite newspaper comics on it, and that was nice, but I could tell that it had been hastily folded and mailed from the press company before the image had cooled and / or set. The folded crease had a split in it. Now, I wore that shirt anyway, but ever after I have never trusted that company’s quality. You probably know them. They are big name, and they also make mugs and such as well. But I’ve always wondered were I could get print T-shirts made whose quality I could trust. I think I’ve found that place.

Simply named customyourshirt.com, they look like they have a superior product, with bulk discounts, where you can upload your images. I think it’s just the pale to get my next otter shirt that I’m not supposed to have . . . heh.

My grandfather was a house painter, and I’ve actually made a website for a house painter once, so I know just a tough about painting, through my father. Toronto painters do as well. Finer Edge has a tidy little site. The colors are soothing and painterly, with rollovers that don’t throw you to missing graphics, which I just detest. They have a great gallery of their work, and their client surveys (assuming this is an accurate sampling!) are revealing and largely positive. It’s a site I would ahve been proud to building myself. The only criticism I would have is that its rather inflexible to larger browser sizes . . . when I opened it up their home page it was floating alone and at sea in a great expanse of gray in my browser window.

But if their painting is as good as their site, it looks like they would be a good painter to check out, if you are in Toronto.

The suspense is palpable. How long will it take to certify those signatures? WIll they be certified at all? And who will be the next mayor? Will they be worse than the current mayor?

No telling.

Back in the day, I liked going to go up to midtown to Aquarius and check out the New Age and imported merchandise and music. (Later on I went to White Light.) This was back when I was writing a lot, and it provided a certain amount of inspiration for that. Right now I
have to go online for the same sort of pleasure. If you like your Tibestan Buddhist bowls or your singing bowls — quite extraordinary, made of quartz with leather strikers, from six to twenty inches across — from the same provenance, then this is the place to go. They have other kinds of merchandise, like felted handbags, Malas beads, and tingshas. It brought back memories: closing my eyes, I could almost smell the incense and hear the music.