W for Weblog

As part of our published goal to describe in gory detail our painfully boring lives, we have published our first travel experience page - Day 1 of Las Vegas. Other days will come soon.

Test of the coppermine-wordpress plugin to add images from a coppermine gallery. The image you see below is from our trip to Las Vegas. This was taken from the top of the Stratosphere. I was unable to take a decent photo from the top as my hands were shaking from my vertigo problem. And they did not allow tripods. How could they not allow tripods?!

This past weekend (Feb 24th-26th) I met up with two friends - Vatsa and Kripa. I hadnt seen Vatsa in more than 3 years and he is now a famous blogger, writing about applying for MBA. I had met Kripa in Jan after about 3.5 years also. A weekend well spent in the CIty, doing a lot of nothing. And I got my first parking ticket!

Friday night was fun. Vatsa was meeting up with a few other MBA bloggers at the Latin American Club in the Mission, and Kripa and I piled on with him. After all, how can one not want to go to a good drinking party, even if one has nothing to do with the theme of the party. It was an interesting experience for me personally. I have always read accounts of bloggers meeting each other after long periods of knowing each other electronically, but I had not had such an experience myself. Until now! The introductions went thusly:

“What is your blog/pen name?”

“You do have a blog, dont you?”

“Boooooooooooo.”

The group consisted of … errr.. well, they all had alter egos, like Bob Parr and the Mr. Incredible. There was taketwobskool, foobarme, marina, sorebrek, i_will_make_it, brownoski, vatsa of course, and other friendly bloggers whose names escape me now, thanks to all the alcohol of that day. There was so much drinking that, in the end, the other patrons of the establishment stopped drinking and encouraged us to make fools of ourselves. As taketwobskool puts it, we were like fraternity boys, thumping tables and chanting “drink, drink.” And birthday-girl Kripa enjoyed her tequila-spiked beer a lot!

Then we went to a nice little taqueria, where the food was awesome. I am told this area has some of the best Mexican restaurants and I agree. At the taqueria, Kripa called one of the bloggers as ..erm.. a character from a “Will Smith Alien Movie”. We stayed there until we were asked to leave and then went to another bar for more refreshing alcohol. By this time though, some of the folks had left, as it was past mid night and the rest of us decided to call it a night too. It was a fun night and I hope I get to attend one more blogger meetup.

Saturday was spent lounging around in The House That Google Provides. Breakfast at Sears Fine Food was really awesome. A breakfast of eggs and mini-pancakes provided enough sugar to walk up and down the hills of the city. Sears was quite a find. We were just wandering around, trying to find a place to eat and we saw this smallish looking place and decided to go there. On the inside, it looks quite different, like a posh hotel lobby. There are framed pictures and news articles describing a 103 year old man who worked as a maitre d’ for this place, and other fascinating bits of information. Some time later, we were approached by a lady who told us that they have tours of the city and if we had any questions about touring the city, we could get their help. I wish other restaurants did things like this.

Another good place to eat was the Chaat Cafe, opposite Kripa’s lodgings, where we had dinner saturday night and lunch on sunday. The place had enough variety to support two straight meals there. Saturday night was spent watching The Sixth Day on cable and drinking Ouzo. Kripa wanted to sleep, while Vatsa and I wanted to go out somewhere but neither of us felt like getting out of the sofa. Then sunday came around, I got my parking ticket and we had to split up.

In all it was a fun weekend.

During my random “websurfing”, I managed to do a google search for “Dave Winer.” The first link you see there is Dave Winer’s webpage, with the date in the title:

Now, if you go to Dave Winer’s web page directly, the date may or may not be the same:

What google shows me is the date on which it indexed Dave Winer’s webpage. This is an interesting way to find out when google indexes your webpage. Just add the date to your <title> tag on your site.

(I am sure this is old news to people who optimize for search engines and possibly others; I just discovered this today and found it fascinating.)

Technorati Tags: google, search engine

“Hello world!” indeed! First post and all that. New to the world of weblogging.