UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

…but it’s a good thing.

From kottke.org: The country’s new robots.txt file.

Well, it’s probably easy to read too much into this. But the short story of it is that President Obama’s new whitehouse.gov website is blocking a lot less content from search engine “spiders” than that of Ex-President Bush (oh, that has a sweet ring to it).

Now there are plenty of reasons for putting things into your robots.txt file, and most of them have nothing to do with trying to withhold information from the public.

It’s rather odd, though, the set of directories Bush’s site was blocking from the spiders. I find expectmore and help especially amusing. The others aren’t quite so funny. What exactly about omb (Office of Management and Budget) did they need to hide? And… uh… well… 911 kind of goes without saying.

Why block these pages from being indexed by search engines? Good question. And here, I think, is the answer: to make it harder for the average citizen to keep track of changes that have been made to those pages by accessing Google’s cached versions (or, perhaps even more damning, the indefinitely-archived snapshots on the Wayback Machine).

But, it’s a new day. President Obama has promised a much more open and transparent White House, and if the visible underbelly of its website is any indication, he intends to keep his promise.

Also of interest: Here’s a comparison of the old and new whitehouse.gov sites.

In just 3 short hours, as I write this, Barack Obama will be sworn in as 44th President of the United States of America, ushering in a new era in more ways than I can describe. I’ll be watching the proceedings on MSNBC.

No president in recent memory has entered office with such a high approval rating (83%), but no president ever has entered office with as many hopes and expectations riding on his shoulders. He’s uniquely qualified to be the man in this time, in this place, however, and if anyone can do it, he can.

We can.

It’s going to be an interesting four years…

Last night while walking to 300 First in Rochester for dinner, SLP and I were greeted by a disturbing, nay, terrifying sight and sound. Hundreds, nay, thousands of crows, all converging to roost in the tops of the trees of Central Park, home of the mysterious Heritage House.

We asked our server about the crows and she informed us that they arrive every night around 5 or 6 PM. We’re not sure if it’s more scary to think they do this every night, or if we were witnessing (and perhaps somehow implicated in) a one-time occurrence. Or maybe it’s just lame that we were going out to dinner at 5 PM. But we have kids so, enough said.

I managed to snap the following photo of the birds in action, though it fails to convey their staggering numbers or the freight train volume of the cacophony they were producing. But what’s even creepier is that when we left the restaurant around 7 PM, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of these birds perched on the upper branches of every tree in the park… and they were totally silent. Paging Tippi Hedren…

This one’s making the rounds… Daring Fireball and Cabel Sasser at the very least, but it bears sharing.

I’ve had this game on both the PC and the NES, and I’ve tried it in MAME. It’s way cool… way ahead of its time… and way crazy-hard. But I loved it, even though I was never any good at it.

I’ve never actually had the opportunity to play it the way it was meant to be played — with a trackball in an arcade cabinet. But I have a feeling that even if I did it would require years of practice for me to play it this well:

There’s one, and only one, thing I like about “Joe” the “Plumber,” and that’s people mocking him.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez brings the goods in this commentary on “Joe” and his douchebaggery.

I think the stopwatch is reading 14:59 right about now.