Darkoshi

This search query ("I'm the fire of your") returns 5 results:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22i%27m+the+fire+of+your%22

This search query ("I'm the fire of your desire") returns 10 results:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22i%27m+the+fire+of+your+desire%22

*and* the 2nd one says at the bottom, "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

It doesn't make sense. Yeah, I got the lyrics wrong, but still, it doesn't make sense that adding more words to an exact-match query (within quotes) makes it return more results.

Hmmm. Google must automatically filter out pages with the word "desire" unless you specifically use it in your query. Or maybe it filters it when you put it together with another word like fire. Maybe if I were logged into a Google account when doing my queries, and had my settings set to not filter anything, it would act differently.

Yesterday afternoon, it occurred to me that if Clinton won, it would be 12 years in a row of a Democrat being president. How would that feel to the losers, the non-Democrats? It would make them more discontent, more angry. Maybe it is a necessary thing that each of the 2 major parties wins every few elections, to give each side a feeling of "having their turn". The longer a stretch goes on of not "having your turn", the worse and worse the other side seems, and the better you imagine things might be with your side being in charge.

It occurred to me that if elections really were rigged, if the same people are behind both parties, pulling strings and faking election results, it would make sense for them to switch between parties every few elections. To keep people placated, to make people feel like the results are real. It would make sense for the results to always be near 50/50, so that people wouldn't find it too unbelievable whenever the balance tips the other way.

I got to wondering what's the longest stretch of time that one party has won the presidential elections. I remembered Wikipedia having a page listing all the U.S. presidents along with their party affiliation. Google search results, however, failed me yesterday. It kept showing only other results like "popular presidents" and "best presidents", and stuff related to the current election.

I edited my search phrase from "list of presidents" to "list of u.s. presidents" to "list of all u.s. presidents", with no luck. (Although today, those all work fine, and the desired page is the first hit.) I kept adding onto my search phrase, up through this one, which still didn't work:
list of all u.s. presidents ever from george washington damn google you are not working today no i don't want the popular ones or the best ones I want a list of all of them for fucks sake how hard can that be

I finally found the page by searching directly on Wikipedia: List of Presidents of the United States

Other than the 12 years of Reagan/Reagan/Bush, the longest recent stretch of a single party president was from 1932 to 1952, FDR and Truman, Democrats.

The new Google logo reminds me of Sesame Street and the Cookie Monster.

Google totally fails to answer the question "what is a live installer?". It is a small install program that downloads the bulk of the actual software to be installed as part of the install process itself (so that the install won't succeed unless you have an internet connection available during the process). Right? For a moment I wasn't certain. Now maybe this answer will come up if someone else searches on it.

.

The small pond at work is at a low level, due to the heat and not much rain. As I was driving by on my way home, it looked like young green grass growing out of the pond scum on top of the water! Yet I walked by the pond at lunch time and didn't notice anything then. Maybe I wasn't paying attention? Maybe it's some quick-growing fungus? Google fails me there too.

.

I decided which trees in the yard to get cut down. A few are half-dead. A few are simply making the back yard too shady, dark, dreary, and mosquito-ridden. Yet they do also block some of the view of the neighbors' yards which is a positive thing. And even the half dead ones... I actually like the look of bare gray limbs... on one tree, that is even more aesthetically pleasing to me than the leafy parts. And my wonderful Japanese Cherry Tree with the beautiful blossoms in the spring-time! It's half dead, but also still half alive. Am I making a horrible mistake??? I told Qiao he'd better hurry and call up some people to get quotes for the work, as otherwise I might change my mind. I'd been considering this for a while, but probably would have put it off longer had the neighbor not also mentioned trees needing trimming.

.

Next post about pronunciations! But Windows wants to reboot first.

Terrorists used false DMCA claims to get personal data of anti-islamist YouTuber

First, I'll mention a few items from the original German article that I didn't see mentioned in the other English posts I read.

The automated emails sent by YouTube to the channel owners clearly stated that 1) the channel owner had to provide their personal data in order to counter the copyright infringement claim, and 2) that this personal data would be shared with the person who submitted the claim.

YouTube alternately allows you to provide the contact information of an authorized representative (such as a lawyer) rather than your own, but the channel owners didn't discover that until afterwards.

Neither of the 2 main presenters of the channel were willing to share their contact information. Sabatina James (not her real name) was already in a victim's protection program, and in the habit of moving every few years for her own protection. In the past, she received death threats from her own family after fleeing an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

They suspected that the person making the false claim was an Islamist, and they repeatedly tried to tell YouTube this. But they were ignored.

After YouTube received 3 copyright infringement claims and no counter claim, the channel was shut down. After the channel was shut down, one of the channel's collaborators offered to provide his contact information in order to get the channel reinstated. It was this person's personal data that was provided to the false claimant and subsequently made public.

.

According to Google's help pages, one can submit a copyright infringement complaint by web-form or email. The web-form requires you to enter your full legal name, address and phone number. But curiously, the email option only says that it requires your contact information "such as an email address, physical address or telephone number".

Whereas, when submitting a counter-notification by email, you are required to include a full legal name, email address, physical address, and phone number.

So it sounds like someone can file a claim by providing only an email address, whereas to fight a claim, one has to disclose much more.

Ok, the game goes much faster and easier the 2nd time through. But I still can't figure out how to keep the graveyard ghost from repeatedly killing me, other than random luck. Have any of you figured that out?

update: Well, this page ( says... )

While checking my browser cookies, I noticed some curious ones named __utma, __utmb, __utmv, etc., from a few LiveJournal and Dreamwidth domains. It turns out they are a part of Google Analytics, which can be used to track visitor traffic to your websites.

Apparently, blocking cookies from google.com doesn't block these cookies, as they belong to your website, not to google's website. I wonder whether blocking Javascript from the Google-Analytics website (which I've had NoScript set to do) disables the tracking information from being collected, or not. In my browser, I generally don't enable Javascript from that site.

Both Dreamwidth and LiveJournal support the use of Google Analytics.

So I figured I'd set up a Google Analytics account to use with my journals, to see what kind of info it generates. But it's likely I won't be checking it very often, because...

This reminded me that I hadn't checked the boingdragon counter info for my website in a very long time (a year and a half, it turns out). So today I checked it.

The Curses page remains my most popular one. A year and a half ago, it was getting around 10 hits a day. Now it's getting more than 40 a day.

On the Google Play website, where can you view the permissions required by an app, before downloading or installing it? I seem to remember when browsing apps a few months ago, each app had a link or tab for showing the required permissions. But the site looks different now, and I can no longer find the information. Oh**, nevermind.

Note: I prefer to browse the available apps on my computer before downloading the chosen ones to my phone. And I'm using Firefox - that shouldn't limit what I see, should it?

I'm trying not to gripe much about Google products seeming user unfriendly, as my difficulties may simply be due to my inexperience with the interfaces.

Yesterday evening while trying to do a web search on Chrome, I got annoyed by a microphone window unexpectedly popping up. I muttered "F*ck You", and it proceeded to show a page of search results for "F*ck You". That was amusing.

I then tried some other verbal searches... but it didn't give me time to finish my thoughts, and instead searched on the first few words I had said. I suppose I'd need to formulate my question before starting to speak it.

At work, I found a free app/plugin/whatever-Chrome-calls-it, on the Google site, that I wanted to install to my Chrome browser. Besides not being able to find the permissions, there was no obvious way to install it. There was a button at the top of the page labelled "Free". When I eventually clicked this button, it showed me the required permissions, and after my accepting them, apparently installed the plugin. As I recall, I didn't get a confirmation message that it had been installed, but when I checked the installed plugins, it was listed. Why do they label the install button "Free" instead of "Install" or "Add to Browser"?

When I tried to use the plugin, I got a prompt requesting extra permissions. Why weren't all the permissions listed to begin with? And then to top it all off, the plugin didn't even seem to work. It kept showing an hourglass.

** This page says that the only way to see permissions now is to click the Install button. But it seems that the install button doesn't display unless you're logged in with a Google account. Even then, if it's an account other than the one you've set up for your phone, you *still* won't be able to see the permissions. You'll just get a message "You haven't accessed the Google Play Store app (the white shopping bag icon) on your device with this email account." Sheesh. gripegripegripehategooglehategooglegripegripe

No option for turning off the navigation bar auto-hide "feature" when using Chrome on a tablet. gripegripe. Even Opera for Android seems to have done the same thing! grrrrr.

Go to Google.com and slowly type in (type it in; don't copy and paste) "do a/c cages work?"

Qiao just called me to say he saw the Google street-view car with the 6-foot high tripod with cameras on the end. It passed him while he was driving on Pine Belt Rd. He said it was a small white funny-looking car with stripes on it.... must have been like this one.

I checked Google maps, and the area between Pine Belt Rd, Two Notch Rd, and Beltline Blvd doesn't have street-view available yet, so the car might have been doing imaging of that area. I'm curious whether Qiao's car got into any of the images. We will check Google maps in the future to find out.