What do Japan, Germany and Italy have in common? No, I'm not talking about World War II. I'm talking about the fact that their English names aren't the names they refer to themselves by--they're exonyms (I didn't even know there was a word for it till now!) Japan in Japanese is Nihon or Nippon, Germany...
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You've heard of the 5 W's--who, what, when where and why--possibly in relation to writing or analyzing news stories or press releases. The 5 W's are also applicable to choosing keywords and sites for AdWords keyword or site-targeted advertising. For example, considering how these five dimensions relate to potential customers for CaRP (my RSS to...
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Ars Technica has an article about an intellectual property case where someone if France sued someone in the U.S. for publishing something that's protected by IP laws in France but not in the U.S. I'm a little torn on cases like this--we don't want other countries imposing their laws on us, but we also don't...
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Wow, they still haven't figured this out... Same problem as last year: when you download your transaction history from PayPal in tab-delimited format, each value is enclosed in quotes. That's correct for comma delimited files, but tab delimited files are supposed to just have tabs between the data items with no added quote marks. So...
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Welcome to my new weblog, Alpha Gecko. This blog combines a number of old blogs into one (thus all of the content before the welcome entry). Why combine?

Many (most...maybe all) of my narrowly focused blogs were not updated often enough to live very well on their own.

I can easily create a place fo...
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I stumbled on a panel discussing the question of impeaching President Bush on CSPAN today (a replay of a recording from March 2), and it got me thinking about the risk the republican party is running of self destructing. First a little background.

I used to be a republican. It's been quite a few years...
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All the hubbub over Larry Miller cancelling the showing of Brokeback Mountain at his Utah theater got me thinking about potential sequel titles. Here are a few ideas:

Flatback Praire: a love story about two gay farmers.

Moneyback Mall: a love story about two gay retailers.

Comeback Field: a love story about two gay quarterbacks....
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I heard someone on NPR talking today about how we're likely to have some huge online catastophy where someone really malicious releases a virus that causes huge enough problems that people will be willing to accept some sort of "license to code" (whether regulatory or de facto) before programs that people write can run on...
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Question: What would cause Google to load one page (http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/) over 700 times in 24 hours? Answer: I'll tell you when I find out.

Over the last few weeks, an ever increasing number of requests have been coming in from a few of Google's IP addresses loading the same page over and over and over......
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Utah residents watching The Amazing Race got a good chuckle tonight at the expense of the Utah-hating Weaver family. After listening to them dis our state, we enjoyed watching them make a major route finding mistake on their way from Heber City to Park City. The editing on the show didn't even begin to do...
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