Day 335

I got a call from the local newspaper in Ennis, Texas today saying they had just received a Google News Alert that I had blogged yesterday about Mow the goat coming to live in their town. They wanted to interview me and run a story about the animal friends in the paper. I'd never heard of a Google News Alert before, but evidently Google indexes every single word that is written on the Internet and newspapers and journalists can subscribe to a service that alerts them when certain word combinations appear. Believe it or now, the goat story is a big deal in Texas. Apparently, when the words Ennis and Mow the goat appeared in yesterday's blog post, Google sounded the alarm at the Ennis newspaper and got a reporter interested enough to give me a call.

It's kind of scary how much Google knows about you. Less than 24 hours after I write something, I've got reporters calling me. Google Earth is just as impressive in a George Orwell kind of way. Once I zoomed in on my house using the Google Street View application and could read the license plate on my car in the driveway. I also zoomed in on my house while I was using the iPad a while ago and noticed that GPS was accurate enough to know I was in the kitchen.

I wonder if Google knew how busy I was today. I had to go downtown this morning to get a protection master made of the video tape I shot on Sunday before sending it off to National Geographic. I don't always do this, but the producers want the camera original tape and I'm always afraid the FedEx shipment will get lost and I'll have to start over again. Although it is expensive to work this way, making a broadcast quality protection master of everything is a lot cheaper than trying to round everybody up again and re-shoot an entire segment.

With the video tapes safely on their way to Washington DC, I returned to the office to deal with getting the furnace fixed as well as trying to resolve a major e-mail hassle. Apparently, none of the e-mail I've sent for the past week to people with a yahoo.com e-mail account has gone through. Yahoo seems to have blocked my mail server for some reason. With so many people using those free Yahoo mail accounts, this is turning into a big mess for me. I wasn't even aware that the mail wasn't going through until a client called wondering why I still hadn't sent the pictures he had been asking for.

I continue to be amazed at how popular Facebook seems to be. Jeez! I wish it were as easy to find real friends as it is to find Facebook friends. I've only got a small handful of friends in real life, but somehow in just two days I seem to have accumulated almost fifty Facebook friends. I don't think I've had fifty real friends in my entire life.

Dalmatian of the Day

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