It took a while after the Google street view car came here, but Google Street View is finally available in Ketchikan, Alaska via Google maps:
View Larger Map
Now it's possible for anyone to explore my little town. Please take note: this is Alaska and there's no igloos in sight. That's actually why I chose this location to embed, so you can see one of our towers. Also you can see our Plaza mall. If you rotate 180 you can see the other tower. This is a real city, I swear!
Go ahead, play with the embedded map... Click and drag to pan around, or click on one of the arrows on the road overlay to go up and down the street.
I didn't choose to embed the location of the the sign downtown that says "Ketchikan" in big letters because that part of town is only there for tourists. Once upon a time it was the true downtown of Ketchikan, but now it's just a bunch of tourist shops that board up their windows for the winter. What I've embedded is in the West End, the "true" part of town that locals actually go to.
They've got most of the road system, even a surprising number of the side roads. The road out South of town (East on a compass) has spotty coverage, I'm not sure why that is.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
«Street View in Ketchikan!»
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
«Face of the Island»
As with anywhere, this island has a few geological shapes that by chance resemble something recognizable. It's human nature to try to see faces in places there are none, this phenomenon is called pareidolia.
Here's one example from the topographical maps around here. Notice the names of the points: Brow Point, Nose Point, and Chin Point. This picture was taken aboard the Taku Alaska ferry on May 28th, 2009.
Here's a satellite view of the same place in an embedded Google map:
That's just a small area of the much larger Revillagigedo Island, the very island that I live on and hosts the town of Ketchikan, Alaska. Random fact: it's the 12th largest island in the United States, with an area of 1,063.65 square miles and 309 miles of coastline.
The town is exactly South of this on the map, if you look far enough.
See the rest of “Face of the Island”»
Sunday, September 20, 2009
«The Stick You Could Be Saving With... Google?»
So I ran across this Google Ad during my ventures in the interwebs yesterday (pictured to the right, but not an actual live ad unit). The ad linked to Google's campaign: Pet Stick: A 'Worst-Case' Case Study
The ad says "Trust us, this is going somewhere." I'm pretty sure it already has. It seems to me, adding googly eyes to a random object is clearly NOT a Google innovation. In fact, I'm pretty sure Geico already did it. I'm speaking of course about "The Money You Could be Saving With Geico."
Geico | "Kash Kitchen"
Oddly enough, during my vacation 5 months back, I saw "The Money You Could be Saving With Geico" everywhere... On giant billboards, on TV, even in the trash (they had sent out postcards with the money picture to people). It got to the point that my dad and I started seeing it in other things, even...
This image was taken in Mount Vernon, Washington on May 24th, 2009.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
«Google Moble iPhone App»
The Google Mobile App (opens in iTunes, if you have it) for the iPhone is interesting to play around with. Not because its voice recognition is accurate; quite to the contrary. It doesn't seem to pick up my speech very well, so it's funny to see what it thinks I said. Consequently, it's not that useful to me. I still have to type my search queries if I want to actually search for something meaningful.
For example, I say Master Marf and it searches for [nastia mouse]. That isn't to say that it doesn't sometimes get what I wanted. But it can't be a very complex search. Single words or letters seems to work okay.
Friday, May 8, 2009
«Kayak Across the Pacific Ocean»
Well, it's a good thing my vacation doesn't take me to Hawaii. Judging by Google Maps, I'd be screwed...
Of particular interest is direction number 42, outlined in red: Kayak across the Pacific Ocean 2,756 miles.
I think I'd die if I attempted to kayak across the Pacific Ocean. I think any normal person would. Except for Roz Savage. Although even she didn't use a simple kayak.
See the rest of “Kayak Across the Pacific Ocean”»
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
«Google is God»
...Or at least the closest thing we have to a God. There's even a Church of Google.
I, being an atheist, require extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. However, the Church of Google website backs up their claim with 9 proofs:
- Omniscience (all-knowing)
- Omnipresence (everywhere at once)
- Answers Prayers (searches)
- Immortality (potentially, anyway)
- Infinite (theoretically no limits)
- Offer of an Afterlife (Google's cache)
- Omnibenevolence ("don't be evil" motto)
- Fulfillment (turn to when in a time of need)
- Existence (Google exists)
That last one is where Google trumps all other gods. Google actually exists. While I will admit Google is the closest thing we know of to a god, it is still not a god. Google is missing omnipotence (all-powerful). There is no extraordinary evidence to prove Google is all-powerful. In fact, I'd say true omnipotence is an impossibility (due to various logical paradoxes).
I also question the validity of Google's omnibenevolence claim. Just because their company motto is "don't be evil" it doesn't mean they follow it all the time. However, omnibenevolence is not a prerequisite in my mind for a god. Just look at the God of the Christian Bible... That vengeful bastard is anything but omnibenevolent.
So, I will still remain an Atheist. Google does exist, but it is not a god.
See the rest of “Google is God”»
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
«Duplicate Title Tag Fix»
For the fellow blog owners out there that use Google Webmaster Tools, have you ever checked for duplicate title tags? You can find it under Diagnostics/Content analysis. If you do have duplicate tags (and I'm betting you do), they will show under Title tag issues.
If you're anything like me, you try your best to avoid duplicate title tags. It is why I use strange title names for a few of my post series (like Caturday, for example). Also, if you're anything like me you'll be shocked and applauded by all the duplicate tags that are still being reported; despite your best efforts.
When you dig down and figure out what is causing the duplicate title tags you'll find they are from things like comment permalinks like this: /2009/02/vince-offer.html?showComment=1239111420000
Some of them were really god-awful like this one: http://www.mastermarf.com/2009/02/vince-offer.html?widgetType=BlogArchive&widgetId=BlogArchive1&action=toggle&dir=close&toggle=YEARLY-1199178000000&toggleopen=MONTHLY-1222848000000
That brings up the exact same page as /2009/02/vince-offer.html, only it has a bunch of unnecessary query tags tacked on. What's worse is, sometimes googlebot will think that the long one is the true page and drop the short (correct) one from the index.
The fix is finally at hand. Google (and the other major search engines) are now supporting what's called canonical links. Basically they tell the search engine spiders where the "real" version of a page is located. They are extremely useful for situations like I described above or where duplicate content is likely to be generated.
Here's the code for your blogger layout so you too, will no longer have this issue. Put it somewhere just before the </head> tag in your html layout:<link expr:href='data:blog.url' rel='canonical'/>
That will strip all the unnecessary query tags off the url and point the search engine bots to the shortened url so they can index that one. After your pages are re-indexed you won't have duplicate title tag issues from comment permalinks anymore. All the major search engines use and support these canonical links.
I had a couple hundred duplicate title tags, and within a week of putting in the canonical links I'm down to 5. I trust those won't be around much longer, either. It might take longer for your site. For some reason googlebot really likes my site (crawling an average of 183 pages per day).
Sunday, April 5, 2009
«Google Ventures»
Sure... We all believe that. *wink* *wink*You don't have to be a potential Google acquisition for us to want to work with you
I like Google. And to their credit they're trying to maintain their "Don't be evil" motto. But they still have a company to build and maintain.
See the rest of “Google Ventures”»
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
«Gmail Sorting Technique»
I have a specific system that I use to manage my email. You may have a different system, and I'd like to hear about it in the comments. I use my Gmail account for all my email. Even the mail sent to my official website contact address gets forwarded to Gmail and is treated the same way. No new mail! Want to read updates from your favorite sites? Try Google Reader
I don't really throw much away other than spam. I love the archive feature of Gmail. On many occasions I've searched back in the archive for something. However, I usually only archive an email when I feel I'm done with it. Another feature I love about Gmail are the labels. It makes it so much easier to categorize and color-code emails. I have tons of automated filters (some quite complicated) that sort most of my incoming email into their appropriate labels.
So what I see in my inbox are emails that have already been sorted automatically thanks to my filters (one less thing I have to do manually). From there, I read any new bold-face emails. Some don't require much action after reading them and can be archived.
Others however, I want to reply to. I may not think up a reply right away or may not have the time to. So those ones I leave in my inbox until I decide to take action on them. I'll also leave blog comment notification emails in my inbox until I've decided if I am going to respond to the comment. Basically anything that I leave in my inbox I have plans to take action on. After I've taken that action, I archive it.
If I'm too indecisive about an email and it sits in my inbox for a long time, I'll star it with the special purple question mark superstar, then archive it. I can always find it again easily by looking in my starred emails if I decide to do anything with it at some point.
My official website contact address gets special treatment in that it gets its own inbox using the new multiple inbox feature. I have a filter that assigns a label to all mail sent to or from that address. I then have my multiple inbox set to show only mail with that label and is in my inbox. I use the search term [in:inbox AND label:label name] (without the brackets).
Anyway, this system works quite well for me. I rarely have much buildup and am often able to reach inbox=0. FYI: the empty inbox message in Gmail is:
I bet that a lot of Gmail users never get to see that message!
Sunday, February 22, 2009
«AdSense Data Not in Analytics»
I have AdSense and Analytics linked, but no AdSense data is showing in Analytics. There is absolutely no official Google support on this1, and it's too new of a feature for anyone else in the community to have figured anything out about it. So I'm starting to experiment on my own to see if I can figure out why the data isn't showing up.
I have a few ideas pertaining to how I'm tracking subdomains. However it's going to take some time to test them. I have to make the change, then wait a day or two so I can tell if it's working. If I can get it to work I'll be sure to tell how.
I've been a little discouraged about this whole link thing between Analytics and AdSense. It took me nearly 5 months to finally get it, then it doesn't even work.
1: Let's face it, there's absolutely no official Google customer support at all, on anything.
Friday, February 20, 2009
«Google Sitelinks»
I just noticed that Google has generated sitelinks for my site! You can see them by doing a search for [Master Marf]. Here's a picture of them, outlined in red:
Games
An Idle Mind and a Quote on Theater
April
I almost feel like this is an important site, with navigation items showing and-Wait... what? Those are just random links! How in the hell did Google manage to select a random blog post and the archive page from April 2008? I'd expect to see links like those in my navigation menu (About, Quotes, Links, etc.).
Google uses an algorithm to determine automatically what should be in the sitelinks, and if a site should have them at all. I've always thought it was only big, important sites that got them. I never expected this blog to.
I did a little research about how a site can obtain sitelinks. Google has very little official information about them, so it's up to the community to figure it out. It seems older sites are favored, as well as sites who's name matches their url.
I could block the random ones with my Google Webmaster account. However, it takes a minimum of 3 links for any to show. So I'd rather have the random links there than no links. It makes my site stick out more in the search results.
Friday, February 13, 2009
«Finally Linked AdSense and Analytics»
I finally got the option available to me to link Google AdSense and Google Analytics. I've only been waiting since they announced it in October of last year. I know Google rolls out updates slowly to their users, but come on... That took 5 months!
It probably would have been longer if I didn't run across their AdSense / Analytics interest form. The link to this form can also be found at the top of the Official AdSense blog.
So I have them linked. I should be able to get more detailed information about the performance of my ads now. Although at the time of writing this, no data is showing up in my Analytics account about AdSense yet.
One little thing that threw me for a bit during the linking process: They ask you to chose a primary domain to link to. All other domains other than the primary must have an additional bit of code inserted in. I was thinking that since I use a few subdomains (extras, www, and pictures) that I'd need this little code snippet. However, I couldn't find it anywhere.
Turns out that by "different domains", they really meant different profiles in Analytics. I track all my subdomains under the same profile in analytics, so I should be good. I shouldn't need to add any extra code anywhere.
You might be wondering why I even have ads. Well, they're primarily to pay for my domain name and monthly hosting costs. "But wait!" you say to yourself, "Blogger is a free service! There's no hosting costs involved!" Well, you're right... Sorta.
I pay (through GoDaddy) for my mastermarf.com domain name. I also have a hosting account through GoDaddy that hosts the Games section, as well as all the images you see here on the blog. I did not like the limitations of the built-in image hosting that blogger provides. And yes, I do make enough from the ads to cover my costs.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
«Mythbusters, Landslides, and Gmail, Oh My!»
The Mythbusters were in town between January 31st and February 5th. I knew that they were going to be in town, but I didn't know exactly when until they were already gone. So I didn't have a chance to meet Adam and Jamie. They were working in the shop up at the high school. I heard they did an assembly for the students after someone slipped them a note under the door. They didn't let too much information out about what they were doing, but it has something to do with a pykrete boat made of newspapers. I think the episode is due to air in April.
In other local news, yesterday morning there was a major landslide here around 8 AM. It happened around 5 miles North. Just North of Walmart for those of you who know the area. It blocked the main road with house-sized rocks, and undercut a house above it. They're still clearing it. Yesterday afternoon they managed to clear enough of one lane to allow people to pass every half hour.
And on a less interesting note, I spent some time yesterday reorganizing my Gmail.
I usually keep a pretty tidy inbox, and even all my archived mail have labels attached to them. However, I went through and tried to clean a little out of my dreaded catch-all "Other" label. When I can't decide what else to label an email as, I slap on the "Other" label. I also redid a few of my filters, added a few new ones... The main bulk of my email sorts itself into the correct labels thanks to the filters.
The email address in my About Section ends up in my gmail account, and goes through the same sorting process too. In fact, I've set up its own inbox using the new multiple inbox feature in Gmail Labs.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
«Satellite Images of the Inauguration»
You may or may not have seen this image already. It's Washington DC 41 minutes before Obama was officially sworn in. Ever wounder what 1.8 million people looks like from space?
They look like swarms of ants or bees. They're in groups like that because they are in front of the JumboTrons (very large TVs) spread down the National Mall.
You know what's amazing? There were at least 1.8 million people there, and no-one did anything stupid enough to get arrested. Just... Wow. I'm impressed.
The newly-launched (on September 6th, 2008) GeoEye-1 satellite was over DC January 20th. This satellite is owned by GeoEye, the same company that provides imagery for Google Maps and Google Earth.
Now, you might notice that I usually have the text "Click image to view full" under images I have sized-down for the blog. Well, this time if you click the image above you'll get medium-size (2560x2650 px), not full. The full-size is really big. But if you must see it, here it is:
Full Sized Satellite Image of Obama's Inauguration
Caution: the image is very large at 7816x8091 px, 51.5 MB in size. I recommend right-clicking the link and selecting "save as...", as well as a fast internet connection. (I'm putting my GoDaddy hosting to work now.)
For ground-view images, Boston.com has a great page: The Inauguration of President Barack Obama
See the rest of “Satellite Images of the Inauguration”»
Friday, January 23, 2009
«Update Web Feed Subscriptions»
I hope this somehow makes it to the old web feed subscribers, but things have changed with my webfeeds. The Feedburner address has been moved to a Google address, and as such they're making people move their web feeds to a new address.
I went a step further and moved mine over to my own domain. So my blog's web feed is now located at http://feeds.mastermarf.com/mastermarf rather than http://feeds.feedburner.com/mastermarf.
The same change has taken place for my Shared Stuff widget. You can find the updated web feed address at http://feeds.mastermarf.com/marfssharedstuff. Please update your subscriptions accordingly, thanks.
Monday, January 19, 2009
«Motivational Monday: The iPhone»
My dad has an iPhone. Keeping in mind I have a bias against Apple products... Even I think the iPhone is friggin' awesome.![Delete “Google” Deleting “Google” will also delete all of its data. [Delete] [Cancel] / The iPhone / That powerful.](http://pictures.mastermarf.com/blog/2009/090119-iphone-powerful.jpg)
Friday, January 9, 2009
«Colorful "g" Icon»
Well, Google's new icon is better... I'm getting a sense of déjà vu, it seems like I've already blogged about this topic before...
Old(ish) lower case "g".
New, more colorful lower case "g".
This time I caught the icon change the day it happened. In fact, some of the Google pages don't even have the new icon quite yet. I'm still inclined to say I like the old original capitol "G" icon the best.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
«Image Search Fix»
A while back I started to notice a problem with my image hosting for my blog. It was taking longer and longer to get a directory listing of my pictures folder in FileZilla (an FTP program). The reason was the sheer number of images building up in the directory, and it was taking too long to download all the file names. I knew that it would only get worse as I put more images on my blog.
So I decided to break them out by year. I moved all my images from http://pictures.mastermarf.com/blog/ to http://pictures.mastermarf.com/blog/2008/. That way I can create a new folder for each year. For instance, now I'm uploading any new pictures to http://pictures.mastermarf.com/blog/2009/. It works great. A little slow getting the directory listing towards the end of the year, but manageable.
The only problem was that Google Image Search had already indexed many of the images at their old location. You'll notice when you do a Google image search you have the option to "See full size image". So now I had a lot of people getting a 404 not found error when they tried to view an image result from my page.
I finally fixed the 404 errors people were getting from the Google Image search results of my images that I moved into their 2008 folder. I wrote a short little PHP script and put it on the 404 error page for my pictures subdomain:<?php
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if (stripos($uri,"/08") == 5)
{
$uriImage = substr($uri,6);
// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://pictures.mastermarf.com/blog/2008/" . $uriImage);
exit();
}
?>
It's a 301 redirect to the new address for the images I moved. A 301 redirect basically says to the browser or search engine spider, "I have permanently moved to this new location." I had to tell the server to use PHP version 5 for the stripos() function. It didn't work when it tried to run in version 4.
What the script does is gets the web address that was requested and checks if "/08" is in the right position to be one of the images I moved. I did this because I only wanted to redirect the moved images. All the file names of the images I moved start with "08". I figured it was easier to do than have a long list of specific images to check for. Also, there is are no other file names that start with "08" in that directory, so it worked out.
The rest of the script is a pretty strait-forward 301 redirect. I pull just the file name out of the requested web address, and re-build the new web address right there inside the header() function.
I just hope it wasn't too late. I moved the images a while ago, so Google has had time to see the 404 Not Found error and remove the images from their index.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
«Gina in Google Earth»
I was wasting some time randomly looking at things in Google Earth. I happened to find this near Seattle, Washington:
You can also see it in Google Maps written in chalk. If the date in Google Earth is to be believed, it was photographed on November 9th, 2007.
Whoever you are Gina, you must be lucky. Your boyfriend's graffiti was photographed by a passing satellite. I just hope he wasn't hit by a passing car after drawing it.
Yes, finding that was the most exciting thing all day for me yesterday.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
«AdSense and Analytics Sitting in a Tree...»
K-I-S-S-I-N-G... Yeah, ok. I'll stop with the nursery rhyme.
So the biggest news for me lately is Google is finally integrating Google AdSense (their ad network) with Google Analytics (their tracking software). It appears to be part of a big upgrade they've did with Google Analytics. You don't even know how much I've wanted this to happen.
Tracking clicks and revenue on the ads using their current system in AdSense is a real pain. Using all the different channels and such has always given somewhat confusing and overlapping results. Once it's tied into Google Analytics, that shouldn't be an issue any longer.
I've been really happy with Google Analytics. About my only complaint with it is I wish it were more real-time; the stats only update a few times a day. It took me a bit to set it up properly after I switched to the new domain. There was about a 10 day period I had it set wrong and didn't notice: all the visits site-wide registered as being on index.html instead of their corresponding pages. It was entirely my fault though. I had set a custom filter so I could tell what sub-domain the page visits were on, and I had left out some parentheses. So, like anything involving code, that little error totally borked the entire thing.
It's going to be great to be able to pull up the traffic stats on a page and also be able to see how much money the page has made me. However, as the usual Google updates go, they roll it out slowly. The option (or invite as they call it) hasn't been offered to me yet. Probably won't be for a while, but I'll keep checking.
My theory is they roll things out slowly so if there's a bug or glitch it will be reported and they can fix it before the majority of people are even using the newer version. Good idea I suppose. I was one of the last to get the new iGoogle homepage. I wish they would have just skipped me entirely on that one. I like the old iGoogle much better. I've even been tossing around the idea of writing my own homepage or just using "about:blank". It'd defiantly load faster.
As a side note, sometimes when I have Google Analytics open in my browser, I have a few other tabs open as well. Then when I look at the tab names I'll see "Google Anal..." as one of the tabs. I had a few laughs when I first noticed it.
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