Normally, as any SEO guru could tell you, Google’s algorithm punishes scraper sites. These are sites that don’t add any new content to the Internet, but just have programs that find new material on a variety of other sites, then effectively copy and paste them into their own site. The creation of duplicate content or slightly modified duplicate content, is therefore discounted by Google to punish sites that don’t come up with original material.

That is, of course, except for news.google.com. It is a directory for various news feeds, and a site I use quite often. It also does not generate any content and is, in that sense, a sort of scraper site. It’s also got a PR (Pagerank - Google’s official ranking of how important a page is, from 0 to 10) of 9. That’s really, really good for a site that isn’t responsible for adding any content to the ‘net. I guess you could be a site for my dog fluffy with midi files embedded and animated GIFs everywhere and still be a PR 9 if you had fluffy.google.com. I wonder if they’d give me that…

OK, I don’t know if I’m stupid (if I were, would I know it?) so we’ll just say I am. Regardless, I just received an email with an xlsx attachment created with MS Excel 2007. I’m unable to open it with Excel 2003. I simply get an error stating that “This file is not in a recognizable format.”

Please tell me Microsoft isn’t going to make everyone upgrade to Office ‘07 to view files from their more Office-ly advanced brothers. Those jerks. Of course, you don’t get to their monopolistic status without pushing the little guys around.

So as an incentive for this that and the other at work, I had the privledge of receiving a work notebook to replace my desktop and to make it easier to work from home, which I’m very OK with. While carousing the Dell site, I decided it would be worth the couple extra pounds to go crazy and get a 17 inch widescreen Inspiron (the E1705 which changed product names to the 9400 or something within the last week). I figured it would be worth it to have a similar-sized screen next to my standard LCD at work, plus I have a thing about watching media on small screens and I simply didn’t want to travel and watch movies on a 15 inch screen. What can I say? It all made sense at the time. So, in spite of some doubtful comments from coworkers, I went big.

Well, now I’m seeing some of the reasoning behind their comments. The thing is something of a beast. One issue I had not considered - finding a case. It was quite the hunt trying to find something I liked that would carry a 17 inch. That’s not to say there aren’t bags out there for 17″ screens, but they must not have had this one in mind since it never fit a “17 inch” bag. I was seriously beginning to doubt my decision and wondering what Dell’s trade-in policy was (or if such a thing exists). Finally I came upon a Samsonite bag which looked and felt good and, lo and behold, my laptop FIT. I was downright giddy to see it only cost $35, too. Thank you, Sam’s Club. So, now that I got the bag, I’m feeling pretty good about the 9400 again.

I better wrap this up though, my lap’s going numb.