Don’t you love new software?! Don’t you love all the great new features?! Don’t you love when the developers come up with some change that no one really wanted or had any reason to care about until they changed it and made life all the more difficult for you?!?! Yaaaay!!

Ok, so if you’ve been on the interwebs for any amount of time, you’ve see that odd little thing in front of the web address: “http://” This is what we in the bidnis call the “protocol.” 99% of the time, you’ll either see http or https (which means it’s using a SSL secured connection).

Firefox 7, just for grins and giggles, hides the protocol in the address bar. So, you don’t see “https://mybank.com/login”. You just see “mybank.com/login”. Gah! er… I mean… Yaaaay!

But why, you might ask, do I care what protocol is being used?

Well, I would say in a patronizing tone, you might need to see for certain that your connection is secure (https) before you put your username and password into your bank’s website (else someone would be able to intercept your request and steal your login) or put your credit card number on a web form (or someone might steal your number), or maybe your employer blocks http://facebook.com, but you’ve discovered that they don’t block https://facebook.com. There are many reasons why you might want to see and change the protocol.

In my line of work (I’m a web developer), the protocol is very important. I need to be sure that certain pages of the site I maintain are secure and that others aren’t. (https is slower, so only use it if you need it!) So I really really need to be able to see the protocol.

Thankfully, Google had the answer for me. (Google knows everything.) There is a config setting in Firefox to stop it from trimming the URL. Thanks Google! And thank you, Firefox 7 developer who thought this would be a neat feature, for wasting an hour of my life.

When I was down, a friend of mine came over and told me ten jokes to try and make me feel better. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

…

“No pun intended!” C’mon, people.

Q: What’s the difference between beer nuts and deer nuts?

A: Beer nuts are a dollar fifty, but deer nuts are under buck.

Q: What is the difference between a bad golfer and a bad sky diver?

A: One goes “WHACK!” and then says, “Darn!” The other says, “Darn!” and then goes “WHACK!”

Q: Why does a chicken coup always have two doors?

A: Because if it had four doors, it’d be a chicken sedan.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Google has now digitized and cataloged millions of books from as far back as the 16th century. Take that, and mix in some university researchers desperate for a thesis, and you get Google’s N-Gram tool.

Essentially, you can type in any series of words or phrases, separated by commas, and Google will graph the frequency with which those words appeared in literature over the ages.

For instance, I wondered about “sneaked” and “snuck.” Which is correct? When did the wrong one appear and how popular is it? Well, easy enough: Click to see the results! Turns out, “sneaked” is correct, but “snuck” has been gradually sneaking up on it since the 1920’s. As a side note, “sneaked” shows a huge spike during and after WWII. Seems we got all interested in sneaking during the war.

Here are some more search ideas:
Who is more popular? Frodo, or Harry Potter?
When did the desktop start to lose out to the laptop?
When did “crap” become more popular than “poop”? (Try adding that other 4-letter scatological, word for a real surprise.)

If you’re interested and have 15 minutes to burn, here’s the video of the researchers describing their project at TED. (Clicky clicky)

Q: Why did the cowboy buy a wiener dog?

A: Because someone told him to get a long little doggie.

Time flies like an arrow.

Fruit flies like a banana.

Q: Why was the math book so sad?

A: It had a lot of problems.

Yes. We have returned from a grand trip to Colorado. Yes. There are oodles pictures. Yes. There are a plethora of videos. I’m working on it. I swear. Check back here in a few days and I’ll have something up. Honest. I’m trying. Give me a break, would ya?!

Here’s a teaser, to placate you for a bit.