We have three laptops in our house.

My one, a solid IBM G40 that the guys at work call ‘the brick’, because it’s so big, old and heavy. I don’t know how old it is now, but there seem to be files created in 2003, if not 2002. Still going, although its time for some more power and space.

Matt’s, another IBM, which has already been repaired once, after he spilt orange juice over the keyboard, and is around 2 yrs old. Mostly ok, although the internal wireless connection seems to drop out a lot, and the CD drive no longer works with any reliability.

And Scotts, a Compaq Presario V2417 which is only 1.5 yrs old. And likes to die. Alot.

Scott has lost months and months of action with his crappy compaq (my opinion).

The power cable has died twice, and been replaced.

It died within a few months of purchase with a dead hard drive. That really did take months to repair, by the time Chatswood Myer remembered to send it off to the repairers. Disgusting service there.

The motherboard died a few months ago, with at least another month of repair time, courtesy of Toshiba. Each week we would ring up, and they would say ‘ready next week’. Again. And the next week.

And he’s been getting the blue screen of death for the last two weeks. Warnings that the hard drive is about to fail. And today he took it over to a friends place to play games together for the first time, and it wouldn’t even start at all. (Usually his mates come to our place to play).

Five wipeouts in 1.5 years is beyond disgusting.

Needless to say I will NEVER NEVER NEVER buy another Compaq laptop from Myer. Even with the extended warranty, managed externally that they keep at a distance.

Enough ranting. I feel a bit better now.

UPDATED TO ADD: Two weeks after reporting this error, they agreed to write off Scott’s laptop as an official lemon. They eventually replaced it with a Lenovo. It’s doing ok so far (although he still complains of wireless lag when he plays Runescape. So he hangs out with the blue cable in the front room. It could be worse.

One of my sites was down briefly today. At first I only noticed by chance, when I mentioned it to someone and throught I’d check how things were going. And it wasn’t there. And I couldn’t login to my cpanel, to check if I’d accidentally blown my space or bandwidth allocation.

So I sent an email to the hosting company, asking if there was a problem. I could have phoned, but assumed it would be fixed by the time I got home.

And yes it was. The downside of sharing a server with others. Someone else on the same server was doing something bad, and brought down the server and all the sites on it. But only for around 20 minutes, according to an email from InternetSeer.

InternetSeer.com is a site monitoring service that sends you an email if your site is down. On the surface it was quite nice to know that they were monitoring things, and that my site was only down briefly. But when you dig deeper (ie through a Google search), there are negative feelings out there.

I didn’t sign up for InternetSeer. When I did an automated search engine submission through IBP, one of the search engines bundled up the InternetSeer service with it. That search engine is probably making big biccies from that deal - wouldn’t you like to know about new websites whose owners care enough to do a confirmed directory submission?

And InternetSeer does a ping to your website each hour, to see if it is responding. And tells you if your site doesn’t respond. And another when it comes back up.

A search through Google shows that many people don’t like this. It uses up bandwidth each time it visits your site. And according to the threads I read at Google, it was visiting waaayy too many pages on each site, and using an incorrect email address as notification, that had apparently been harvested from the site. For example this post at http://www.blogjam.com/2003/12/16/internet-seer-spam/

Whether this is still an issue is unclear. Which brings me to my second point. The above post was written in 2003. And it was returned as the second result at Google for a search on InternetSeer in 2007.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell Google to only show you results from the current year?

Fair enough, if you are searching for information on Van Gogh, you would probably be happy with a website written five years ago. And the Google ranking algorithm apparently has over 100 factors it considers when working out who to put at the top, from freshness, incoming links, content, etc. But if I’m searching for something technical, I want a lot more weight put on the age of the page.

How about a little extra command, such as age<1y - to restrict results to those created or updated in the last year. So a search for news about Britney Spears could be formatted as “Britney Spears -age<1m” so you only find out what she’s been up to in the last month. If that’s what you’re into.

How about it Google?