:: crapweasel ::
the official blog of
Dave Tompkins

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As my DVD Collection approaches 1000 Movies on DVD, I wanted to see how my collection compared to the New York Times Best 1000 Movies Ever Made. But I needed an automated way to cross-reference entries from the NYT list to the IMDb. For example, the NYT entry for The Earrings of Madame De... (1954) is in the IMDb as Madame de... (1953) -- they are close, but not exact. So my ultra-clever way to do this was to write an automated (perl) script to do a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search on the IMDb site, which would most likely return the correct movie. It was working great... nice and automated... until I started seeing 403 errors... then I tried a manual Google search and I was denied. My ip address was actually Google-blocked for violating the Google terms of reference. I had never heard of that before. I couldn't even do a regular Google search for an hour or two. How frustrating and embarrasing... I actually felt like I was in trouble. What made this even worse was that just last week I was making fun of another friend who was banned from Facebook for making too many wall posts.

I was checking out Google Webmaster Tools for the first time, and naturally I looked at my personal website (like you've never googled yourself) and I stumbled across a website linking to me that triggered a serious WTF? moment: http://e-meet.mobi/ has an emplyment link to me... click on the image to see the full screenshot.

There's a lot of stuff I stumble upon that I don't think is "blog-worthy", so I've decided to start sharing them in Google Reader and make them public. (There is an RSS Feed if you prefer) It integrates into Facebook but not very well, and I'm hoping they can improve that interface.

I highly recommend you take the 5 minutes and give this Eyeballing Game: a decent try... the most interesting part is at the end to see where you lie in the distribution.