It’s a relic of the Cold War era. It is black. Once shiny Bakelite became dull. Maybe it was the chemicals. It found shelter in a darkroom. In a research center dismantling its nuclear reactor. There was no future for nuclear science after the iron curtain had crumbled. It was voiceless, robbed of its carbon…
Tag: Google
Have We Changed After All?
A poem from googled snippets of text – details on the creative process at the bottom of this post. ~ ~~ ~~~ Have We Changed After All we’re unearthing the biggest questions Why do we have such strong preferences If we think we know better struggling to believe that God will provide traverse this landscape…
Tower in the Middle
To honor Foucault’s Pendulum (the novel), I am creating poetry from it – and in its spirit. Rules: Open the physical book at a random page and point to a random place. Pick a phrase touched by your finger tip. This becomes a line of your poem. Repeat until it feels like the poem has…
Cyber Something
You know you have become a dinosaur when you keep using outdated terminology. Everybody else uses the new buzz word, but you just find it odd. But someday it will creep also into your active vocabulary. Then I will use the tag cyber something, like stating that I work with cyber-physical systems. But am I…
The Subtle Power of the Top Snippet. A New Sub-Genre of Google Poetry.
New game, new rules! I have tried to make the rules tougher! Here is some context and history. Search for your site on Google: site:elkement.wordpress.com Pick the first search result in the language of your site[*] Pick a chain of words, a contiguous snippet from this Google search result (use only the snippet on the…
Bots, Like This! I am an Ardent Fan of HTTPS and Certificates!
This is an experiment in Machine Learning, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, whatever. But I need proper digression first. Last autumn, I turned my back on social media and went offline for a few days. There, in that magical place, the real world was offline as well. A history of physics museum had to be opened,…
Bing Says We Are Weird. I Prove It. Using Search Term Poetry.
Bing has done so repeatedly: In order to learn more about this fundamental confusion I investigated my Bing search terms. [This blog has now entered the phase of traditionally light summer entertainment.] Rules: Raw material: Search terms shown in Bing Web Master Tools for any of my / our websites. Each line is a search…
The Future of Small Business?
If I would be asked which technology or ‘innovation’ has had the most profound impact on the way I work I would answer: Working remotely – with clients and systems I hardly ever see. 20 years ago I played with modems, cumbersome dial-in, and Microsoft’s Netmeeting. Few imagined yet, that remote work will once be…
Other People Have Lives – I Have Domains
These are just some boring update notifications from the elkemental Webiverse. The elkement blog has recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, and the punktwissen blog will turn five in December. Time to celebrate this – with new domain names that says exactly what these sites are – the ‘elkement.blog‘ and the ‘punktwissen.blog‘ (Edit: which now –…
Internet of Things. Yet Another Gloomy Post.
Technically, I work with Things, as in the Internet of Things. As outlined in Everything as a Service many formerly ‘dumb’ products – such as heating systems – become part of service offerings. A vital component of the new services is the technical connection of the Thing in your home to that Big Cloud. It…
Self-Sufficiency Poetry
Our self-sufficiency quota for electrical energy is 30%, but what about the garden? Since I haven’t smart metered every edible wildflower consumed, I resort to Search Term Poetry and random images. This is a summer blog post, lacking the usual number crunching and investigative tech journalism. Search terms are from WordPress statistics and Google Tools….
Blinded by the Light: Links Not Considered Click-Worthy
I promised more experimental internet poetry — here it is! The problem: Spam comments have petered out, their number seems to scale with posting frequency. The quality of search terms for this blog has improved, and most terms are technical and dull. I turned to untapped raw material – finally I know what last year’s…
Google-Mediated Self-Poetry – Holiday Edition
A new sub-genre of my experimental internet poetry! Is Google able to capture the essence of this blog? Rules: Search your own site on Google, using site:[your site]. This ‘poem’ is based on results from site:elkement.wordpress.com. Open the first search result in a new tab. Pick one phrase from this page (your own content) and…
Shortest Post Ever
… self-indulgent though, but just to add an update on the previous post. My new personal website is live: elkement.subversiv.at I have already redirected the root URLs of the precursor sites radices.net, subversiv.at and e-stangl.at. Now I am waiting for Google’s final verdict; then I am going to add the rewrite map for the 1:n…
Finally Mobile-Friendly! (How I Made Googlebot Happy)
Not this blog of course – it had been responsive already. But I gave in to Google’s nagging and did not ignore messages in Google Webmaster Tools any longer. All my home-grown websites had a fixed width of the content pane and a fixed left sidebar. On a mobile device you only saw the upper…
All My Theories Have Been Wrong. Fortunately!
I apologize to Google. They still like my blog. This blog’s numbers plummeted as per Webmaster Tools, here and here you find everything you never wanted to know about it. I finally figured that my blog was a victim of Google’s latest update Panda 4.1. Sites about ‘anything’ had suffered, and the Panda rollout matched…
Looking for Patterns
Scott Adams, of Dilbert Fame, has a lot of useful advice in his autobiographical book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. He recommends looking for patterns in your life, without attempting to theorize about cause and effects. Learning from those patterns you could increase the chance that luck with hit you….
Google Translational Poetry – Austrian Christmas Edition
I am at the nadir of my online reputation – my Google page impressions plummeted by a factor of about 100. This is very liberating, and I start enjoying the irony of being considered a notorious link scammer. Now I will harvest Google for any weird purpose whatsoever. For poetry nobody will read. The title says it all. I…
Waging a Battle against Sinister Algorithms
I have felt a disturbance of the force. As you might expect from a blog about anything, this one has a weird collection of unrelated top pages and posts. My WordPress Blog Stats tell me I am obviously an internet authority on: how rodents get into kitchen appliances, about the physics of a spinning toy,…
Google and Heating Systems (2)
I googled our company name. Then I found this: Auftrag means order and the obfuscated parts contain our full company name, the Chief Engineer’s name, the URL of a vendor we ordered material from recently, invoice total, and a comment like The client said we should… The now inaccessible URL had pointed to a comma-separated…
I Am Too Googleable!
What a letdown. I wanted to report on near completion of The Website Resurrection Project – but I had a mind-altering experience. On the upside, I am not afraid of identity theft or surveillance anymore. My dentist had to cancel an appointment the day before. I showed up some minutes before the appointed time. The…
Should This Blog Be Cast in Stone and Live Forever?
In my end-of-year-cleaning-digital-assets procedure I have found an Outlook contact of a user deceased some years ago. I have just tweaked this blog’s stylesheet – although I know that the layout will revert to the default when I will have died and nobody will pay for the WordPress’ Custom Design feature anymore. So what will…
Breaking News on Search Term Poetry (Good, Bad, Ugly)
This is a break from quantum physics – you deserve it! Based on your questions – no un-follows so far fortunately – I will follow-up with attempting again to pick the right metaphors for 1026 dimensional spaces and tons of enormous vectors. But there is more (enigmatic) to this universe than quantum field theory – such…
My Google Searches Might Heat Your Home
Sorry, but this is not about Search Term Poetry! Rather the contrary: Imagine your search terms could be utilized for something down-to-earth, for something useful. Google states: See more comparisons for Google services here! (Though I am disappointed they did not convert to bath tubs!) If Google’s computers run in their data centers in the…
elkemental Force 