work stiller alexa cat action?

Well, instead of winding down towards Xmas, work commitments seem to be winding up a bit, but I'm confident we'll breeze through everything and get to Christmas time in one piece - yay!

Comedy Central has been showing, late at night, Ben Stiller Show episodes, since the DVD has just come out, I got a chance to catch one or two for the first time - unsurprisingly, it never made it to the UK. And, by gosh, they're pretty darn good - Ben, Janeane Garofalo, Andy Dick and Bob Odenkirk all went on to be slightly more famous than they were at this point, and the U2 bar mitzvah spoof in the first episode is priceless.

There's always been some debate about whether Alexa, which indexes website popularity, is actually fair, or whether it can be biased by just a few users. But I hadn't seen a good example of someone messing with it until a friend pointed out some Shacknews messageboard users initiated a campaign earlier this year to get everyone to download and use the Alexa toolbar (which is how they work out popularity rankings), plus visit Shacknews like they normally do. You can check out the results for yourself - a not-unimpressive jump from 20,000-ish ranked to 2,500-ish was the end product, though it's wandered back down again now. Conclusion? Don't really have one, other than Alexa is probably a half-decent arbiter for the top 1,000 sites or so, and maybe the top 5,000 when people don't make efforts to skew it.

Finally, I noticed cat pawprints on the back window of my car a couple of months back, and a few weeks ago saw a cat sitting on the roof of another car parked in a similar place, because there's a small tree just next to it, and the roof is perfect leverage to jump up and claw at those pesky birds sitting pretty up there. But how can you _really_ tell there's cats hanging around your car late at night? As I discovered a couple of days ago, if there's a small fur-covered fake mouse left on the street just next to your automobile, that's how. Why, those reprobates!