I walked to Ralphs today. My car's battery was dead which forced me to remember that I still have legs and am able to use them for certain trips. While walking into the Ralphs parking lot I was nearly run over by a fire engine (yes Jenny, engine not truck). An ambulance arrived behind it and a rather bored crew emerged from both vehicles. They sauntered into the store behind me, and were directed to an elderly man in a wheelchair. I later learned from a cashier that the man had been experiencing discomfort then became unresponsive so they called 911. Why call out the fire engine for one man's health problems? I'm guessing that the fire engine guys saw the ambulance crew getting ready to go and said, "aw, jeez, can we come too? pretty please?" The fire station is probably not the most exciting place to hang out.

I barely woke up in time today to take the US Puzzle Championship test that Kat mentioned. Groggily I pulled up the web page to get the password and begin the test. However, I was surprised to find only a blank page instead. Several minutes of reloading produced only more blankness except for a couple minutes where it disappeared entirely. At times even the main puzzle page wouldn't respond. So, I got some extra sleep instead of taking the test.

Those of you who also blog might be interested to know that your happy days of Google ranking are soon to be over. After complains that blogs are cluttering Google's search results Google has indicated it will be removing blogs from the main results and creating a side tab for them. This might be helpful for certain web browsing, but will disappoint many a blogger. A certain sense of fame is delivered when a stranger reads your blog because google ranked your site third for some obscure search. How then, will strangers find us, if not through Google? Perhaps blogger communities could form. I think friday five is a good example. It provides a way for many bloggers to post links to their site at a central place. The site LAblogs.com attempts to list bloggers in LA, but the site kind of sucks. One very cool tool is blo.gs which lists all of the most recently updated blogs on a variety of hosts. But, all of these sources are for those just looking for blogs. Perhaps the incidental visits by web searchers is just a passing phenomenon.