If you can’t spell your url, nobody can.

That is an honest-to-goodness-computing truth. And I didn’t get that from some real-computer-jocks I’ve been working with lately either. Nope. That epiphany was all mine. Sadly, that’s about it for mary’s-monthly-intelligence-quota.

When you’re a no-lifer, your idea of scare-the-shit-out-of-each-other-watching-horror-movies-on-friday-night is really just read-end-of-the-world(wideweb)-predictions-(alone)-on-friday-night. I was settled in for a very scary read: Google conspiracy theories. It’s your usual geek horror stuff:

• subpoenaed ‘private’ information (the kind of info Google HAS, if released, can be damaging)
• un-delete-able search histories and mail archives (if you have an account or sent an email to a gmail account, you’re vulnerable)
• dubious advertising practices
• and predictions of geeky, sci-fi monopoly through Google services such as Google Socks (returns a perfect pair out of 20,670 odd ones in 0.25000 seconds) and Google Cows (delivered 1-10 of 257,800 cows in 0.315400001 seconds)

The idea of Google having the power to send me cows at will was starting to make me jittery — but it wasn’t scary enough. Therefore (in keeping with the fun-friday-night-analogy) it was time to up the scare-factor.

I tried to act like a mindless teenager and freaked out. I disabled the Google toolbar, signed out of my gmail account, and cleared my private data (cache and browsing history). And that was when the real-psychopath-enters-the-house part of my fun-friday-night-analogy happened.

I was trying to login to my site to remove the Google analytics code when, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the url. It wasn’t for lack of trying. In fact, numerous attempts have been made to summon the hideous pink-and-black blog from my distant past:

• mary.kanaku
• mary.tyl
• mary.kanaku.tyl

The dilemma is, I was USED TO Firefox recommending urls based on sites I’ve previously visited. Unfortunately, an idiot deleted the browser history. Still, I kept expecting FF to choke out a suggestion just to stop me from abusing the address bar, but she was being a heartless bitch so no responses there. At this point, I would have accepted any help. Even my old, pipe-up-just-to-piss-me-off buddy, Clippy would’ve been welcome…

So I had no choice but to face the main villain. After all, despite the evil-ness attributed to it, Google IS good at finding answers. You can accuse them of anything (even cow-delivery) BUT being useless in the search category? You’d have to be a bigger idiot than me to call them that. And honestly, I don’t think you can go dumber than me right now. Except, maybe, go down to bottom-feeder level.

Going back to the ‘dilemma’: I succumbed. Who wouldn’t?

SO I forgot my own url AND used Google to retrieve it. If this was still a fun-friday-night analogy, I’ll be the blond cheerleader who bleeds to death from stab wounds. Pencil stab wounds. (Mind you, this IS a fun-friday-night analogy and we’re in the last five minutes. The director is going to squeeze in a final, gory scene.)

Of course Google found http://mary.twirp.net. Meanwhile I had a painful realization and the makings of a post title

If you can’t spell your url, nobody can. (Because nobody remembers it.)

And it’s true. If I couldn’t remember it, who else would?

So I realized that no one remembers mary.twirp.net anymore. Not even me. It’s going to be down there with all the other has-beens like OSWD.com and Britney Spears, forgotten and misspelled by everyone except the Google bot. And I didn’t care as much as I thought I would.