Earlier this week, I got an e-mail from an acquaintance which basically started off… “Hey man, you know a lot about [x], right?  So would you recommend...”

That in itself isn’t so offensive.  But when someone routinely takes and takes (advice, help, my time via his rantings, etc.) and never gives (a sincere “How are things?”, a random “Hey, I was thinking of you” without a request for help, etc.)… well, that just gets incredibly annoying.

Luckily, I don’t know many people like this.  I have much better taste in friends, and I’ve been really pleased to end up with colleagues who are consistently thoughtful and personable.  But still… there are still enough clueless leeches I hear from that I ought to come up with decent ways of addressing this situation.  And I’d love some of your insight and recommendations!

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of taking a river cruise of sorts through Berlin… including both the former East and West parts.

I shot the photos with my new Canon SD700 camera (which I’m generally pleased but not thrilled with) and posted them on various services.

See my Berlin boat tour photos on...
- Flickr [ set | slideshow ] (strong community, many features, good privacy protection)
- Fotki [ set | slideshow not directly linkable ] (handy admin features, nice hierarchical options)
- Picasa Web Albums [ set | slideshow ] (smart pre-caching, great Picasa integration)

You may note a few funky/overly-general tags (e.g., “Places” and “Geography” and such).  This is because I’m having problems debugging a hierarchical-categories-to-IPTC-script.  If that doesn’t mean anything to you, no worries; it’s only a minor annoyance and doesn’t affect the photos themselves .

First, a quick note to those SEOs who are still reading my blog hoping for detailed Google search-related tidbits.  It’s still unlikely.  If I ever do post nuggets of search wisdom here, I’m sure you’ll hear about it .  With that said, Google is moving ahead to improve communications, both internally and externally; I recently enjoyed visiting and discussing Search Quality issues with Googlers in Berlin and Dublin and also had a great time meeting with folks at the London Search Engine Strategies Conference.  Photos online soon, I hope!  And yes, we’re further extending the coolness of Sitemaps and related Webmaster tools, improving documentation, and much more. 

Okay, enough about that, though.

I wanted to bring back the musicness of my blog and so today I’m featuring a catchy tune by my friend Tat Tong… a lousy Webmaster (sorry, Tat) but a fine musician and award-winning sound recording engineer.

The short song below, Revocation, was composed, arranged, and sung entirely by Tat.
NOTE: Broadband connection required.  Sorry, I’m not dealing with bandwidth detection and uploading multiple / inferior clips anymore.

At Tat’s recording studio Web site, you can hear more of his recording work and learn about the awards he’s garnered.