Rude Epiphany!

Good lord, when will people ever learn?

I was poking around looking at motorcycle helmets. The one I currently have is a high-priced 2006 model from Arai. Since it’s fairly new, I’m not really shopping around but more “just browsing.”

What I have in mind is.. for my next helmet, buy a white model and then have a local airbrush artist apply my vision to it. This may seem a bit pricey, but consider that the price delta between “solid color” and “replica” helmets run up to $200. If I fork $200 to a local artist, he’s happy (money in his pocket) and I’m happy (I get my own design). Honestly, to get a unique helmet, I’d happily pay more. Lots more.

Just don’t tell the local artists, hehe.

Anyway, back on topic.. so since my helmet is an Arai Corsair, I entered “arai corsair” into google. First two hits are ebay.com, no surprise there. Next hit is motoliberty.com, a local (to DFW) retailer — I’ve purchased boots there before and a friend of mine works there. In my first page of google results, there is no mention of the manufacturer’s site. This is odd. I manually try http://www.arai.com, but it times out. Things are not looking up for Arai.

So let’s simplify the search — I entered “arai helmets” and that worked. The top result is http://www.araiamericas.com/ Upon clicking the google link, I am introduced to a page that is purely flash.

No text, just flash.

First off, my browser is configured to block flash a-la “flashblock” (best firefox plug-in, evah!). That returns a blank page with a simple “>” icon in the middle (click the icon to “accept” the flash activity). Ok, that’s me-specific (and.. “yay me!”) .

The real point of this rant is that a lot of companies with big-dollars floating around inside them can’t spend the 4-5-digits required to actually figure out that google (and other search engines) can’t crawl Macromedia (er.. I mean Adobe) Flash. They can crawl lots of other interesting formats.. PDF, MS Word, Sun “pkg” format, but not Flash.

Sheesh. If you’re gonna be on the Internet, learn how to Play The Game.

If they were a local company, I know someone who’s well-versed in the arts of ranking well in search engines. Ah well. Their loss.

A good friend of mine, let’s call him “skeek”, had an awesome idea some time ago. Here’s how it goes:

Picture a giant arena filled with combatants, every one of which is equipped with a chain saw. To make it exciting, all the chain saws are out of gas at the beginning, but there are thousands and thousands of thimbles, filled with gas, scattered around..

That may seem a bit morbid because, well, it is. Push the personal aspect back a level and picture it as a theme for one of today’s high-tech computer games. (There are much worse out there, you know.)

From a programming perspective, it is perfect. You have a goal, “environmental” constraints, and a fair number of non-obvious solutions. The solution you choose may not be the best at first, but can be reworked and experience will be critical in your end-goal success.

Happy chainsawing!