When I was a kid back in Richmond, “113” was the phone number for “Information” (not “Directory Assistance”, and it was free). Eventually, it was replaced by 411 and 555-1212 and stopped being free.

In the 1970s, I started going to SF conventions and reading fanzines, and I soon learned that “all knowledge is contained in fanzines” – because fans were interested in many things, not just SF, and wrote profusely. And in the late ’90s and early 2000s, all knowledge was contained in blogs for the same reason.

Today, of course, we have DuckDuckGo and Bing and Google and the entire Internet is filled with information, most of it free and some of it accurate. But sometimes searches still lead to blogs. Today, I got my monthly Google Search report for this blog and I was amused to see the pages that were found most often in June.

The page that got found the most was about building Python3.7 to use a specific version of encryption instead of the one the system gives you. It’s probably still accurate and useful, though at this point, I’d suggest building Python 3.8.

The other two top pages were a lot older and probably less useful – one, from 2006, documented my search for a refill for a giveaway pen (“The Refill Detective at Work”) and the other, from 2004, documented my frustration with Maytag (“Bite the Wax Motor”).

And the page that got the most growth in hits since last month is probably completely useless unless you’re researching the way PG&E handled rolling blackouts in 2001 (“Outage Block 50”) – it got 9 hits versus 2 in May.

There’s no limit to what people want to know.

It was back to the JCC for outdoor personal training this morning – they’ve set up a mini-TRX and we used that for the first time in more than 112 days; I expect to feel it tomorrow.

After that, we made a bonus shopping trip to Safeway to refresh our white wine supply – and as long as we were there, we also picked up some milk and salad dressing and rice. And tequila. And blue curaçao. And Lindy’s Italian ice (which is no threat to Ralph’s, or even Rita’s). And we even found Clorox wipes and our preferred brand of toilet paper! Going early seems to be a win.

I ordered yet another webcam (Amcrest AWC2198) on Friday so we wouldn’t have to move the one we had between the family room and the office several times a week; it arrived today and seems to work fine – we’ll use it on our trivia team call tomorrow and see if anyone notices the difference. I also got an Echo Show for the kitchen to make it easier to have multiple timers running at once while we’re cooking – of course, dinner tonight didn’t need any timers other than the shutoff timer on the convection oven, but I’m sure it’ll be useful soon.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.