1-1-3 was Information. 1-1-4 was Repair Service, so it’s appropriate that I spent this morning at the dentist’s office having some Repair Service: two fillings and a crown.

There had been some changes at the dentist since the last time I needed anything more than a cleaning – instead of taking wax impressions of the spot for the crown, they used a 3D camera/scanner to get the measurements and dispatched the order to the lab as I watched.

And of course there were new COVID-19 precautions – the dentist and assistant wore face shields and masks, and they put some sort of airway protection/suction device in my mouth covering everything but the teeth they were working on.

Two hours later, I left with fillings, a temporary crown, a sore mouth, and a lighter wallet. I’m scheduled to return in two weeks for the permanent crown. It’s supposed to be a shorter appointment. I hope they’re right.

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.