M� wrote:

On Thursday 22 December 2005 05:48 am, Jon wrote:

He's probably JA.Mac or Bruening now.

no, he's dead.
he's let his domain go, he hasn't updated his web pages and he's no
longer
actively posting online.
he was a man who actively participated in life online. it was a big part
of his life. he joined SETI (donated idle computer time to the project).
he posted to forums all over (asking really dumb questions).
he would not simply log off. i doubt he is in jail. the Brits give
prisoners weekend passes and he would have definitely used that
opportunity to go online.
he has to be dead.

apparently he made a fairly large impact on your life,

of course he did. he spent a lot of his time doing stuff to
inconvenience me. that legacy still remains online.

i tell you, i don't have the time (or the inclination) to spend large
chunks of my free time trying to get back at someone online.

i post my ***** on Usenet, and there it stays. it does not migrate off
Usenet.

though only I can
take the credit for your completely overhauling every aspect of it

give me a list of what you think you are responsible for, and i'll tell
you if you're right.

i wonder if, at the end, he had time to think, "*****, i'm dying, and
that
***** Mel is gonna crow over me!"

...he didn't think it in vain

i don't give a ***** about him personally. what i have been doing lately
is using google to research various people. the task is the research,
and the fun is finding what i want out of the masses of data in google's
index.

MÐ wrote:

On Thursday 22 December 2005 05:48 am, Jon wrote:

He's probably JA.Mac or Bruening now.

no, he's dead.
he's let his domain go, he hasn't updated his web pages and he's no
longer actively posting online.
he was a man who actively participated in life online. it was a big part
of his life. he joined SETI (donated idle computer time to the project).
he posted to forums all over (asking really dumb questions).
he would not simply log off. i doubt he is in jail. the Brits give
prisoners weekend passes and he would have definitely used that
opportunity to go online.
he has to be dead.

apparently he made a fairly large impact on your life,

of course he did. he spent a lot of his time doing stuff to inconvenience
me. that legacy still remains online.

i tell you, i don't have the time (or the inclination) to spend large
chunks of my free time trying to get back at someone online.

i post my ***** on Usenet, and there it stays. it does not migrate off
Usenet.

though only I can
take the credit for your completely overhauling every aspect of it

give me a list of what you think you are responsible for, and i'll tell
you if you're right.

i wonder if, at the end, he had time to think, "*****, i'm dying, and that
***** Mel is gonna crow over me!"

...he didn't think it in vain

i don't give a ***** about him personally. what i have been doing lately is
using google to research various people. the task is the research, and the
fun is finding what i want out of the masses of data in google's index.

i've found out a lot about various people i've known. Peter Copeman was
not the first on my list by far. I researched him only after wracking my
brains to figure out who to look up next. but i have far more interesting
subjects that i am still continuing to research and struggling to get data
on.

what i've also come to realise is that data mining via google is still
very hard. it's hard to use google's rudimentary interface. google does
not even make it easy for people to discover how to use their advanced
syntax. it's not conveniently accessible from the front page. it's buried,
and it's incomplete.

i am using syntax i remember out of my head from articles i've read
elsewhere, but which google doesn't seem to mention on its own site. in
fact, they give out incorrect syntax!

google's simple command line falls very short for advanced users, who wish
to refine and re-refine their searches.

for instance, i get referred to google.co.za. i can choose to search all
of the web, or confine it to SA web. what about confining it to only the
UK web? i don't know how to do that. i found one person who is now in
Australia. I don't know how to confine google to only Aus pages.

well, okay, i just checked and if open google.com.au and google.co.uk, i
can do that.

but i had to pluck that from my brain. i have to continually wrack my
brains to come up with new creative options to try. there is no easy
intuitive interface on google.com itself which makes doing that as easy as
picking an option. there are no links, even, to country specific google
sites.

google needs to develop a more sophisticated advanced search interface for
people who want to use google to greater effect. google needs to make it
more obvious how you can confine your search to various datasets, and use
options to add and subtract from the dataset being searched.

there are so many ways to mine data. you can spend a lot of time creating
a custom dataset, and then run searches against that, rather than the
entire database (the universal set). and each search result is in turn
itself a dataset, which you should be able to save for future data mining
sessions.

and then you can use set logic to combine datasets by unions,
intersections, and take the complement of them. google has a lot of work
still to do to take themselves to the next generation of search.

and there's lots of problems with cached pages. sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't.

I wonder if vampeleon entertained similar thoughts at the end, or whether
he lost his mind before he lost his body?

Geri (Gernot) Lachner was an Austrian tour guide (mainly out of
Botswana), and at one time worked for Willie Zing's safari outfit in the
Okavango delta, as well as being an avid photographer and short-order
cook at some
place in Hillbrow/Johannesburg. He died on May 31st, '04.

is all that on google too?

he died of complications of viral meningitis, aged 40. poor *****.

he also told me that he lost his mother. she was savaged to death by a
dog.