gopher

gopher go·pher \GOH-fer\ , verb:

1. Mining. a. to mine unsystematically.
b. to enlarge a hole, as in loose soil, with successively larger blasts.

noun:

1. any of several ground squirrels of the genus Citellus, of the prairie regions of North America.
2. pocket gopher.
3. gopher tortoise.
4. gopher snake.
5. (initial capital letter) a native or inhabitant of Minnesota (used as a nickname).
6. (initial capital letter) Computers.
a. a protocol for a menu-based system of accessing documents on the Internet.
b. any program that implements this protocol

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When I hear or see the word "gopher", I think of two movies. The first is Urban Cowboy where Bud - played by John Travolta - gets a job at the refinery and the man who hires him says he'll be a gopher and sarcastically asks him if he knows what a gopher is. Travolta says he figures it's someone who goes for things, then tries to make a joke about him being a small furry animal. The man is not amused and tells Travolta that around there, they were about the same.

That's a funny scene in that movie, but it's not nearly as funny as this one from Caddyshack.

Don't Click!

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Of course, you'll have to click the link to get there.

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Google Loves Me

URL Change

A few hours ago I purchased the domain "topoftexasgazette.com". Blogger will redirect to it, but if you want, you can change your bookmarks to the dot com URL.  I'm not for sure if the few reader feeds this blog has will change.

I'm going ahead with the Blogger platform because it's user-friendly (read: simple for a doofus like me) and I didn't want to pay for hosting.  I might change that in the future, but will stick with Blogger for the time being.

Some other things have changed;  the Feedjit feed quit working, even though I changed the URL after I signed into my Feedjit account.  I put in a new module, but for some reason the colors and width of the module didn't come out the way I wanted, so I will "work" on that sometime soon.  It's an interesting feature, but not necessary.

Also, the ToTG Trivia scoreboard module quit working, but it wasn't working earlier before the URL change.  I will also see if I can fix that, but if not, I will just create a link in the right-hand nav-bar for those who like to play the quiz that way.  Until then, the URL is ToTG Trivia Tournament

Other than that, I don't see many other changes.  I'm thinking of using AdSense, but OTOH, I doubt I'd see much money from it, seeing as how there's only a few dozen unique hits each day and probably isn't worth the hassle.  We'll see...I might try it for a while.  The domain cost only ten bucks, so it's not as though I have anything other than time tied up in this site. 

I've read articles about making money with a blog, but I also have read that people who make a profit off their blogs are few and far between.  I follow some food blogs/sites in my reader and one woman said she had just started turning a profit after 6+ years of blogging.  She hinted at the time she had spent and I did some quick calculations and figured she was making about a dollar an hour.  My time isn't worth much, but it's worth more than that. (one of the reasons I follow her blog in my reader instead of bookmarking it and visiting it daily is because of the multiple and obtrusive ads she has on her pages.)

The URL is longer than I wanted, but someone already had purchased "totg.com".  It's not being used, but is for sale for $8875.

Yeah, sure.  I'll get that out of my piggy bank.