Vanessa Fox. Nude.

The San Jose airport is not really all that exciting, particularly terminal C, and even more particularly the little cubby behind security where the Alaska gates are. All two of them. And the Togo’s. As always, this flight is overbooked and they are asking people to give up their seats. I’m thinking… not so much. After all, I have to get back to Seattle in time to fly out again to New York. If I’m lucky, I’ll even have enough time to do a little laundry and pack. Otherwise, who’s up for shopping?

Speaking of New York, are you going to be there? I’m speaking Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, then flying out on Friday. Don’t you have to pay like $10 a day to use the gym at the Hilton? That seems particularly crazy, but I will likely pay it so I can continue the eating-crappy lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. I can’t complain about the Hilton all that much though if they’ve got in-room coffee. The hotel I just left had made-fresh-in-the-lobby coffee instead. I called down yesterday morning at 5am after I fell out of bed and opened my laptop. “Really? I have to go all the way to the lobby for coffee?” The front desk guy said, “It’s sooooo far. You have to walk all the way down the elevator and then 20 whole feet once you get to the lobby.” I think he was a little punchy from working all night.

People tend to think I’m a coffee aficionado since I talk about it so much, but really, it’s the quick hit of caffeine I need. I’m not particular about the method of delivery. Just now before I went through security, knowing I couldn’t bring any coffee through and that I had only a couple of minutes, I stopped by the Starbucks and asked for two shots of espresso and a little steamed milk in a short cup. Quick coffee shot. It did the trick.

And now I’m going to board the plane and take a little nap. See you in New York.

Tamar tagged me for this latest meme. 5 reasons I blog. Well, obviously Dave was my inspiration. But I have other reasons.

1. I wanted to be able to share more about my cats with the world.
2. Sometimes twitter isn’t enough.
3. I needed new places to talk about coffee.
4. The cats wanted a forum for banding together with Matt’s cats in the fight supporting equality for all cats everywhere. (Although they are a bit jealous of Matt’s cats as they’ve never starred in their own videos and to be honest, aren’t all that good at jumping. They’re pretty sure that Ozzie is a big showoff, but are willing to extend an olive branch for the greater good of cat rights everywhere.)
5. We all need an RSS feed of our very own.

OK, maybe I’ve got a few other reasons.

• I’m a writer. I write. It’s just what I do. The writing.
• I’ve been making websites since 1995, but hadn’t done a new one in several years so I thought I’d check out all the new-fangled technology the cool kids were using.
• I’ve been involved in online communities since 1997 and just like hanging out and chatting online.
• You have a blog. Why can’t I have one? Why are you ASKING ME THESE QUESTIONS?
• I didn’t want to be the only person not ranking for a certain keyword phrase.

I’m supposed to tag five other people for the meme? Hmm. Maybe I’ll go after some search engine friends…

Matt
Adam
Jeremy
Laura
Tim

And since I’m doing five things, maybe I’ll do five more. Long ago, I was pinged by several people to spill the things you don’t know about me. I didn’t really have a place to do that then, but what better place than here for a topic like that? But surely you know everything about me already, right?

1. I’ve seen Billy Joel in concert five times. (There will be NO mocking of Billy Joel!) I also recently bought his latest live CD even though I have all of his albums, including his best of collection and millennium concert, which means that I already have any song on that live CD at least three times already. I haven’t seen him in concert for a really long time. He was playing in NY during last’s year’s SES and he’s playing nearby again this year! So close yet so far. I’m considering going to Detroit to see him in a couple of months. Anyone up for a road trip to Detroit?
2. I used to have a forklift license. Yes, I was a pretty scary driver. I never knocked into anything or ran over anyone though. Really!
3. I interned at a newspaper in high school and with a theatre company in college. At the theatre company, I did set construction. Even welding.
4. In high school, I once rode a float in the homecoming parade as our school mascot, a tiger. However, I did not wear a big furry costume. I had painted on whiskers.
5. I don’t like mustard. At all. Except that I have to have mustard on corn dogs. I know. I can be quite complicated.

Now that I’ve got this site launched, maybe I should take a closer look at it. I’m told in the comments that layout is broken in IE6. I have dealt with an IE bug like this before and ended up creating an alternate css file just for IE and just for one div. I may end up doing that here too. I was going to try the display:inline trick, but the css already uses that and it doesn’t seem to be working. I tried a couple of other tricks but was denied. Maybe if I wasn’t at the airport about to hop a flight, I’d have more time to dig into the details, but I guess it’ll have to stay broken a bit longer. Sorry IE6 users! If you are reading this and thinking to yourself, that Vanessa is so lame and that fix is so easy, please drop a note in the comments and I’ll check it out when I land. The “fix is so easy” comment that is.

Other broken things:

• The comments feed didn’t seem to be working in my feed reader. It’s fixed now (er, I was subscribed to the wrong thing I think), but now I’m thinking about that Search Engine Land article about owning your feed URL again and maybe I should do the MyBrand thing. Because even with the WordPress plugin, I’m using a Feedburner domain for the feed, which doesn’t seem ideal. Alas, that too will have to wait until I land.
• The link to the theme in the footer was broken. (And if the owner of that site logs into webmaster tools, they’ll be wondering where the heck that broken link is coming from!) That was an easy fix at least.
• The feed URLs in my header don’t match the links in the sidebar (the header URLs are the original; the sidebar URLs from feedburner). This means that if you pop my domain into a feed reader, it finds two versions of each feed. Again, not ideal. Will fix that when I do the MyBrand thing. Er, maybe tomorrow.
• I’ve got all these meta tags:

  <meta name="distribution" content="global" />
  <meta name="robots" content="follow, all" />
  <meta name="language" content="en, sv" />
  <meta name="distribution" content="global" />
  <meta name="robots" content="follow, all" />
  <meta name="language" content="en, sv" />

  Hmm. For one thing, everything is there twice. For another thing, I’m not thinking I need most of these tags even once. I’m also not sure why my content is specified as Swedish. I definitely don’t need to tell the robots to follow all. They’re pretty good at doing that on their own. Anyway, I just need to track down how these are being generated and fix ‘em up.

• This isn’t broken, but I’m thinking of moving by blogroll from the sidebar to a tab, so you don’t have to see it on every page. Especially as it might get longer over time. I do read a lot, after all.
• Someone asked for pictures. That’s what the Flickr feed at the end is for! No, not those kinds of pictures.
• Someone in the comments was questioning the seagull. Don’t be hating on the seagull! That’s not really a broken thing to fix. I just wanted to represent for the poor little guy.

In my hasty testing, what have I missed?

Since I don’t have time to read complete sentences, much less wait for a rotary dial phone, I’ve been setting up this blog in hurried moments amidst working, doing laundry, getting on planes, and racing to finish books in time to discuss them at meetings. It’s definitely still a work in progress. So, what have I done so far besides ramble about my cats and Britney Spears?

1. Hosted the domain on a separate IP address. No, you don’t need one IP address per domain, but I figured if this domain was on the same IP as say, my Buffy site, some of you (and you know who you are) would find it entertaining track it down. And since I developed that site years ago, it really needs some work and I didn’t want you to find it yet. Of course, now that I’ve mentioned it, you’ll find it anyway and mock its incorrect use of meta tags.
2. Installed the latest version of Wordpress and found a theme with a layout I liked. Then I tweaked it with my own graphics and modified the CSS a bit. I’m still tweaking. Obviously. If you load the site and everything’s purple and yellow, reload! It’ll get better! Or maybe I’m trying some new Web 5.1 thing and doing an experiment in contrasting colors. Don’t worry. You’ll learn to love it.
3. Changed the URL structure to be name-based. This version of Wordpress has lots of different URL options (including easy ways to customize), found under Options > Permalinks. Why did I do this? Mostly to reduce my own confusion. No way I’ll know what /?p=527 is, but I when I see /which-willow-hairstyle, I’ll know just which post that is.
4. Switched the order of my title tag to be post name then blog name. I’m still not quite finished with this; I still need to tweak it a bit. Since my blog isn’t targeted at anything, I’m not worried about using particular keywords in my post titles. I’m not trying to rank for water and air. As far as you know.
5. Signed up for Feedburner. I was following the advice in this Search Engine Land post about maintaining control of the feed domain name, and thought I’d try the plugin recommended in the comments for that. As far as I know, using Feedburner is the easiest way to get Google Reader and personalized home page stats.
6. Installed the following plugins:
• Feedburner feed replacement
• Akismet
• Add Meta tags (I use the excerpt option for a meta description for each blog entry; no idea what it does for meta keywords)
7. Redirected the non-www version of the site to the www version using a 301 rewrite in my .htaccess file (I never remember how to do this, so I always just do a Google search for [htaccess redirect]). The entry in my .htaccess file looks like this:

   Edit: John in the comments pointed out that in my haste, I hadn’t tested my .htaccess code and it simply redirected every non-www URL to the home page. I’ve seen that so many times too; I can’t believe I didn’t think to check that out. He linked to a Wordpress plugin that takes care of the www/non-www issue, and it works great. Thanks John!

8. Signed up for webmaster tools and submitted my RSS feed as a Sitemap. While in webmaster tools, I verified my site using the meta tag option and set my preferred domain to www.vanessafoxnude.com. Since this is a brand new site, my account shows no links (that data is only generated once a month) or query stats (that data is generated once a week and I imagine this site isn’t being returned in search results yet) and much of the other data is empty also, since there’s no data to show yet. One thing that I discovered by using webmaster tools? This site has a robots.txt file! I had no idea! My guess is that Wordpress adds it, since it has an option that lets you choose whether to be indexed by search engines or not. Apparently, my robots.txt file doesn’t disallow any bots, and is returning a 200 response, so that’s good to know.

That’s about all I’ve done so far other than start posting.

The site went live late Saturday and got a few links beginning on Sunday. I’m not really expecting to be indexed by search engines yet, four days in. Are my expectations too low?

• I’ll check live.com first. A search for “vanessa fox” doesn’t return the site in the first two pages (in this initial experiment, I am too lazy to look beyond the first two pages of results), and a search for site:vanessafoxnude.com doesn’t return anything.
• What about Ask? Don’t see this blog on the first two pages of results either, although I’m asked if I want to expand my search into “welfare problems”. (And while the site doesn’t seem to be indexed in Ask at all, Ask’s blog search does oddly suggest my comments as a top feed.) At least Ask isn’t suggesting I marry Rand.
• Speaking of Yahoo, have they found the blog? Maybe they’re making up for the whole Rand situation, because they’ve got this blog ranked #2 in a search for my name. (Dave’s now edited blog post is #4.) A quick check of Site Explorer shows that just the home page is indexed so far.
• And what about Google? A quick check of my name doesn’t bring this blog up in the first two pages of results, although Dave’s post that links to the blog comes up on page two. But a quick site search does show that three pages are indexed. The home page was indexed soon after I registered the domain, when it was still parked at the registrar (hopefully that page will be recrawled soon). And Google Blogsearch does seem to be indexing the posts.

So, as it turns out, my expectations were too low. Two of the four engines are already on it. Who’s winning so far? Google’s got more pages indexed, but I’m going to have to give this round to Yahoo for that great SERP position. And I’ll keep tweaking between airports and book club meetings.

You expect certain things from hotel rooms. A bed. A pillow. Towels. Please God, a good internet connection. Some form of caffeine.

I travel a lot and it’s astounding to me how often hotels strive to keep me caffeine free. I don’t operate well as a non-caffeinated person. And by “don’t operate well”, I mean that I have lie very still in a dark room without moving to prevent my head from exploding into a million tiny pieces.

I suppose I should keep a stash of those tea-like bags of coffee with me at all times, just in case of a caffeine emergency, but has the world really been reduced to that? I would gladly forgo the hair dryer and alarm clock if it’s a matter of a limited quota of electrical appliances.

Clearly, the lack of in-room coffee makers is a ploy to get me to order a pot of room service coffee, such as I did this morning. And at $14, including tax, tip, and room service charge, it was worth every penny. The most hilarious explanation I got for lack of in room coffee accoutrements was during Pubcon Vegas last year. A hotel employee claimed that the rooms used to have coffee markers, but found that the electrical bills were too high. I listened to this as I gazed at the billions of blinking lights burning bright in the casino. I’m sure that coffee makers just put the electrical bill right over the top.

In New York last week, I had a different caffeine crisis. My room had a coffee maker, but it was entirely stocked with decaf coffee packets. What cruel trick was that, lulling me into a false sense of caffeinated security?

In a pinch, I can make due with the $5 cans of diet coke in the minibar. And if the room has neither coffee nor minibar? I’m faced with a desolate hopelessness that tears at my very soul. I make the trek to the lobby, the bar, the lounge, the restaurant, an elusive starbucks, anywhere, anywhere I might find a caffeinated beverage. I trudge along in my pajamas and slippers, anxiously searching for that liquid elixir of life.

I don’t remember if the Hilton NY has in-room coffee. I’m pretty sure it does. But if not, you may see me one morning next week, wandering the hotel halls, a look of loss and confusion on my face. And if you do, if you could just kindly point me in the direction of the coffee, I would be forever grateful.

At my book club meeting last night, we were discussing Fahrenheit 451 and several people mentioned the frenetic pace of the writing and how it made the story difficult to read. And I sat there listening to the discussion (well, listening and drinking beer; we did meet at a pub after all), thinking, what frenetic pace? What are these people talking about? And then it hit me. I’m moving so much faster than the writing of this book that I didn’t even notice.

As I was reading the book, I was struck by how well it captured some of the fast pace of today, even though it was written in 1953. In the story, people don’t have time for conversations or to appreciate flowers. They’re too busy going 200 miles an hour. It’s a cleverly designed system, built to keep you from critical thinking. You can get arrested for being a pedestrian. Walking is just way too slow. And books are definitely out. (Reading about the books being burned was so painful to read, I cannot even fully describe it. Don’t burn the books!)

But the story didn’t capture today entirely, right? Sure, we move fast, but look! We’re online, having conversations. Reading. Thinking critically. Well, to a point. I’m a big multitasker. I’m really good at it. I can do and keep track of all kinds of things at once. My brain operates best in a multithreaded environment. But lately I’ve noticed that as I go through my feeds, I’m not really reading anything. Sometimes, I keep a particularly interesting post as new so I can go back and read it later. But when is later? What kind of sense does it make to file someway away to read later while I’m supposed to be reading it?

Sometimes, when I feel like I have a little more time, I open everything I find interesting in tabs. Thank God for Session Manager. Because when I have four browser windows, each with 20 tabs open, and then my computer crashes, life would be pretty sad without it.

I dream of an organization system that helps me sort through all of this and keep track of it. I know that lots of such systems are out there. And if I had some of that elusive time, I could check a few of them out.

I was reading this NY Times article about how we’re all too busy to notice we’re busy. And while I initially mistrust it because it was written by someone who admits to having time for reading, movies, and lunch, it does reveal some truth. I’m not sure about being busy to feel important. That would require an amount of calculation that I just don’t have time for. But a rotary dial phone? Can you imagine waiting for that dial? (What? We were supposed to think he was a little crazy? I was sympathizing!) The article suggests evaluating priorities and figuring out what matters. Which, of course, also requires that non-existent time. I barely had time to read the article.

But I’m glad I took the time, as it served as a cautionary tale I’m taking to heart. I’m so avoiding rotary dial phones.

I have a deep dark secret buried in the depths of my soul. I’m normally not one for telling secrets, but the time has come for raw and brutal truth. I only hope that you can look me in the eye once you know.

My iPod includes the following:

• Britney Spears
• NSync (and also JC Chasez’s solo album, but none of Justin’s)
• Nick Carter (but not those whiny Backstreet Boys)

I can explain.

Sort of.

See, it’s like this. Profound and thoughtful music is great, but not so much when you’re on the elliptical at the gym, attempting to go somewhat faster than the pace of the slowest snail ever to creep its way under the slowest flower in the slowest garden. (I know, the slow garden thing makes no sense. Just go with me here. I’m abusing metaphors.) You need peppy music. And please God, not music that makes you think. Or makes you depressed, so that all you want to do is go cry in a corner. No crying in gymage! Or something.

Sometimes Britney is just the thing.

I haven’t been listening to Brit or the boys as much lately though, as my iPod has sadly, once again, stopped working. All I get is the folder with the excited exclamation point. Why is the folder so exclaimy? It’s not actually saying anything except “I don’t work! Woo! You get no music! None!” So, instead of speeding along as NSync wonders if you’d still love them if they weren’t, you know, rich and famous and all that (I guess they’ve learned the answer to that!), I have been using my blackberry to catch up on email while I climb endless flights of non-existent stairs. Because of my iPod’s stubborn refusal to give me music, I have crossed the geek line and have become someone who even the every-three-minute twitterers can mock.

On the plus side, I’m making a tiny dent in my email. Those who know me are aware of my massive failure to keep up on email. Friends have seen my inbox and have honestly gasped in horror and absolute astonishment. I suppose I should thank Apple for giving me a way to get a bit closer to catching up. (I feel I should mention that I used to read while on the elliptical. Actual books! Not just electronic devices! I wasn’t always this geeky!)

I don’t always do email at the gym. Sometimes, I’m being endlessly tortured by Frank. Frank is my personal trainer. I used to mock the idea of a personal trainer. I figured I could work out just as easily without paying someone lots of money to stand around and yell at me. But I was oh so very wrong. Apparently the standing around and yelling makes a really big difference. I can tell this because of the substantially increased amount of pain that I feel after working out with him compared to the days I work out by myself. Typical exchange:

Me: OK, that’s enough. I can’t do anymore. I’m going to die.
Frank: Ha ha. You’re not done. Keep going.
Me: No seriously. I’m going to throw up now.
Frank: I’ll go get you a bucket.

It’s a good time.

But back to my confession. It’s possible that every so often, I even listen to some of these songs outside of the gym. Like maybe the car. Possibly I’ve sung along. But I’m not confessing everything. Some secrets are just too dark to share.