and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

A friend of mine is applying to a job in Japan. She is super excited about it and so when I checked my sitemeter yesterday and I saw an odd hit on my website, I figured I should mention it.. Before I got it out she showed me an email from her potential boss in which he requested more information (scan of passport, areas of expertise, etc).. and I noted the time stamp which was right about around the time of this odd hit.. which came from a japanese domain... the referring page of which was a google search for "mcgill" and her full name.

The odd thing about all this is that I still to this day get a crap load of search hits on this site from people searching for names.. A long time ago I had a column down the left side of this site listing many of my friends and a short sentence about where they were / what they were up to.. ala "in montreal doing a masters at mcgill", which she was doing at the time, which is how google returned my site for the search.. but still, those pages don't exist anymore, they haven't for well over a year, and yet the still produce these phantom links. How odd is that?

Which is why I will take the time to explain google caching to you right now. Many of you, in fact I should hope most of you, probably already know about google caching so go ahead and skip this paragraph if you want. However, if you wish to learn something on this slow saturday afternoon, well - mouth closed, ears open. Google, as it traverses the web and indexes pages it also keeps a copy of those pages. Later, when you search on google and get a bunch of hits, you can click directly on the large heading to go to that web address as it is now. That last part is important. What it means is that the search terms you are looking for might not even be on the webpage at that site anymore. Which, if you don't know this, makes for some frustrated bumbling. It reminds me of an old mainer's joke where a guy gets a letter from his parents. Among the "your uncle died in a vat of whiskey.. they tried to save him but he fought them off bravely" jokes there is the gem: "Next time you come and visit you won't recognize the house. We've moved". Which is a brilliantly back-assward way of looking at things but it's got a nugget of wisdom in there for our little google discussion. When you arrive at a website there is no gaurantee that it is the same as a) last time you visited, b) last time someone else visited and told you to go to it, or c) the last time google indexed it.. THUS. When searching on google you can always click on the much smaller link labeled "cache" following the short excerpt. This will take you to a copy of the old website as it was when it was indexed by google. In addition, google automatically returns that cached page with all your search terms highlighted so it's easy to scroll through a page and find what you're looking for. And last but not least, using google's cache has the added benefit of letting you access information even if the original site is down for some reason.

Like the Guinness commercials say: BRILLIANT!